I recently spent about $500 0n a Google Ads campaign in order to test out their marketing services. The results weren’t what I expected, which I’ll share in this post.
Google Ads is a service which displays ads to a specific customer demographic. You can choose the keywords you want to use and which website to show.
You can choose the layout of the advertisement, the wording, etc. The interface wasn’t hard to use. But the results – wow. Let’s dive right in.
Building the Google Ads Campaign
I set the budget at $750 and I ran it for 3 weeks. I decided to cut it short because Google was choosing weird search phrases which had nothing to do with my product or advertising campaign.
Here’s my ad below.
Before starting the ad campaign I was already selling one of these courses every few days at $500 a pop. I expected this would increase.
Ad Campaign Results
I had 1,500 clicks on the ad which seems way too many in that short of a period. And It cost me $500. That’s $0.30 per click.
I would have preferred to get charged more and instead target the proper audience.
I had zero sales in this time. Which means that I lost money in 2 ways; I lost my $500 which I spent on the ad campaign and I lost the revenue from course sales.
That’s right – I didn’t sell any courses in those 3 weeks. Odd. The opposite of what I expected.
Stopping the Campaign
After stopping the campaign, about 1 week later, I started selling my courses again. All is well in the universe.
It could have been a fluke, no doubt. But I also think that I was competing against myself in this ultra-niche.
My site was already ranking quite high on search engines and I was getting a ton of visitors. By creating an ad campaign I was competing against my own pages which would have come up anyway, depending on whatever search keywords people were choosing.
Organic Searches
Once again, I’m convinced that an organic search, without paying for advertisement, is the best way to get your product before the right audience.
In order to achieve that you need 2 things:
- Content
- Time
#1. Content
The content has to be good content and relevant content. Which means that you have to create blog posts which support whatever service you’re offering or whatever product you’re selling.
Your content (blog post) will be displayed to the person performing an online search. Based on how much time they spend on your site it will be further recommended to the same demographic.
And if your content is referred to by other websites in the same niche, even better. That’ll bump you up further in the rankings. Everyone’s happy.
#2. Time
You need time for your content to rank. The more time your content spends getting bounced around the various clicks the more likely for your content to rank well.
The only way to shortcut this is to have a solid network with other bloggers and get those websites to link to your content.
I find this a bit cheesy. Maybe because I get a ton of requests daily from people who want me to link to their product, which I refuse. I refuse because I don’t think it’s the right service/product for my audience.
But, if you have a genuine service, a genuine product, by all means, network the shit out of it. Contact as many other websites as possible and let them know – it’ll expedite your ranking.
Oh, and don’t curse. Curse words on your site will get your bumped the fuck down, way down. Keep that shit professional because god don’t curse in no bible.
When to Use Google Ads
Google Ads definitely has a place in your marketing repertoire. I reviewed in my free Marketing Course. But you should only use it when you’re trying to fasttrack your product or if your product is hard to create content for.
Also, consider hiring an Ads Campaign Manager. There are lots of them on Upwork. Be sure to interview several people and go with someone who is the right fit for you.
For somewhere around $50-100/hr you can hire a great Google Ads campaign manager. The return on investment should be obvious to you once you run the campaign for a few months.
Return on Investment (ROI)
I don’t want to get too nerdy here but my audience is mostly physicians and many APC’s. If you guys are creating courses then your audience is only about 1,000,000. This is tiny.
You can’t be charging $15-20 for your product. That’s too low. If you’re charging at least $150 and closer to $500 then hiring a campaign manager and paying for Google Ads makes sense.
The term CAC stands for customer acquisition cost. Even if it costs me $100 to find 1 customer, if I sell that person a course for $500, that’s a great return on investment.
If I am the one creating the Google Ads campaign, managing it, tuning it, coming up with new keywords, etc., then I need to calculate my hourly rate into it as well. RIght now that hourly rate is $300/hr.
So, what I am saying is that I’d much rather spend $60/hr on Michael, the Google Ads specialist, than spend my own time doing this.
Opportunities
There is a big opportunity for healthcare professionals to run ad campaigns for physicians and APC’s.
Even if I hire someone from Upwork, they wouldn’t exactly get my product and my audience. There is a lot of money to be made as a Google Ads campaign manager – far more than $100/hr. And it’s remote!
6 replies on “Results of my Google Ads Campaign”
What are APC’s?
APC refers to Advances Care Practitioners. Mid levels is what they used to be called.
Did you use “buyer intent” keywords or general “telemedicine” keywords?
Figuring out the best buyer intent keywords was one strategy I had to learn when I used PPC ads.
Sometimes its hard to think like a buyer when you’re a seller.
-J
I tried my best but you’re right, it’s really important to choose the right words. The kind of keywords I was using were so niche that my target audience was rather small. That’s probably why the ad platform was choosing other keywords to reach a broader audience.
I’m currently running a campaign on Instagram as well and I’ll report the results on that soon. Should be interesting to see. I’ll revisit Google Ads again in the future – I used them in the past for our auto mechanic shop in San Diego and it did decently there.
Very interesting blog posts you have. I’m an ND working in the US in a state where NDs are licensed physicians. I’ve had my own private practice and it is difficult letting people know who you are and how you can help them. My patients have had lots of success but they aren’t so good at getting more patients sent my way. I’ve paid business/marketing “experts” to help me and it’s resulted in a reduction of patients scheduling. Your information is much more helpful because you are a doctor whereas the other marketing/business expert seemed to miss many of the important points. And you are actually doing the stuff, not just charging and telling other business owners to do it. I’ve done the google ads and facebook ads and I got more patients in when I was doing none of those things. In fact my new patient flow decreased dramatically when I followed all the “experts” advice. I even created a free guide with follow up emails and maybe it resulted in one patient. People who want free guides don’t usually end up reaching out to fix their issue, especially if it’s something they decide to just suffer in silence with, like, I don’t know, flatulence or bad breath (my free guide was not about either of those). I’ve become more and more convinced that the organic searches result in many more patients scheduling, at least that has been 90+% of my new patients scheduling.
The opportunities you mention is very interesting. I’ve recently been hired as an Executive Director of a nonprofit health clinic. I’ve been doing tons of stuff for them that they couldn’t find anyone to do correctly, from creating a new website for them (my spouse happens to be a software engineer and I’ve learned a ton about website creation from him), I’ve been working on their social media content and platform, cleaning up their bookkeeping, organizing their grant writing and fundraising. None of these things are something I’m formally trained in but because I understand the medical side of things and I supposed because I’m very efficient and organized I’ve been able to branch out way more than I ever expected I would. My husbands jokes that after all that medical training I’m now creating websites. I had actually considered using it as a money making opportunity until reading your blog posts.
How exciting. I think that’s definitely a side hustle that you could build out for other ND’s and MD/DO’s. I would say that if nothing else it’ll be something to put on your future resume. But you’ll also learn a lot in the process. It might require you to build a new side brand to do it. This might be a good time to learn how to delegate and hire some other marketers or graphic designers and web designers and sell packages to other health professionals or even clinics.
As for your own marketing … I’ve learned that if you want word of mouth it’s important to ask for it and be very direct about it. “I would love it if you could tell 2 of your friends about my services. Can you think of anyone who has health conditions that I could treat? It would be helpful.”
And if you can find patient interest groups or talk about ND related topics on Quora, you’d also find some patient sources. Also, check out my free digital marketing course.