* The following transcript is computer generated and may contain errors.

Stewart Gandolf
Everyone. I'm Stuart Gandolf. Welcome to our webinar today. I'm looking forward to co-leading this presentation very, very excited about this topic. Our topic today.

Josh Weum
Is all about paid.

Stewart Gandolf
Search and we're going to focus most of our energy on Google Ads, Micro and many of the things we talk about will also apply to Microsoft advertising. But essentially this is all about winning patience or getting results with Google ads. So the title of the webinar is about patience, but obviously this can be health care consumers, it can be about B2B lead generation.

Stewart Gandolf
But really at the end of the day, this is about paid search, specifically Google ads and how to be effective. So we're going to talk today. I'm going to do introductions in just a moment. After right after that, we're going to jump into what is stage search. Why is it so powerful? How to win some of the mistakes, analytics and reporting and Q&A.

Stewart Gandolf
We've got a ton of content for you today, so you may feel like you've been drinking from a firehose by the time we get through with this meeting. But we're going to share with you some of the best practices we've learned over 17 years as a company. And by the way, we've been doing paid search since the very beginning days of our company.

Stewart Gandolf
So this is an area we like a lot. So starting off with introductions again next year, again up on CEO of Health Care Success, I co-founded the company 17 years ago. I have been started off with great big agencies and built this company for the last 17 years. I absolutely love digital marketing. We are truly an integrated agency, but this is today is all about paid search jobs.

Josh Weum
I want my name's Josh Weum. I'm a copywriter and digital analyst for Healthcare Success. I've been in health care field for more than ten years and I come from Google, where I was the Google AdWords at the time. Digital ambassador, subject matter expert for Google ads. And I'm really happy to be able to share some more insights with you today.

Stewart Gandolf
Perfect, Garrick.

Garrick Gaffney
Hi everyone. I am a senior digital strategist with a deep, deep passion and love for paid search. Been doing it for well over ten years and specifically in health care for about seven years. So really excited to be here and delighted.

Stewart Gandolf
Also with the great the about our company. In case you're not familiar, we are an integrated agency we were completely in health care. We do tons of content. So if you're new to us, I recommend you follow our blog carefully. We are doing a ton of webinars, ebooks, case studies and blog posts and so forth. So jumping straight in, you know, what is paid search and why is it so powerful?

Stewart Gandolf
Well, the first step on our talk about here is the user journey and the you know, if we look at the patient journey or the health care consumer journey, this is going to vary by business to business, right? Every business has its own journey. Every individual has their own journey. But to kind of make this a around leg and this is a sales funnel, think of it as a continuum.

Stewart Gandolf
So where we have the awareness phase where they don't even know you exist, nobody can search for you. They don't know you exist. So this is typically thought of as top of the funnel, and they're usually using top, top of the funnel strategies. For example, if it's relevant, traditional advertising or display or programmatic. But that's not the only thing people are saying.

Stewart Gandolf
There's YouTube, there's pharma ads, people are seeing things in the news. These are all things before they are at Roundabout. The page around about the site stage, right? Rather where they're first even aware of your business. The next stage, of course, is when there's a need they begin to consider and so people begin doing more research. And so again, this is a continuum and this is varies by case to case, but they may be engaging more with you.

Stewart Gandolf
They may be looking at directories. But the thing about page search, which is later on we have a decision stage patient experience that puts actually happens to them. And then of course, following up and making them loyal patients or consumers. But at the E crossroads to where everything really happens, that's when SEO and page search are really important.

Stewart Gandolf
Because when people begin to do that page search, when they're at the research phase where they're looking for solutions, we want to make sure that we're there now, if those of you that have worked with us before as an agency now, we want to think about this entire funnel. But today's call is really about that low funnel making a decision to take action stage.

Stewart Gandolf
And that's really what we're focusing in on today. The another concept that we talk a lot about to our clients to keep in mind that if you think about what we just discussed, the consumer demand and that's usually at the awareness phase. And so we think about the consumer demand for your service or your products is typically pretty fixed unless you do things to help build demand through external advertising or display or programmatic.

Stewart Gandolf
But that's one factor that some really important like how much demand is there for what you do. The second part when you're thinking about digital agencies or digital advertising, so there's a demand for your service in your area that's appropriate then is what we're about to talk about today. So today is all about this second puzzle piece, the campaign management.

