Optimizing PPC for Multilocation Providers in Healthcare

By Stewart Gandolf, Chief Executive Officer

Managing a PPC strategy for any sized business is complex and challenging.

But organizations with dozens or hundreds of locations face even more hurdles:

Multilocation providers must consider each location’s unique needs, competitive situation, and business objectives—compounding the complexity of managing an accurate and effective PPC (aka pay-per-click or paid search) strategy.

The good news is that well-executed PPC campaigns drive conversions, enhance brand visibility, and fuel business growth—especially when paired with strategic PPC landing page optimizations.

In this guide, I present actionable insights for effective multilocation healthcare PPC.

Key Consideration: ROI

While PPC can be a fast and powerful tool to increase patient volume for your locations, it can also quickly and significantly increase your marketing spend.

To convince internal stakeholders of the need to invest adequately in medical paid search, remind them that it's not about how much you spend. Instead, it's about how much you make vs. how much you spend—your return on investment (ROI).

Supporting Your Provider Locations With Medical PPC Advertising

Building a strategic PPC strategy that addresses the unique needs of multilocation healthcare organizations involves a seven-phase framework that aligns business objectives with individual location goals.

Phase 1: Understand Offerings

Once you have identified the business goals for your multilocation healthcare organization, familiarize yourself with the unique offerings of each location.

Are there specialists or extenders on staff?
Do they offer new services, treatments, or procedures?
Did they recently upgrade their technology or equipment?

Phase 2: Define KPIs & Conversions

Next, clearly define and prioritize what you want to achieve with your PPC budget. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are pivotal for deciding where to invest in terms of platforms and ad types.

This is arguably the most important phase of building an effective PPC ad campaign strategy.

KPIs can vary per location, depending on their individual business goals.

Common digital marketing KPIs include:

Phone calls
Walk-in traffic
Appointment bookings
Form fills
Website traffic
eBook downloads

Identify converting actions for each location, prioritize them, and bring them to life by how you manage the PPC campaigns.

Phase 3: Identify Audience Targeting

Once you have identified a target audience for each location (e.g., age, gender, medical needs, and geographic location of their preferred patient), learn where they are in their buyer journey. This ensures PPC headlines and calls to action are actionable and relevant.

It also helps identify which:

Keywords to bid for
Ads to display
Landing pages to link to

Phase 4: Manage Ad Copy & Keywords

For effective PPC management practices across multiple locations, focus on the following:

Identifying optimal ad copy and keywords for location-based searches (while maintaining consistency across campaigns).
Dynamically adding location-based verbiage to headlines.
- Ex. “Urgent Care in Rutland” or “Knee Surgery in Atlanta”
Leveraging ad extensions for local ads to provide additional information about their unique treatments and services.

Managing consistency across all location-specific PPC ads contributes to brand identity and helps increase brand recognition online.

Phase 5: Determine Budget Fluidity

Determining the budget fluidity between provider locations is another essential phase of building an effective PPC ad campaign strategy. It’s important to ask the right questions.

Is there a digital marketing “Minimum Daily Requirement” for each location?
Does the budget need to be evenly split between locations?
Can you prioritize specific locations?
Is there flexibility to invest more where opportunities are more significant?

Consider a scenario where your organization has 100 provider locations and a $100K monthly budget for paid search. Must you allocate $1K per practice, or can you prioritize certain practice locations to maximize the campaign’s effectiveness for the business as a whole?

Phase 6: Map Market Areas

Understanding the geographic positioning of your provider locations relative to one another (and competitors) is integral to defining your PPC strategy.

Should you market by geographic area or on a per-location basis? Often, there is a lot of overlap, so campaign build-out strategies must be very thoughtful and specific to ensure you maximize your budget.

Phase 7: Consider Timing

Consider the best days and times to run your ad campaigns to maximize your budget. To determine the most effective days and times for running ad campaigns, you may need to run A/B tests.

Should campaigns run exclusively during business hours, or is extending them after hours and on weekends (when the locations are closed) more cost-effective?

While running PPC ads, 24/7 may provide better coverage and more leads, ensuring your team has the capacity to follow up in a timely manner.

Professional PPC Strategies Deliver Fast Results

A robust digital marketing strategy involves several components, but medical paid search stands out as the fastest and most direct route to impacting your bottom line.

At our healthcare PPC agency, we have extensive experience managing successful paid search campaigns. Contact us to find out how we can help you.

Discover how our strategic partnership with SynergenX realized an 87% increase in leads using a robust PPC and social media strategy.