Chiropractor PPC: A Practical Google Ads Guide

A chiropractic ad account works when it is narrow, local and measured on booked new patients.

What a Chiropractic PPC Campaign Is For

A pay per click campaign for a chiropractic office has one job. It puts your practice in front of someone nearby who wants to be seen soon, and it gets that person on the schedule. Search ads suit that job because the patient types the problem into Google themselves. A person searching for a chiropractor open Saturday in your town has already decided to book somewhere.

Most wasted chiropractor PPC spend comes from running the account like a brand campaign: broad keywords, one ad group, the homepage as the landing page, and a report that counts clicks. The fixes in this guide are mostly about narrowing the account down to the searches you want, matched to what you treat and sent to pages built for them.

If you hire a chiropractor PPC company, the same list works as a checklist for their work.

The Searches Worth Paying For

Start with near me and location searches. Chiropractor near me, chiropractor plus your town, and chiropractor plus your neighborhood form the core of almost every account. They carry clear intent, and they tend to turn into phone calls.

Condition and symptom searches come next. People search for sciatica relief, lower back pain treatment, neck pain after a car accident, or headaches from neck tension. Bid on these when you treat the condition and have a page about it. Group them by condition so each ad group gets its own ads and its own landing page. A sciatica ad group should show an ad that mentions sciatica and lands on your sciatica page.

Then look at new patient intent. Searches that include new patient, first visit, same day, accepts insurance or walk in come from people who are ready to book, and some practices bid higher on them.

Technique names need care. Someone searching for a specific adjustment method may already be a loyal patient of another office. Test those terms in a separate campaign with its own budget so they cannot eat the spend meant for local searches.

Negative Keywords That Protect the Budget

Chiropractic terms attract plenty of searchers who will never book. Students look up schools and programs. Job seekers look up salary, hiring and associate positions. Curious people search how to crack your own back or how to adjust your own neck, and others want free stretches, videos or DIY tools.

Build a shared negative keyword list before launch and apply it to every campaign. A reasonable starting list includes jobs, job, salary, hiring, career, school, college, degree, course, license, how to become, DIY, yourself, at home, video and youtube. If there is a chiropractic college near you, add its name.

Open the search terms report every week for the first two months. It shows the exact searches that triggered your ads, and anything irrelevant goes on the negative list.

If you hire a management company, ask to see this list. A short negative list on an account that has run for a year tells you nobody is reading the search terms.

Call Assets, Location Assets and Your Ad Schedule

Most chiropractic bookings start with a phone call, so the ad should make calling easy. Add a call asset with your front desk number, which lets Google show a tap to call button on mobile. Use a Google forwarding number if you want calls from ads counted as conversions, and set a minimum call length so hang ups are left out.

Link your Google Business Profile to the ads account and turn on location assets. The ad can then show your address and distance, which helps someone choosing between two offices a few miles apart.

Match the ad schedule to the hours someone answers the phone. A call that rings out at 7pm on a Thursday is a paid click that ended in voicemail. If you offer online booking, you can keep ads running after hours and drop the call asset during those hours so the ad points to the booking page.

Keep the location radius tight around the office. Patients coming for regular adjustments will only drive so far, and you know your own map better than any default setting does.

One Landing Page Per Condition

Sending every ad to the homepage is the most common reason chiropractic ads cost too much. The person who searched for sciatica relief lands on a page about wellness and family care, can find no mention of sciatica, and leaves.

Build a page for each condition you advertise. The sciatica page explains how you evaluate and treat sciatica, what the first visit looks like, how long it takes, which insurance you accept, and how to book. Put the phone number and booking button near the top and again at the bottom. Add reviews from patients who came in for that condition, with their permission to quote them.

If you advertise a new patient offer, put the full terms on the landing page. State chiropractic boards set their own rules about advertising free or discounted exams, and some require specific disclosure language. Those rules vary from state to state, so check with your board before an offer goes into an ad.

What Google's Health Policies Change

Google's personalized advertising policy restricts targeting people based on health conditions. For a chiropractor this mostly limits remarketing. Building an audience of people who visited your sciatica page and following them around the web with sciatica ads is the kind of targeting the policy restricts, because the audience is defined by a health condition.

Keywords are handled differently. Bidding on searches like lower back pain treatment or sciatica chiropractor is allowed, and your ad copy can name the conditions you treat. The restriction applies to audiences and personalized ads, the tools that would imply you know something about a specific person's health.

If you want remarketing at all, keep the lists broad, avoid building them from condition pages, and read Google's current policy page before you set one up.

Measure Booked New Patients

Clicks and click through rate show whether people see the ad and find it relevant. The number that decides whether the campaign pays for itself is booked new patient appointments, followed by how many of those patients showed up and came back for a second visit.

Set up conversion tracking for calls from ads, calls from the website and completed online bookings. A form fill or a visit to the booking page is a weaker signal than a finished booking, so track it separately or give it less weight.

Close the loop at the front desk. Ask every new patient how they found you and record the answer in your practice management system. Once a month, compare the new patients who said Google ad with the conversions Google Ads reports. The two numbers will differ. What you want is a rough cost per booked new patient that you can hold up against what a new patient is worth to you across a typical care plan.

How to Judge a Chiropractor PPC Company

A chiropractic PPC company should set up the Google Ads account with you as the owner and them as a manager. If the account lives under the agency and stays with them when you leave, you lose the history and conversion data you paid for.

The monthly report should show spend, calls, bookings and cost per booked new patient, broken out by campaign. It should list the search terms added as negatives and the changes made that month with a reason for each. If the report shows impressions and clicks with nothing about appointments, ask for the booking numbers before you pay the next invoice.

Ask how they bill. Management fees are usually a flat monthly amount or a percentage of spend. Ad spend should go on your own card, billed by Google, so you can see every dollar. Ask for month to month terms, or a short initial period at most.

askotter manages Google Ads on its managed plan with paid channels at $1,000 a month, with ad spend billed separately and no contract. Whoever you talk to, bring the questions above to the first call.