Stewart Gandolf
What actually happens is a machine with Google and to a lesser extent Microsoft advertising. The third category is the landing page experience. So where are we sending this traffic to? Or isn't it your website, a special landing page? And then finally, the last piece is the conversion process. What is your sales process? Do you have a call center or contact center?

Stewart Gandolf
Are you scheduling appointments? If you're a provider or is it a retail environment? If there actually are and in fact manufacturer, is it they're going to go to see this if it's pharmaceutical or what is the actual conversion process? The point here, though, that matters is all all of these puzzle pieces are equally important. So the demand, the campaign management, the landing page is the conversion process.

Stewart Gandolf
So ideally, when you think about your marketing, you're thinking about all of these things because they are multiplicative, meaning that if consumer demand doubles on the back end and the conversions double, if you can raise by a better campaign management, your results by 50%, then your results straight out the back end will rise by 50%. If you do a better job of converting patients into our increase in the patients, you've just increased by the exact same percentage.

Stewart Gandolf
So all of these need to be working together again. Today we're focusing on paid search specifically, which is that number two box over there. But keep in mind, the larger ecosystem, all of these things are in order. I'm going to switch roles and become more of a commentator in a moment, but I do want to talk about the unique benefits of paid search before I do so.

Stewart Gandolf
Again, you know, I don't just talk about this as a CEO. I build our company through content, through us here, through paid search. In the earliest days we were doing this. And so I've been to the Google complex many, many times, and I've worked with Google for years, and there are some specific things I love about Page Search.

Stewart Gandolf
And the first is the immediate results, the fact that you can get calls, appointments, inquiries, whatever it is, your call to action within days, sometimes that same first day of a campaign launching, though that's not usually the case, but certainly very, very quickly. My experience prior to, you know, during paid search 17 years ago when we were looking for immediate results, you know, we did a TV ad, it would take months.

Stewart Gandolf
And you know, way sick of five figures, sometimes six, to do a TV campaign. So to get results there, it took forever. And then the other part of this is testing was incredibly difficult back then, didn't work, was try a different TV ad. So the fact is that you have the nimbleness to get results immediately, to immediately show up in the marketplace where people are searching and to be able to do that immediately and to change your approach and test and try and adjust is fantastic.

Stewart Gandolf
The second thing is the ability to rank above all competitors organically, like right off the bat is another highly powerful term, another big benefit. So they're testing the targeting. We're going to talk about all of these things in a little bit, but especially that flexibility, the control, the results and the ROI because it's low funnel are really, really powerful.

Stewart Gandolf
And so not every one of our clients, but certainly the vast majority head search is a significant part of what we're doing for that. Right? So not all of them, but most of them paid search is a really powerful tool and it's a lot of cases. It's the driving force is the backbone of the marketing campaign. So this is something that I'm personally very excited about and have been for years.

Stewart Gandolf
I was amazed at the power of this when it first came out, really. And we've been doing this for a long time and I'm pleased that we have two absolute experts who are far closer to the machine than I am these days. I'm running the company, but let's go ahead and get started with the details. So Josh.

Josh Weum
Thanks to Google ads today. Yeah, two stories point. It's it's critical to be to consider paid search as an important piece of the marketing mix whether you already have strong patient volume or you're an established and or not you know paid search has a lot of utility. Some of the different campaign types that it offers today include search, which is really where most of most advertisers put their paid spend.

Josh Weum
That's obviously when you're looking at keywords high end that bottom of the funnel search activity, you know, people looking for doctors near them and things like that. Performance. Max is a newer campaign type that utilizes some air signals and a lot of machine learning to allow ads to serve all across Google's network, YouTube, display network, Gmail, places like that displays very similar performance.

Josh Weum
Max utilizes some display aspects. Essentially, that's your your image ads that show up across the Internet on different websites. If you've got medical devices or home health equipment, sometimes a shopping campaign can be a good fit for your business. Video is a very impactful campaign type as well. YouTube, in fact, is considered the number two search engine in the world.

Josh Weum
If you've got an app, there are some good ways that Google has to promote both engagement and downloads of your app. And then lastly, discovery campaigns are a newer type that also uses AI and attempts to do a sort of more top of funnel search for you. And then at the bottom here, we've got dynamic search at the side campaign type, but dynamic search ads are a new type of ad that utilizes you're not not to new, but a type of ad that utilizes your website and the content on your website to automatically create ads that are engaging for users.

