Case Study on Advertising for a Medical Center - domedica24.ru

Intro

The Affordable Medicine Clinic became our client in March 2021. At the time, the medical institution had already opened 2 branches in St. Petersburg and the third was getting ready to open. They refer people to specialists in gynecology, neurology, oncology, and traumatology, as well as provide services like MRI, CT, ultrasound, and laboratory tests.

A client contacted us on a recommendation. And Affordable Medicine became both an interesting project and a challenge for us. We understood that advertising for medical topics would require both strict adherence to the rules and adopting non-standard decisions. We’ll talk later about how everything worked out.

For anyone who doesn’t want to read the who case study, we’ve got the results alone in two screenshots from Google Data Studio.

Initial Data

• Client’s website domedica24.ru
• Advertising system – Google Ads
• Advertising system – Yandex.Direct

When we met with the client, they already had an advertising account, and PPC advertising was being done. With that in mind, the work began with an analysis of current campaigns 🧐. During the analysis, we identified a lot of gaps and shortcomings in the setup and management of the advertising campaigns. Therefore, we decided to reconfigure everything from scratch.

It was important for us to attract people from Yandex and Google searches, so before launching campaigns, we studied how each network responds to advertising for medical activities and services.

The initial budget was 600,000 RUB for the advertising account per month, and during the project, it was redistributed in favour of Google Ads. The low competition in the medical field and the smart capabilities of the system are advantages that shouldn’t be missed out on.

Objectives

Today more and more people are looking on the Internet for medical services, preferring to compare and contrast different offers, rather than seeking advice from friends. But due to the complexity of setting up PPC advertising, most of the clinics simply go under people’s radar and don’t get attention 🤨.

Our goal was to make our client as visible as possible to their target audience. To do this, we set the following objectives:

• Set up ads in Google Ads, which the system would accept. Google Ads has a number of restrictions on advertising healthcare and medical services that you need to be careful with. By doing this correctly, we understood that launching on this network would give the client a great advantage over their competitors.
• Setting up ads in Yandex.Direct that will successfully go through moderation.
• Launching retargeting in Yandex.Direct.

Plan of Action

Since Yandex.Direct accepts advertisements for medical activities for placement, and Google Ads has strict restrictions on these kinds of services as well as their geography (Yandex.Direct being more widely used in Russia), we had different strategies for working with each system.

💡Actions for Yandex.Direct:

• We prepared and sent out documents, including a copy of the company’s license with a list of services and addresses, as well as a letter of guarantee on behalf of a legal entity.
• We carefully worked out the wording of the ads in accordance with the requirements of Yandex.Direct.

💡Actions for Google Ads:

• We couldn’t do ads for service pages and launched the context advertising only for the main page.
• We worked on writing ads so that the system didn’t flag certain medical topics.
• We replaced explicitly medical words for general vocabulary. For example, switching out ‘doctors’ for ‘specialists’ or ‘experts.’

These solutions gave us a low-Quality Score on Google, but they were moderated and we were able to run the ad.

Implementation

Search Advertising on Google Ads

We initially launched search ad campaigns for all services provided by the clinic: MRI, CT, ultrasound, analyses, and services by traumatologists, neurologists, gynecologists, and oncologists.

In accordance with search queries and interest in the services, we created a structure by adding ad groups.

For example, the ‘MRI’ campaign includes the groups ‘MRI for joints’, ‘MRI for the brain’, ‘MRI for knees’, etc. The same was done for other campaigns.

Work Strategy:

1. We collected 1873 search queries, which gave us the basis to form the account’s structure.
2. We launched all campaigns using manual strategies. Launching automatic strategies at the start of work would drain the budget, since the system doesn’t initially know what to focus on, and it needs time to learn.
3. For each of 1873 search queries, bids were manually set with the ‘Enhanced CPC’ option. This means that our bids are a priority, but we give the system the opportunity to raise them if the system understands that this will lead to a conversion.
4. We configured conversions:
   1. Calls via call tracking.
   2. Clicking on the Sign-up button on any of the site’s pages.
   3. JivoSite (the user starting a dialogue in the chat or answering a request).
5. We set up work according to 2 Rules:
   1. Reduce bids by 10% when the percentage of impressions rises above 85%.
   2. Increase bids when this indicator drops below 75%.

