How Chiropractors Waste Budget on Google Ads

Chiropractors serving a typical UK town should be expecting at least 40-70 inbound website enquiries and/or appointment bookings from new patients each month.

In our experience, most Chiropractic practices aren’t getting anywhere near that and are typically wasting 35%-60% or more of their marketing budget, particularly when it comes to Google Ads.

In this post, we explore the common reasons why this happens, how to avoid and how to get more inbound Chiro enquiries.

Track Everything – Get More Chiro Enquiries from Google Ads

If you’re to improve the performance of Google Ads campaigns and get more chiro leads for your budget, you must track everything you possibly can.

Google Ads has its own tracking functions which you should configure for any actions you consider valuable on your website.

When tracking is configured correctly, you’ll be able to see which keywords and search terms are wasting budget and which are driving valuable enquiries in to your practice. You’ll be able to measure the cost of an enquiry on mobile devices vs desktop devices, or for different locations, days of the week or times of the day.

That tracking data is incredibly powerful – you’ll be able to measure and optimise campaign performance to get more enquiries for the same budget.

If your Chiropractic Practice doesn’t track enquiries, you will waste budget on poor quality clicks.

Track Enquiry Forms

If you have a contact form on your website (you definitely should!), you should track when visitors have completed that form. (Pro Tip: Don’t track when a visitor clicks the submit button, or you’re counting button clicks whether an email is sent or not).

Track Appointment Bookings

If you have an appointment booking system integrated with your website, you should track appointment bookings. If your appointment booking system doesn’t run within your website and the visitor is sent externally, this can often present a challenge in implementing Google Ads tracking directly.
In some cases, you may be forced to track visitors clicking the appointment button link, rather than an actual appointment booking. This is less accurate than tracking appointment bookings, of course, but does at least give an indication of the intent to book.

Track Telephone Calls

Using Google Ads call tracking, it is possible to track when visitors call you whilst they’re visiting your site. This only works for visitors who arrived from a Google Ads click though, and be aware that this tracking will change the telephone number on your site too – just temporarily, for those specific visitors.

Track Email Link Clicks

Whilst we’re never fans of publishing email addresses on websites (that’s just inviting spam email we could all do without!), if you do have email addresses on your site, make sure they’re a mailto: link and configure tracking to measure when visitors click.
This is less accurate than a contact form completion, but does provide some measurement where there may be no alternative. We also recommend considering email link click tracking as a secondary conversion – used for measurement, but not used for performance optimisation of your campaigns.

Track Telephone Number Link Clicks

As with email address links, telephone numbers on your site should ideally be tel; links. Clicks on those links can easily be tracked and used a measurement of success for your campaigns. As with email link clicks though, a click doesn’t mean that visitor called, only that they clicked the link. As such, you may wish to consider added telephone link click tracking as a secondary conversion used for measurement, but not for campaign optimisation.

Poor Targeting Wastes Chiropractic Marketing Budget

Google Ads is easy to set up, but difficult to master.

There are dozens, maybe hundreds of options to choose from and to configure and within those, numerous tripping hazards that will waste your budget. Let’s take a look at some of the greatest offenders that waste budget.

Broad Keyword Matching

Yes, we know, “Google recommended it”. Of course Google recommended it – it makes Google more money, but not the Chiropractor that’s advertising and wasting their budget on junk traffic.

Bidding on the broad match keyword, ‘chiropractor’ could match any search containing the word ‘chiropractor’ or words like it – that means some good visitors, of course, but also means ‘chiropractor qualifications’, ‘chiropractor london’ (bad news if you’re not in London), ‘chiropractic procedure’, ‘chiropractor jobs’. It could potentially match a search for ‘back pain’ a similar terms too – that could convert in to an enquiry, of course, but the cost of that conversion/enquiry might be way higher than you should be paying.

Check the Search Terms report in your Google Ads search campaigns too see how much budget you’re wasting on irrelevant searches.

Location Targeting

There’s a slightly buried option in the Google Ads Campaign Settings which defaults to “Presence or interest: People in, regularly in or who’ve shown interest in your targeted locations (recommended)”.

That last part is the killer – “shown interest in” essentially means anyone on the planet that might have searched for something else in your location at some point and can attract clicks from Asia, Africa or from other areas outside of your clinic’s operating area – those clicks won’t convert too well and will waste budget, of course.

We’d recommend the second option to focus on more local patients: “Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations”.

Convert More Visitors in to Patients

The greatest wasted budget of all – a website that visitors won’t trust enough to convert, or so confusing, they don’t know what they should do and leave, taking their money with them to another Chiropractor with a site that looks more trustworthy.

We’re dealing with health – to convert from a click, your web page needs to look like you’re a professional practice that a patient can trust with their health and wellness. There’s certainly an element of, “if you don’t care about your website, can I trust you to care about my health”?

Professionally designed chiropractor websites convert more visitors in to patients.

It’s not just how your site and pages look though.

Page Speed Optimisation

Since 75% or more of your site traffic is from mobile devices and often those users might be on 3G or 4G connections rather than on wifi, your site needs to load fast – aim for 2 seconds for a usable page. 30 seconds of additional load time could be costing you 30% more enquiries every month!

Call to Action

Make it clear what you want a visitor to do when they’re on your page. Enquire, make a booking, get a free assessment, call you?

We’d also recommend a “sticky header”, which keeps your Call To Action visible when visitors scroll down the page.

Use Short Forms

Longer forms don’t convert as well as short forms and waste your budget. Keep forms short and don’t request information you could easily obtain from a phone call or follow up email, or in their chiropractic session or free assessment.

Remember, the form’s job is to generate an enquiry – the easier it is for a visitor to fill the form in, the more visitors will and the more enquiries you’ll get.

Effective Google Ads for Chiropractors

In summary, for Google Ads to be effective for Chiropractors;

1. Track everything so that you, your Google Ads agency and Google’s machine learning can understand what drives enquiries and therefore how to get more of them.
2. Target accurately. Steer clear of broad match keywords and low intent search terms which won’t convert well. Take care with location targeting too.
3. Most importantly, focus on the design, messaging and calls to action on your website to maximise the enquiries you get from all traffic sources, including Google Ads.

Three areas to focus on to achieve success, some of which are easier than others.

Here at Tillison Consulting, we provide Google Ads services for a variety of different business sectors. Whether you’re looking for Google Ads services for Wedding Venues, Events, Law Firms and many more, we have Google Ads specialists to help you improve your online presence.