Josh Weum
What is paid search. This is what it looks like when you look for, for example, addiction treatment on Google. You're going to notice that you've got ads covering the entire, you know, visible part of that above the full page. They're people when you're advertising, if you're one of these four people on this page paying to show an ad for for this search, you're only going to pay when people click on that ad.

Josh Weum
So of course, that's why we call it pay per click. But there are a couple of factors that dictate where your ad goes. You know, where you rank on that page, and that's called ad rank. And essentially it's looking at quality score, which means does your landing page resonate with the ad copy that you have? And does the search that this person look for, in this case addiction treatment near me, does that lead them to irrelevant?

Josh Weum
PAGE That's what Google's looking for, ensuring that their users are getting the answers. They're looking for. Conversions and ROI are what matter. And Google ads is a really good way to get the data that sometimes we aren't able to get from the organic activity that we see. Google ads is the dominant player for sure 80 to 90%. Microsoft advertising has a portion of that market as well for everyone.

Stewart Gandolf
I'd like not to cut or comment here. The I think it's important to reiterate that these ads, if you begin with paid search your placement number one, you can't guarantee placement in. Right. Is not going to be number one, right? You can. But because Google is constantly changing every search, if you just refresh your screen, you'll see the pay per click ad order change.

Stewart Gandolf
And that's because what's happening is that order is based upon, as we said, it's really it used to be very simple. The quality score, which is really the relevance to the user searching as to the best to do it and Google's ability to see that. So as the ad right is landing page right or people clicking through and taking over, that is multiplying by the good amount.

Stewart Gandolf
So what that means is through smart campaign management, which we're going to talk about a lot, as you can show up above competitors for less money. And that's really important. So this isn't just a gross weight of throwing money at this issue. It's more about how smart can you play this game? And Google therefore having, you know, I didn't go to the campus as much as Josh did, but every interaction I've had with the Google people over the years is they're absolutely passionate about relevance to the user.

Stewart Gandolf
And so that's why they have this methodology. In the old days, it was search with the previous players and all those days of pay per click or just about the amount of dollars. Just better Google cares greatly about relevance to the user paradox, but.

Garrick Gaffney
I love to chime in too on one thing if you don't mind guys, I think placement is really depends upon the bidding strategies. I mean bidding strategies are incredibly important when it comes to our objectives. You may not if you're, for example, using maximize conversions, then your placement will vary and be sporadic through the throughout the day. And it's based a lot of historical data.

Garrick Gaffney
What's going to be an optimal time for our ad to ultimately convert? You may use I may use target impression share where you do want to show up for your branded terms. For example, 90% of the times, and that will allow your ad to consistently show up top. Yeah, I've been doing this again over ten years and you get the famous question Why is my ad showing, Well, there's a long list of reasons, but building strategies is definitely near the top of top of those reasons.

Stewart Gandolf
They're very good.

Josh Weum
To great point. You know, two point, we like to optimize everything. We can accept the bid. Now, we can always throw more money at Google and have them try to rank as higher. But if we can diagnose an issue with the landing page or the ad copy, it saves us money and allows us to rank for cheaper estimates.

Josh Weum
And these are examples of what it looks like on a mobile device when you've got the ads on top of the organic. Again, you can't see an organic listing on any of these screens. It just speaks to the value and the prominence of Google search ads and what they mean to healthcare.

Stewart Gandolf
Absolutely. You'll notice how on their very first one they have extensions which are not only giving people more places to click, but it's also increasing the real estate. So quick test. Yes.

Josh Weum
Admissions process. Why choose? There are two sort programs and tracks. These are free ad extensions that any ad can have to increase. It's real estate on that digital screen. If you've got competitors locally that you want to usurp on that, on that you know, results page ad extensions are a great way to do that. I never look at these ads.

Josh Weum
Yeah, this is probably all three of us. We don't technological people don't look at ads, but a lot of people, millions and millions of people do to look at click on and buy things from ads. And so when we're looking at, you know, Google search volume, which is immense, we know that almost 5% of those, about 5% of those have some relation to health care.

Josh Weum
And that's significant.