This kind of recalculation occurs once a day. This gives us the chance to not overpay for the first position. Since Google is moving away from accurate metrics and the estimated hit rate at the top is ineffective, impressions are prioritized. We found empirically that it should be 75-85% for each keyword. Thus, the keywords are between the 1st and 2nd positions.

If we had raised the bids just for the sake of the first positions, payment could have been 10 times over.

• After 2.5 months of work, having received the number of conversions necessary to train the system, and making the necessary adjustments to audiences, devices, and demographics, we got to a reasonable conversion price and then switched to the Target CPA strategy.

After receiving data on the effectiveness of campaigns, we decided to discontinue the less effective ones. As a result, they left ‘MRI’, ‘CT’ and ‘ultrasound’, which now have the greatest demand, in particular, because of the pandemic 😷.

Specifics of working with ads

Negative keywords play an important role in staying within the budget. To avoid non-target clicks, we minified information requests, such as ‘MRI’ (in exact accordance), ‘MRI is’, ‘what is MRI’, etc.

To increase the click-through rate of the ads, we used the following extensions:

• Additional links
• Structured snippet
• Phone number
• Promotion for 20% off at night
• Specifics (Modern Equipment, 1 Minute from the subway, Easy Booking, Excellent Service, Great Service, Affordable Prices, Polite Staff, Cheaper at Night)

Occasionally it was necessary to make changes to the text of the ads. At the same time, Google Ads could reject them several times, as a result, it took several days to edit and approve. In order to not lose traffic, we copied the ad, made edits to the copy, and only after its approval by the system did we disable the original.

When setting up advertising in Google Ads, we had to leave behind the standard practice of connecting remarketing, since it is strictly prohibited in medical topics in this system. 

Search advertising on Yandex.Direct

It is simpler but more expensive to launch advertisements for medical services on Yandex.Direct. Here we don’t need to work around certain restrictions. It’s enough just to provide the needed documents. Most clinics prefer to advertise on Yandex, which increases competition and, accordingly, the cost of clicks.

Work Strategy:

1. Collecting relevant search queries. There were 2685 of them.
2. Launching campaigns with manual bids.
3. Adding key goals and setting up the same conversions as in Google Ads: Calling via call tracking, Clicking on the Sign-up button, JivoSite.
4. At first, adjusting campaigns with manual bids, minus information requests, allowed us to reduce the cost of conversion.
5. After collecting sufficient statistics, transferred each campaign to the conversions optimization strategy, while changing the daily budget to a weekly one.
6. Keeping the most effective campaigns (MRI, CT, and ultrasound).

🔁 Retargeting:

Most people today usually take a serious approach to choosing a medical institution. Often people compare several options, look over reviews, and ask friends for their opinions or advice. We understand that the first visit to the site doesn’t always lead to a conversion. As such, we added a retargeting campaign to return visitors who did not take the targeted action.

Results

While we were setting up and improving advertising, the client started to improve the site. During the process, a new site was made which was more user-friendly and had more conversions, which also improved our performance 🚀.

Over time, we reallocated the budget, giving 65% to Google Ads and 35% to Yandex.Direct. The advertising budget is 17,000 rubles per day for Yandex.Direct and 36,000 rubles. for Google Ads.

Average results for campaigns in Google Ads:

• MRI brings in 889 conversions worth 366 rubles per month.
• CT for the same period brings 1789 conversions at 323 rubles.
• Ultrasound generates 408 conversions at 363 rubles.

The average price of a target on Yandex.Direct is 470 rubles. Users make about 1030 conversions per month.

Conclusion

Advertising for the Affordable Medicine Clinic turned out to be a rather unusual task for us, since we had specific limitations and restrictions we had to work with for this sector.

We managed not only to set up PPC advertising for the medical center in Google Ads but also to get great results 💪. We also continue to advertise in Yandex.Direct, which brings additional conversions and remains a backup source of traffic in case of advertising on Google Ads is blocked.

Today, work on the project continues: advertising brings new visitors to the clinic. We monitor the effectiveness of campaigns, make adjustments and develop together with clients according to their objectives.