Summary of Advertising Strategy for Acquiring Patients
This video presents a comprehensive overview of an effective advertising strategy targeted at healthcare practices, specifically focusing on how to allocate budgets between Google Ads and Meta (Facebook and Instagram) Ads to maximize patient acquisition. The speaker emphasizes that advertising is a critical tool for rapid practice growth, especially when organic methods like SEO, social media posting, and review generation lack immediate leverage.
Key Platforms and Their Roles
- Google Ads
- Targets users with high intent based on explicit search queries (e.g., “dentist who does braces near me”).
- Effective for capturing demand from people actively searching for dental services.
- Represents about 70% of the advertising budget in the recommended strategy.
- Drives traffic to the website where user behavior is tracked.
- Meta Ads (Facebook and Instagram)
- Primarily used for display advertising to build trust and brand familiarity.
- Cannot target based on specific intent but can show personalized ads in social feeds.
- More cost-effective for retargeting users who already demonstrated intent on Google.
- Typically achieves 30-50% lower cost per result compared to Google, but depends on Google to generate the initial intent-based audience.
- Represents about 30% of the advertising budget.
Integrated Advertising Workflow
| Step | Description |
|---|---|
| 1 | User searches for dental services on Google (high intent). |
| 2 | Google Ads capture the searcher and direct them to the practice’s website. |
| 3 | A cookie is placed in the user’s browser to track their visit. |
| 4 | If the user leaves the website without converting, the cookie enables retargeting on Meta. |
| 5 | Meta Ads display targeted, trust-building ads to these high-intent users on social feeds. |
| 6 | If the user converts (books online, calls, or submits a form), no further ads are shown. |
Website Tracking and Conversion Metrics
Tracking user actions on the website is essential to gauge campaign success and optimize spend. The key conversion actions tracked are:
- Online Booking (Highest value)
- Confirmed through booking system integration or, if unavailable, tracked via clicks to the booking page.
- Phone Calls
- Tracked through clickable phone links.
- Call quality is assessed by measuring call duration (>45 seconds implies a qualified lead).
- Form Submissions (Lowest conversion certainty)
- Users submitting contact or inquiry forms on the website.
Conversions are prioritized to avoid overspending on advertising to users who have already taken a desired action.
Important Insights and Conclusions
- Google Ads and Meta Ads serve complementary but distinct roles: Google targets intent; Meta builds trust and nurtures leads through retargeting.
- Budget allocation favors Google (70%) to capture high-intent users, with Meta (30%) used for retargeting, leveraging cost efficiencies.
- Retargeting with Meta reduces cost per result by approximately 30-50% compared to Google alone.
- Tracking user behavior on the website is critical to identify conversions and ensure ad spend focuses on potential patients who have not yet converted.
- The outlined strategy is more sophisticated than many agencies’ approaches, which often focus on only one platform or lack integrated tracking.
- Proper setup of this system can lead to better marketing efficiency and reduced reliance on costly agency fees.
Additional Notes
- Branding is clarified as trust-building via display ads rather than simply increasing awareness.
- The strategy assumes modern online booking platforms can send booking confirmations for accurate tracking; otherwise, proxies like click tracking are used.
- The video promises a follow-up that will dive deeper into platform-specific tactics.
This strategic framework provides a high-level but actionable blueprint for dental practices or similar service providers seeking to invest intelligently in digital advertising for rapid patient growth.
00:00:00
Hey guys, in this video I’m going to break down our advertising strategy, which is basically how do you pay platforms? How do you pay Google and Facebook um or Meta now? How do you pay them in order to get more patients? What does the big picture look like? Um and as a side note, advertising is sort of the last refuge that we have as marketers. If you want to grow your practice at will, um in a short period of time, it’s going to be reliance on ads. uh the other methods, things like local SEO, um generating reviews,
00:00:34
posting on social media, that’s great and do all that. Um but it won’t have the leverage to where you can do something in order to get patients. It’s not going to be that direct. Um so definitely go do it. I’ve made several videos on how to do those things at a high level. Um check it out, but this video is just going to be on ads. All right. So the main platforms we’re going to be looking at are Google and Meta and Meta is broken down into Facebook and Instagram. So, off the bat, let me address the
00:01:13
common question people have, which is what’s better, Google or Meta? And that question is sort of um like it depends is the common answer. But what I see is like meta is very good at display ads. Google is very good at matching with person’s intent because in Google we know exactly what they’re searching for. Meta we can show up in Instagram and the Facebook feed. So it can show more personalized like display stuff. So when it comes to this I actually find that it’s not like we choose one or the
00:01:51
other. It’s that they have different use cases. So with Google, what we’re doing is we’re actually identifying people who have a specific intent. So the use cases for Google is going to be intent. If someone is searching um dentist who does braces near me or dentist who does braces in Anaheim, then we’re pretty clear that they have a strong intent. But if we were on Facebook and Instagram, it’s very hard to target someone like that. It’s very hard to know what their um current
00:02:28