Garrick Gaffney
It's the old it's the old lie. I always tell people it's like some people like a pepperoni on their pizza. Some people don't like clicking on the ads. So people don't. I mean, we always want to dominate the first page of Google if we ultimately can, both in the ad space as well as organically map pack. That's a perfect scenario, right?

Stewart Gandolf
So I always tell people on a page, I want it all, I want organic, I want the map pack and rapid search. We want it all. Today we're talking about paid search. I would like to also remind people that there's many billions. I don't know where they are now in terms of annual revenue. I think last I checked it was a hundred million.

Stewart Gandolf
I try to run that by a lot, but at any rate, 90% or so, the money is coming from paid search terms, all the other stuff, the phones and the Google home and all those things are great. But search is the driver of the fortune of Google.

Josh Weum
Google is actually in the red. For many years before they began running and developing Google ad as a platform. And since then it's become by far their primary revenue generator. So people click ads, maybe not us, but people that we want to talk to. You certainly do. Google and YouTube are not at the top triggers that inspire house changes.

Josh Weum
You know, when people are online looking around for information, Yes. A lot of times they're on Google search looking for an appointment, but sometimes they're looking for new providers or they're new to a community and they're looking for the right hospital system for their family. Google and YouTube, both of which are included in Google ads platform, are now the top two sources.

Josh Weum
For that you can see Tick Tock and Instagram kind of climb in that list for younger people, but certainly for the foreseeable future, Google and YouTube are going to be very, very important platforms for us to be present on. And health care out of all those campaign types we talked about, search again, is the most prevalent. It's low funnel.

Josh Weum
It's people looking for immediate results because they show up so much above those organic results. Showing an ad there can be important. You may have been around for 20 years and have great SEO and you rank first organically, but if a competitor comes into town and decides to run ads to a to a user doesn't know any better, they're going to think that they rank about you, they're going to click the ad and go to their facility instead.

Josh Weum
So, you know, search campaigns are based around keywords that used to be called Google AdWords. Some people still use that moniker, but that's because it was initially based on just the keywords that people search. Now, Google ads can allow you to base your marketing on video views or on, you know, impressions, things like that. But keywords are still the primary way that we match up ads to user behavior and search intents.

Josh Weum
Right now you see four ads above the organic listings that's evolved over time. You know, one day they could just tell us, hey, today there's five ads. Now from now on. So it's important to recognize the value of that placement. Whether you want to pay Google for ads or not, there's certain value in showing up there that top click, that top ad that we three may not click on and maybe some of you may not is clicked on about one in three searches.

Josh Weum
So that's the place to be, just kind of like organic. You really want to rank in that top few's positions ads is no different. And then lastly, an important factor here is Google has recently changed their search engine results page to an infinite scroll. In the past you'd see page one, page two and you'd be able to go.

Josh Weum
Maybe you'd see your ad or ranking on page two. Today. It's going to rank somewhere down that scroll list on on that one infinite scroll page. So just be mindful of that.

Stewart Gandolf
One thing I failed to bring up at the beginning of this meeting. We're starting off here pretty basic. We recognize we have a pretty broad audience. Some of you are absolutely experts, large advertisers, maybe with six figures a month advertising already and a digital sort of fighter pilot on your own account. We love that. We work with clients like that all the time.

Stewart Gandolf
You may also be brand new and if executive level just trying to understand that. So we're covering some pretty foundational concepts here. We will be getting into a lot more specifics shortly. And our goal today isn't to turn you into, you know, to do what we do. We can't do that in 45 minutes or to an hour webinar.

Stewart Gandolf
We can tell you some of the things we've found from our experience over the many years we've been doing this performance.

Josh Weum
Max is one of Google's newer campaign types that really leans on and utilizes AI functionality. This one is sort of interesting because it acts as a low funnel and a high funnel marketing channel. You know, sometimes you'll see display ads or video content driven by a performance max. Other times it may show up in a local search for someone looking for health care.

Josh Weum
Right now, this type of pain is evolving. Google is always iterating on types of campaigns and ways to advertise. But we've found some value with this particular campaign type in health care, especially for medium and enterprise level entities.

Stewart Gandolf
Sorry about that. There are two.

Josh Weum
That's good on that one, that's performance. Max, we're going to go to the next slide and talk about some of the things that we do to actually win the game of pain Search. It's easy to pay Google for money for ads and start showing them, but what do you have to do to make it work? It does start with a proper setup.

