From researching medical concerns for our own, personal needs, we know the internet helps us to understand what our symptoms may mean, make decisions about who will provide our care, and formulate questions to ask our providers.
Consumers seek services for mental health or substance use disorder treatment in exactly the same way, but the online marketing milieu is vastly different in terms of the competition for patients and cost of advertising for services, as compared to other healthcare verticals.
Google is in the business of making money for Google, they’re not concerned about your ability to track ROI. They’ve gone out of their way to reduce visibility into keywords that drive SEO results and other critical data that digital marketers need to optimize PPC campaigns. These changes have forced treatment centers to advertise to a broader audience resulting in a lot of wasted clicks and unqualified calls. Google has even implemented a strategy to deliver your ads on terms you’re not even bidding on, as long as their algorithm decides the terms are relevant to the person searching. They rely on the fact that many agencies turn on auto bidding and don’t review accounts for performance with the data that they have access to.
Google profits from agencies managing accounts that don’t have direct experience with treatment center advertising. These significant changes and market conditions drive acquisition costs to untenable levels for treatment centers that operate within small margins. PPC advertising is a powerful lead generation tool that delivers but it needs to be managed closely and you will need to accept that it is not always trackable and may in fact also be attributed to a referent account. That’s why behavioral health executives struggle with the benefits of direct-to-consumer marketing spend and get frustrated by the perceived lack of performance when a caller dials a PPC dedicated phone number and reports they heard about you from a local clinician.
We’ve all heard executives say, “They would have found us anyway,” or “They just used the internet as a phonebook.” We can show – with data – why you need to invest in your direct-to-consumer advertising.
At the end of the day, if you plan to scale, you must invest in your website. You’ll likely have to do some level of PPC advertising, including enough budget to advertise on your own brand. The last thing you want is someone to use the internet as a phone book and find all your competitors’ advertisements listed above the fold, above the maps and above the organic results, because you have elected to not even advertise on your own brand.
Trust that searchers will call your competitors: they’re researching options. But if they’re looking for you specifically, you want them to find you easily and call you before looking at anyone else. Without PPC advertising, you lose 50% of the consumers looking for you before you start, because your organic results don’t show up until page 2 when they search on a mobile device.
Who scrolls that far for a number to call?
Who digs that deep for information?
No one!
