Traditional marketing has been transformed in the digital age – and nothing is more influential than search engines, specifically Google! The purpose of this step by step guide is to help you understand how to create, build, optimize, and run digital ads for hospice care communities.
From keyword research to return on investment, this blog will help you get a full understanding of Google Ads and the immediate results you’ll see from your investments.
Let’s get started!
Step I: Intro to Hospice Care Google Ads
Starting with the basics, let’s define what Google Ads is. Google Ads is simply a way to pay to promote your website above every other hospice care website on a given search results page.
The higher you “bid” on your keyword search terms, or “keywords,” the higher your hospice care website is promoted on the Google results page!
We call this “pay per click” (PPC). The more clicks you pay for, the more traffic you’ll get to your website.
Here’s an excellent hospice care Google Ads example by Redeemer Health Hospice Care
After someone has searched “hospice care” and clicks on the ad shown above, they will be redirected to a landing page. Each landing page can be customized for any hospice service your business can offer. Here are a few examples:
- Independent Living Communities
- Personal Care Help
- Rehabilitation Services
- Assisted Living Home
Each keyword has a different cost per click (CPC). The cost is higher if there is more competition for those keywords.
If someone searches for “Divorce Attorney” the CPC could be upwards of $25 per click. “Hospice care community” or “Hospice near me” clicks usually range around $3-$8 per click.
After you’ve created a Google Ads campaign for your hospice care business, you can limit the maximum spending per click, and max spending per day! Google will ensure that you do not exceed these budget limits.
The more you spend on your ads campaigns, the more traffic you’ll see!
Does Hospice Care Marketing Need to Feature Google Ads?
Whether your hospice care business is brand new, or operating successfully already – PPC & Google Ads are short term solutions for lead generation. Ideally, this strategy should be partnered with an SEO strategy. Learn more about SEO strategies for small businesses here.
When Google Ads is done correctly, it can be a huge boon for your everyday marketing. Just make sure you’re doing it right…
Should You Hire a Hospice Care Google Ads Expert?
Google Ads for hospice care businesses can be tough to understand at first, but it is even more difficult to master.
If you’re not careful, you can easily find yourself wasting your daily marketing dollars on ads that just don’t convert your traffic into leads. That’s common if you don’t know what you’re doing!
A common mistake for example is setting bids too high or too low on a keyword, and wasting the day’s budget on the wrong phrase. Make sure you know who you want to be clicking on your ads!
Some hospice care business owners have time to learn the entire platform, but others do not.
Check out more info on Google Ads management services here!
Before we continue our deep dive into hospice care Google Ads, you’ll need the following items:
- An current active Google account
- An engaging hospice care website
- A marketing budget around $150 – $900 per month
Step II: Hospice Care Keyword Strategies & Google Ads Plans
Let’s break down exactly what a keyword is.
Simply put, a keyword phrase is what you search for in Google’s search bar. Below are a few hospice care ads keywords:
- Hospice care near me
- Retirement homes near me
- Palliative care near me
- Residential hospice facilities
When you plan your hospice care ads, you’ll need to focus on the intent of search.
First consider what you would search for to find your own business. Get creative! You would of course search for “hospice care near me” and “hospice care facilities” – but other terms you haven’t thought of can be found using Google Keyword Planner, such as:
- in home hospice near me
- end of life care facilities near me
- palliative care homes near me
- long term hospice care
- In-patient hospice house near me
Add these terms to your keyword plan as a crucial first step to your PPC strategy. Using Keyword Planner, you’ll receive relevant data about how many people are searching for each keyword, and how expensive each click is!
Step III: Creating Hospice Care Landing Pages
Earlier in this piece I mentioned the term landing pages – these are simply the pages customized to funnel your web-traffic into leads.
We can easily make a custom landing page for “palliative care” Google Ads, for “live-in retirement community” keywords, “Rehabilitation”, and more!
Customizing these pages with specific service related keywords helps each page show exactly what has been searched.
We wouldn’t want to have information about retirement communities when someone is searching for palliative care! This helps convert traffic into leads.
To optimize your hospice care ads campaign, you need to build a unique landing page for each service you’re advertising!
Below you can find a landing page sales funnel diagram. This image shows the process of converting a PPC click to a lead on a landing page.
You can learn more about building landing pages and web development here
Find Out How We Can Help Grow Your Business
Let’s discuss your marketing needs, and we’ll help you put together a digital marketing strategy that will generate more leads and save you time.
Call-To-Action (CTA)
The call-to-action is the most critical section of any landing page.
The CTA is the driving force to converting traffic (potential customers), into leads. Landing pages also can be used to track progress and ROI on your hospice ads.
Angelic Health has a great example of what a successful hospice care ad CTA looks like:
The CTA here is “Click Here to Schedule Your Consultation.” After you click the CTA, you’re brought to this screen:
This is a straight forward contact form. Here the searcher freely exchanges his or her information to schedule a consultation.