Josh Weum
You know, we're very keen on establishing goals, kicking everything off with the client, you know, discussing the timeline of the ads, serving the budget that we want to utilize at the beginning. If there is an existing campaign or existing account, any historical data, we like to audit that to see if there's any value in what's been run before and if we can use some of that in the new marketing efforts that we put force onboarding.

Josh Weum
Of course, we need to gain access to any active accounts that you've got. We create accounts were non-existent. We work with other vendors to transfer assets over in any situation, but we need to do that. Campaign settings are critical. Google is always surreptitious, really moving us into automation. And so we want to make sure that any default settings are settings that we want because those have changed over time.

Josh Weum
You know, something that may be default now would have been something you'd have opted into a year ago. So always check your campaign settings, keyword research, obviously very important. Two aspects of that, one being the keywords that you want to show up for, the other being those that you want to avoid, which are called negative keywords. As many of us now, those are the ones that we would put in our account to ensure that if someone searches for that, we do not show up.

Josh Weum
The build out is important. Our campaigns are essentially meant to mirror the websites that you've got or the services that you offer to allow for good functionality there. You know, the ad groups will be set up based on the service lines and things like that. The build out is very important. It's got to mirror and mimic the, you know, the website and the offerings that you have on your site.

Josh Weum
And copy is important. We are health care experts, so we have been for more than a decade. So when it comes to the nuances of health care, verbiage and messaging, we're very well versed in how to build that out. And you know, which which copy works really extensions. We talked a little bit about that. Extensions are critical. Obviously, they give you more real estate, but they also provide extra functionality for a user who might be looking to have their insurance verified or see a few take, you know, the insurance that they have targeting you can target geographically.

Josh Weum
Demographic targeting is still within Google. There were some changes to that recently, but you're still able to target people based on their age, you know, where they live, household income, things like that. And then ad scheduling. It's critical to run your ads at times that make sense. A lot of people that we find are having, you know, tough success with Google ads are running ads at two and 3 a.m. when they really shouldn't be.

Josh Weum
And at the end here, tracking set up. It's very important to have good tracking on anything you do. To Stuart's point about TV ads today with digital, there's no excuse for not tracking everything you're doing and know what that our online is client approval. Before we launch anything, Obviously, we discuss and share with the client and see if we all check all those boxes on what we've done there and if we like it.

Josh Weum
Google approves the campaign. There's a small approval process there. If you're in a business that relates to pharma or addiction treatment, there's another layer of whitelisting that we do with Google to have your campaigns approved to advertise. And then lastly, client meetings and reporting cadence. You know, we like to meet weekly at the beginning as often as the client likes, really, ideally, but at the beginning of a project, it's imperative to meet often.

Josh Weum
And then when it comes to reporting, whatever cadence is preferred, we do monthly reporting and then quarterly business reviews as well.

Stewart Gandolf
I want you to surprise Garik as this is a comment on. This is one of the most intense phases, but also the rewarding because we call Garik the Butcher. And so they're going to elaborate on sort of why this phase is so important.

Garrick Gaffney
Yes, it's the most critical early stage. There's a combination really of expertise. And I've been doing this so long and really staying close to the industry, researching, reading all the latest and greatest articles. Right. Having close connections and conversations with the Google team and the partners over there. If it's done right and you create a great foundation from the get go, then you really have a head start.

Garrick Gaffney
And when we talk about immediate results back in the start, when we're talking about that, immediate results are definitely predicated on how well this is structured. Instead of waiting a couple of months to figure out your negative keywords and to figure out, well, this ad copies are resonating, we actually know all of that from the first step. We've done it for so many years.

Garrick Gaffney
We know what works for fibroids, for hemorrhoids, for cancer treatment, for addiction treatment, you name it. We know what works. And so relevancy and structure and being I always I use this word I were neurotic about this stage because it's so critical. And having everything where the campaign is tied directly to the ad groups that have these perfectly aligned keywords, having the negative keywords, extensions, everything really set up thoroughly, you know, is is just yeah, I can't stress enough.

Garrick Gaffney
It's really key and it's definitely the most important stage, I think.

Stewart Gandolf
Yeah, I didn't say one thing right. Almost at the halfway point today we have we're going to speed up a little bit here, but don't worry, we will have time for questions. We will also have if you need specific questions about your campaign, you can talk about that. And we are recording this. So if you have pictures that you want to share this with or if you have to leave unexpectedly to whatever reason, you'll be getting a copy of the recording.

