As your practice continues to grow, it’s crucial to stay in control of your advertising game, whether you’re solo or you’ve expanded into a group practice. So, ask yourself: are your ad groups broken out enough to provide the control you need as your practice grows?
In this article, we provide insights to help you optimize your ad campaigns effectively.
Note: This post assumes you already have a well-built ads campaign! These are advanced considerations as your group practice grows in clinicians, Specialties/modalities, and locations.
Understanding the Key Mechanism with Ads
Let’s start by briefly understanding how ads work: you set a daily budget for your ads, which determines the maximum amount you’re willing to spend in a day. Say you want to spend a lot, you’ll spend a lot; say you want to spend a little, you’ll spend a little.
But here’s the catch—once you hit that budget limit, your ads stop showing until the next day. It’s like hitting the pause button on your ad visibility.
And this is the important point to understand. Because the nature of the daily budget is the reason why you need to make sure you’re in control of your ad groups.
Controlling Budget for Different Populations
Let’s discuss the diverse populations you serve: you might serve various age groups, such as adults and children/teens, and so it’s crucial to allocate your budget wisely. For instance, let’s say you’re full up on adult clients in the afternoon, and child clients in the morning, and, so, you want to connect with more adult clients in the morning, and more child clients in the afternoon.
The answer? Separate your populations into different ad campaigns
You can allocate a higher budget to the campaign targeting adults during afternoon hours, and a separate budget for the campaign focused on children/teens in the late afternoon and early evening.
Use your campaigns strategically to target gaps in your practice’s schedule. Doing so ensures that you effectively fill available slots for each population group, maximizing your practice’s potential.
Managing Budget for Different Locations
As your practice expands to multiple locations, managing your budget allocation becomes more complex. Picture one of your offices being fully booked, while another office needs more clients.
If you have one campaign with all of your locations, the locations that serve more people (i.e. with higher populations) are going to eat up your budget. Let’s say your licensed in New York and Colorado: New York is two hours ahead of Colorado so it’s going to devour your budget before your ads even run in Colorado.
How can you handle the budget in this scenario? You already know the answer: breaking your ads out into separate campaigns.
By creating distinct campaigns for each office—each with its own budget—you gain the power to control where your advertising dollars go. Allocate a higher budget to the locations that require more traffic, ensuring it receives the attention it deserves. Meanwhile, the fully booked office won’t spend unnecessarily on ads, giving you better control over your overall advertising expenses.
Budget Allocation for Different Modalities
Let’s say you offer modalities like EMDR, anxiety treatment, depression therapy, and couples counseling. Not all should be treated equal, as far as ads are concerned. Some Specialties/modalities can be budget hogs (like EMDR), consuming the majority of your ad budget if grouped together.
To avoid budget discrepancies and ensure fair exposure for all your modalities, consider breaking them out into separate campaigns.
By creating dedicated campaigns for each modality, you can allocate appropriate budgets and attract searchers specifically looking for those specialties. This way, you won’t miss out on potential clients interested in anxiety treatment or depression therapy while focusing on EMDR.
Modalities and Specialties to Consider
Here we want to break down some Specialties and modalities that are worth consideration for breaking into separate campaigns.
- ADHD:
- CBT (sometimes DBT)
- Testing/Assessment services
- OCD
- Anxiety (not always the case but it has eaten up budgets in the past—in our experience.)
By strategically breaking out the above into separate campaigns, you can allocate budgets and resources more effectively, ensuring each area of your practice receives the visibility it needs.
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Well-Built Campaigns
Having a well-built campaign doesn’t necessarily mean it’s optimized for your current needs. Don’t assume that a campaign built in the past is still perfect for the present.
To maintain control over your ad groups, take the time to review and optimize your campaigns regularly. Ensure your ads are adhering to best practices. Keep a close eye on performance metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, and cost per acquisition.
By making data-driven adjustments, you can optimize your campaigns to maximize their effectiveness.
As your therapy practice grows, it’s crucial to adapt your advertising strategies and maintain control over your budget. By strategically breaking out your ad groups based on populations, locations, and modalities, you can allocate budgets effectively and ensure that each segment of your practice receives exposure to keep your practice full.