behavior is like. Here, you can only target based on interest, but for something as situational as dentistry can be, it’s typically not a good way of going about. So meta and Facebook the CA um the use case here is going to be display and you could say like some people might say this is like for branding um showing images but uh I made another video I think it was the video right before this one about what branding actually is um it’s not necessarily display but for meta for meta purposes we’re going to
00:03:05
branding is not display for meta purposes we’re going to treat it for showing display showing your case building more trust I should call it that so instead of more more trust so this is these are the use cases so what we can do is first connect with people at the Google level so how should I diagram this let’s say someone searches on Google that is a search are dentist near me. Here we based on the search we can kind of understand their intent is to find a dentist. So we can um connect with that
00:03:59
and we have an ad here. All right. So this is at the Google ads level. We run first Google ads because we know that they have good intent. We don’t necessarily want to create this entire marketing advertising system for someone who has low intent, for someone who is not interested at the dentist because it’s going to be a very hard sell. So, we run an ad and when they click on it, when they click on this ad, they get sent to your website. and we use what’s called a cookie. Now, this is getting a bit technical,
00:04:41
but this is just how it works. Uh, I won’t get too much more technical besides this. We put a cookie in their browser. So, if you use like Firefox, if you use Chrome or Edge or whatever, um, it’s a bit of code that gets put into here, a temporary code. And basically if they use the same browser and now they go off of your website and let’s say instead of your website they go on Facebook or Instagram then the cookie is still in their browser. So now we’re able to show up with your display ads on meta and uh or on
00:05:22
meta platforms to people who had high intent because they came from um Google ads. They came we first matched with high intent. And so what this enables is about or what it enables is that meta ads build more trust with people who already had high intent. So as a result, Meta typically gets about 30% cheaper um cost per result. So if we’re looking for online bookings, Meta is going to come in about 30 to 50% cheaper. But it’s it’s dependent on Google. it it it Google enables Meta to exist because
00:06:07
if it wasn’t for this and if we dumped all our budget into Meta, we wouldn’t have the capacity or the capability to um first target by intent. And so as a result, it wouldn’t work so well. So the budget distribution typically looks like 70% on Google and about 30% on meta. And what we do here is in this entire system we also have to have in your website tracking. I’m running out of colors. So tracking is going to be a very important thing as you’ll see. Um so this is like kind of how the big
00:06:54
picture strategy. So here in tracking what we’re doing is we’re looking for user behavior. What are they actually doing on the website? And there’s three things that you should be tracking depending on what like what things what what results you want. But this is what we look for. So first is online booking, second is phone calls and third is form submissions in this order. Form submissions. All right. So when these are triggered, it’s considered a conversion. That means a user from Google Ads took an action
00:07:47
that we wanted them to. And if they don’t take one of these three actions, then it will then we’ll start showing up on Meta. If they do take these action, great. Uh we don’t need to spend our budget advertising to those people because already they already took the action that we wanted them to take. So uh online booking this is going to be the first because many modern platforms uh many modern online booking systems by the end of the online booking journey we’re able to get confirmation and send
00:08:23
tracking that okay they did book online. Um if if your platform can’t do that and we work with a lot of clients with old platforms then what we do is from your website just tracking how many people click to online booking so it’s going to be a bit inflated and so from there we just try to take an average phone calls you do the same thing on your website all the links on your website are going to be in HTML and it’s going to send out to a tell link teel and uh basically we’re just tracking how many people
00:08:54
click on tell links once they’re on this website. And finally, uh, form submissions. Oh, and and one more note, phone calls. Uh, we also want to kind of vet the quality of them by expanding the um time on a call for about 45 seconds. Because at about 45 seconds, we’re assuming that, okay, this is not some random person who called in with a quick question and just hung up. Um, there’s actually a conversation and a dialogue going on, most likely to figure out the best time to schedule them in.
00:09:25
And um and and this is why uh phone calls are a bit lower than online booking or it’s under online booking. It’s because here we have confirmation that they want to schedule an appointment. Phone calls, it’s a bit more uncertain. And finally, least certain is going to be form submissions. If they go on your website, they submit a form, that’s also a conversion, but we’re not going to rate it as highly as someone who booked online or uh did a phone call. Okay. So now I painted the entire
00:09:54
picture. Um yeah, so this is the strategy for this is the big picture strategy for how you can run ads at a higher level that many agencies are doing and they’re charging a hefty fee. But if you know how to set this part up, then uh you’re pretty golden and you’re probably operating better than I would say about 60 to 70% of the marketing agencies out there who only know how to do one or the other. Um, with that said, I’ll probably do the next video to break down exactly what to do on each
00:10:27
platform. Um, yeah. So, let me know if you have any questions about the big picture strategy and, uh, I’ll get to it. Thanks.