Josh Weum
Ongoing optimizations and management. It's important to not set it and forget it. Everyone's heard that term. That doesn't work right. Things change and Google changes constantly, probably too much. They're always updating that platform and it's together, explaining it's important to know what's happening right now. So when it comes to ongoing optimizations, keyword refinements, one of them, you know, keywords change over time.

Josh Weum
Sentinel is a great example of a keyword that didn't exist in the addiction treatment world years ago and has now more search volume than the word heroin. So, you know, keyword refinement is one of those ways that we find new keywords and recognize other keywords that may have fallen out of favor, add rotations, critical AB testing of landing page elements.

Josh Weum
This could be something as simple as a form in a word that is placed on the page or the color of a button text on a button, a keyword match type assessment, broad map versus exact match. Very important to know what what Google is considering on a match to your keywords. And in our case we prefer exact match or we didn't have control over what gets matched up to what keyword market research.

Josh Weum
Obviously competitive analysis, we've got to know if you've got locations all over New Jersey, for example, we need to know which one of those has the most competition versus which one may not have as much because there could be some campaign elements that we deploy based on the competitive volumes that you've got around your time of day. We talked a little bit about that.

Josh Weum
If you have a busy, urgent care on Monday morning all the way until 2 p.m., maybe you don't need to run ads on Monday morning, but but maybe after 2 p.m. is a good time. Location analysis, ad copy analysis, bidding strategy. You know, we talked a little bit about a few of those. There are there are times when you've got options from Google that you can ab test and determine this maximum clicks might be a better fit for your business than, say, maximum impressions.

Josh Weum
If you're doing a branded campaign or an awareness campaign, your bid strategy may differ based on those goals that you have. A conversion value Analysis. If an appointment is worth hypothetically $50 to your company and that changes over time based on the services that you offer or the value of your services, you know, that's something that should be adjusted on the marketing side.

Josh Weum
So it's important to analyze the value of each conversion client contact level, goal expectations. We talked a little bit about that. We like to be very collaborative and that means sharing the feedback on the phone calls that we've been receiving. The insurance policies that you're getting from the ad campaigns, things like that. A new platform features Garik, as you mentioned, is always when it comes to stay abreast of what's current with Google.

Josh Weum
They're always putting out new features and new beta opportunities, and we like to have our clients be, you know, involved in us and privy to those new business services amenities. Kevin's a great example of something new that may have been added to the mix for your health care company a couple of years ago. And while we couldn't advertise covered on Google initially, we can now go over treatments, I should say development of event specific copy and strategies.

Josh Weum
And this is a recap of these these same things. So you can go to the next slide. But, you know, if we're looking at something where you've got an event coming up or, you know, a summertime promotion, we always like to tie those things into the campaigns. Best practices for paid search, automated bidding, new bid strategies, you know, utilize and embrace some of those.

Josh Weum
I wouldn't say to trust everything that Google recommends, but some of these bidding strategies have a lot of utility and value to your brand. And you've been used to do a glance emotion in ad copy. It's important to focus on treatment rather than the maladies or the negatives of of having the ailment or the affliction. The focus on treatment is the best way to have that.

Josh Weum
That copy resonate and convert negative keyword list is important. You know, what do we want to show up for? What do we want to avoid? If you can't, for example, help people with a certain state based insurance, An advertising campaign may want to.

Stewart Gandolf
Avoid.

Josh Weum
Some of those terms. While your organic campaign can handle that kind of traffic rotating of ads. AB testing. We talked a little bit about that match types. Sometimes a broad match keyword can work well if it's paired up with a lot of negative keywords. But for the most part, we like to have control over what get served in where branded unbranded and competitor keyword.

Josh Weum
You want to show up for your own brand, where a competitor may otherwise show up for your name and be at the top of that page. But ideally on branded terms are what we're looking for. We want people that don't know who we are and haven't chosen a provider and are looking for for health care services. So we target both branded and unbranded.

Josh Weum
And then third is competitor keywords. You know, whenever there's a competitor who has what you want, essentially, you know, they've got that market share, they've got that local notoriety that you're looking for. Oftentimes, if you use their brand name as keyword, you can build some equity by showing up as an alternative. You're not appearing them. You're not saying, Hey, we are in brand X, but if someone is looking for health care services, they don't often choose the first ad things like they're looking for alternatives.