Other CTAs include: “Download Our Brochure” or “Schedule a Visit” or “Get Started.”
Regardless of what you choose for your CTA, focus on funneling traffic to a specific goal to obtain information.
Step IV: Creating a Hospice Care Google Ads Campaign
Creating a Google Ads account is totally free. After you’ve created your first hospice ads account, you can begin building your first campaign.
1. Campaign Goals
Once your campaign is created, the first step is to denote which campaign you’d like to run: Search vs Display.
2. Search Network Campaigns vs. Display Network Campaigns
Use search network campaigns rather than Display network campaigns. Search campaigns show your ads on Google search results, Display campaigns show your ads alongside Youtube videos, product blogs, online shopping carts, etc.
Display campaigns are mostly for e-commerce products, instead of in-person services. We want to strictly focus on customers actively searching for your hospice services.
3. Setting Ads Locations & Budgets
Once you’ve successfully created your first campaign, there are two initial questions to consider: Where & How much? Specifically:
- Where do you want to show your ads?
- How much do you want to spend daily?
Google Ads campaigns have both daily budget settings, and location settings to be considered. Daily budgets are strictly related to spend, location settings denote what countries, states, counties, & towns your ads show up in.
For hospice ads, locations are mostly focused on local traffic rather than national traffic.
Adult children looking for living accomodations for their parents will initially look locally – and you can determine what “local” means. It can be the town where your facilities are, or the entire state/region!
The daily budget defines your total spend on keywords for each day.
If you’ve listed your budget at $40/day – you can have up to ten $4 clicks, or twenty $2 clicks etc…
4. Keyword Bidding
It’s helpful to consider each keyword as an auction item. Each other hospice facility’s Google ads account could possibly be bidding for this traffic.
Google will award traffic to the highest bidder on each of these keywords.
You can decide how much you’d like to spend on each keyword, per click – this is called Manual CPC bidding strategy.
Google also offers other bidding strategies you can choose from. There, you can set a limit to the maximum bid per keyword.
For additional info on hospice Google Ads bidding strategies, check out this video:
Step V: Creating Hospice Care Ad Groups
What is an Ad Group?
An “Ad Group” is a series of custom selected keywords within a specific Google Ads campaign.
A few examples are listed below:
Inside each Ad Group is a series of keywords & advertisements paired with it.
Here’s a great graphic from Word Stream that shows an ads hierarchy:
- SKAGs (Single Keyword Ad Groups)
The simplest way to capture traffic from Google Ads results is to create single keyword ad groups or “SKAGs” within your hospice care Google Ads account.
“SKAG”ing is how we make sure each Ad Group has 1 major keyword it’s focusing on, and thus one customized landing page as a result.
Here’s an example of what a “Hospice Care Near Me” SKAG would look like:
Each of these keywords will be showing the same hospice ad.
This means we can custom design these hospice care ads to be only for “Hospice Care Near Me” and its corresponding CTA.
Now we can start to see the full picture!
Step VI: Writing the Actual Hospice Care Google Ads
Writing the hospice ads themselves is the most subjective part of building your Google ads account.
Ensure your SKAG keywords and corresponding CTA are both included within each hospice ad, and you’re sure to see some success.
When wrapping up your Google ads, you’ll need to generate two (almost) identical hospice ads for every ad group – with one small difference between the two.
With this model, you can tell which ad variance works better. We call this A-B testing.
When writing your hospice Google Ads, check out this awesome resource from Word Stream to give you a little more information!
Now I have to note that you can always hire a marketing pro to help manage your hospice Google Ads account, but you’ll need to consider this within your total costs and returns. It depends on the math – so let’s break that down.
Step VII: Doing The Math
Get your money back! For every dollar you spend on marketing, you should see it back in your returns. Here’s the first step to that:
- Understand Total Customer Values
Research by asking yourself – How much does one resident/client make you in total? How much do they spend per year, and how many years on average do you work with each resident/client. This gives you the “total customer value”
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
If you spend $5000 to get one resident/client, the math just doesn’t add up!
Now if your CPA is $100/client – we’ll start to see some improvements on ROI & your bottom line.
Determine out how much you’re spending on your Google Ads accounts over a 30 day stretch, then divide that value by the number of customers you’ve acquired in those 30 days.
If your total hospice ads spend last month was $1000, and you signed up 10 seniors to live in your facilities, you’d have a CPA of $100
- Total Costs & Return On Investment (ROI)
Trying to balance the total costs and ROI can be one of the most challenging parts of efficiently running your hospice ads. Let’s break it down:
ROI = Total Customer Value ➗ CPA
In this example, our Total Customer Value is $10,000 and our CPA is $100.
You’d have a 100X ROI on this marketing campaign.
For most of the hospice care facilities we work with, their typical ROI ranges from 10X – 90X.
More Resources
Here are a few more blogs related to marketing, check them out and let us know your thoughts below!
