This story may seem ordinary – it is not about solving complex problems and not about how we conquered the market by spending seven and a half rubles. Nevertheless, it is about important: how a structured approach and the ability to build a dialogue with a client help to achieve long-term results, even with very small budgets. We are talking about the experience of cooperation with a network of medical clinics in St. Petersburg. Immediately, we note: we do not give the name of the company, because we signed an NDA with the client.
About the client, product and tasks
In October 2017, a new client came to our agency eLama – a network of medical centers working in the framework of the principles of evidence-based medicine. All clinics of the network are located in St. Petersburg and specialize in rather unpopular areas: orthopedics, neurology, phlebology and rehabilitation.
The client has already launched search advertising campaigns in Yandex.Direct and Google Ads, as well as campaigns in YAN. It was necessary to audit the current campaigns, refine them, and then launch campaigns for new directions.
What difficulties did we see at the start? Firstly, a small advertising budget – at first it was 90 thousand rubles, over the next three years it grew to 160 thousand. This is not much for such a highly competitive niche.
Secondly, the client from the very beginning set the task of launching more than 32 unique new campaigns, while maintaining the CPL at the level of 500 rubles. Looking ahead, let’s say that we launched more than 40 destinations, while the average CPL in Yandex.Direct was RUB 465.
Customization features
Advertising of medical services has its own specifics and restrictions from the side of legislation. Realizing this, we focused on search campaigns. What subtleties had to be taken into account here:
- In the medical field, you can’t just take and copy campaigns from Yandex.Direct to Google Ads. It is necessary to adapt each campaign to the requirements of the system. For example, Google prohibits the use of medical terms (“admission”, “consultation”, “treatment”, “care” and others). Only general formulations are admissible – “department of surgery”, “experienced doctors”, “modern equipment”.
- It was necessary to take into account that in some areas the competition is very high, so it was necessary to choose the most acceptable strategy with an affordable budget. If the budget is very limited, it makes no sense to try to take the first place in the search results.
- It is important to regularly monitor the moderation status of ads in Google Ads, since automatic verification rejects ads for various and not always adequate reasons.
- An advertising campaign for medical services involves a not quite typical semantic core. For example, in our search campaigns, we included queries with the names of well-known doctors at the clinic – people often look not for a service, but for a specific doctor.
An example of optimization of one direction
Our client specializes in narrow topics, one of them is phlebology. The specificity of promoting such directions lies in the fact that in the ad settings it is necessary to clearly segment the semantics, otherwise the campaign is inconvenient to manage.
An advertising campaign on phlebology was launched at the client’s place even before he came to us. We saw a very sad picture here: the core consisted of absolutely diverse requests, statistics were “smeared”, while the budget was small.
We decided to segment the semantics in order to distribute the budget in accordance with the priorities and proposals on the site. We divided one campaign into 5 directions:
- “Diagnostics”.
- “Surgical treatment”.
- “Sclerotherapy”.
- “High bids” (this was an experimental campaign that we launched at the initiative of the client. High-frequency and broad requests were allocated to the group – for them the client wanted to be placed in the top positions, and therefore was ready to increase bids and allocated a separate budget. 8000 rubles in 2 months we received only 2 applications. This only means that chasing the first positions is not always relevant. Therefore, this campaign was stopped, and the phrases were redistributed among the others with lower rates).
- “Other” (all other keys that did not fall into the previous categories).
Based on the category, we have registered a USP with relevant promotions. For example, for the diagnosis of USP it sounded like this: “When consulting a phlebologist – ultrasound as a gift.” For surgical treatment, they indicated the action “All inclusive”, which includes everything – from consultation and diagnostics to a treatment plan and surgery.
What we got in the end:
- CPL before the division of phlebology = 1700-1900 rubles.
- CPL immediately after segmentation = RUB 2007
- 2 months after splitting the campaign and adjusting the display conditions, updating bids, reallocating budgets – CPL within 972–1100 rubles.
Conclusions: things to keep in mind if you are promoting healthcare
The first moment: in the case of medicine, the semantic core can be endless – from abstract symptoms to the search for a specific doctor.
Second: with a limited budget, it is worth focusing on the most targeted semantics and prescribing attractive and relevant ads for it, preferably with promotions. Nobody canceled A / B testing, of course, it is possible and necessary to test the effect of different USPs.
And third: you shouldn’t hold on to SERPs and chase impressions by obvious and broad keywords if your goal is to get CPL at an affordable price.
For 3.5 years of cooperation – from October 2017 to the present – we, as already mentioned, have launched more than 40 unique campaigns with the client. At the same time, they were able to keep the CPL at the starting level. This is a really good result with a small advertising budget.
The ad was set up by Ani Osadchey’s project team, eLama agency.