Josh Weum
So it's good to show up for competitor names as well as extensions. Always want to use all of those quality score. You know, we talked about optimizing the landing page in the ad copy rather than just throwing more money at the bid. We're really good at that. It's easy to throw more money at Google and have them reach a higher.

Josh Weum
But if you work on your your other pieces of that ad rank equation, you can save money. The relevant landing pages are critical. We want to make sure we're sending everyone to the page that that makes sense. I we all know what which activity is. Google has the version of that called Baad. And this is what it looks like now.

Josh Weum
If you're looking online for anything, real sports, music, entertainment, and it's going to start to effect health care searches in every search in the future. So to be clear, we have some content campaign types that we utilized that that have some functionality. Our team does not utilize for copy for content. It's meant to be an inspirational tool and a utility tool, not necessarily something that we appropriate for content creation.

Josh Weum
However, to be clear in the future, we're going to see a bargaining chip to become more involved with search and how that evolves. You know, we'll all be interested to see it. And our agency, of course, stays very close to to this information. And we share with our clients what we're seeing on the front.

Stewart Gandolf
Are just out of this Google ad integrates into the paid search setup or the campaign management I as a part of that in terms of creating copy and becomes of managing campaigns. And we want to make sure that we are using the human management to have a AI versus having a AI run amok. And we'll be talking about that.

Stewart Gandolf
So yeah.

Josh Weum
Garrick And I.

Stewart Gandolf
Thought, you don't like what that does.

Josh Weum
Go ahead now. Yeah. Garrett Guy We don't trust it. I mean, we like it. It's intriguing, but we, we understand that there's better quality from human generated content and thought. I'm real quick on automation. You know Google again, is pushing into automation. If you're an advertiser that doesn't really know better or as and when you're on campaigns without a ton of skill or savvy, you know, you may opt into some of these automation settings which seem good, and some of them are.

Josh Weum
But by definition, automation is a way to avoid the tedium of manual, you know, management, which is something that we prefer. We really like to know what's going on and have control over where ads are serving. So when it comes to automation, you know, default settings, there's auto apply criteria. Google gives you recommendations that you can opt out of.

Josh Weum
But right now, a lot of those auto apply if you don't opt out, kind of like a bad phishing email. So just to be clear of the the limitations of management, you are opting in to automation and know that are better options for effective campaign optimization and management than letting Google automate everything.

Stewart Gandolf
Yeah, the automation works well for Google. They can customize it really quickly, so there's advantages there. Again, that's where the experience happens. Some of the automation they have set up can really help. Some of them just can just waste a lot of budget really, really, really quickly. So that's the art of this is understanding which automations you can use, how to manage it, and monitoring carefully.

Stewart Gandolf
And as Garik and Josh alluded to, things are always changing. So you need to pivot. And with the technology as it changes.

Josh Weum
Geographic building is key for health care, especially multi-location health care. You know, some locations may have a more acute need for patient volume or a specific service line volume, whereas others may be flush with patients and really not a need for new ones and sending them elsewhere anyway. Delineating your geo targets allows you to optimize each of those specific regions, each of those different health care entities.

Josh Weum
For example, you know, you might want to raise the budget for your kidney center in a specific region, but you don't really want the, you know, the broader hospital brand to catch all of that traffic. In this case, we would delineate a target around your kidney center, set up ads for that and sort of geofence that competitor brands can affect that as well.

Josh Weum
If you've got a lot of competition in one area, you know, we want a geofence that with some conquests ads and some brand defense. But it's important to utilize the the controls you have with geographic bidding. People aren't going to drive the car.

Stewart Gandolf
So I brought jobs my time check we're out about 38 minutes. And so just to keep that in mind as we go through these ads, are sites perfect. So I would just add to this on a competitive Jiotv is absolutely critical. That's another factor that we just love about with Google ads is that you can control very carefully.

Stewart Gandolf
And this is different than geofencing, which is a different concept entirely. Just for confuse, we're talking about you're setting up your campaign to run in that markets that matter. So that's going.

Josh Weum
Yeah, that's scheduling. We talked a little bit about this you know Google business profiles now offer some level of a time analysis that tells you when your busiest times are. If you set that online, essentially when you run ads on Google, you're allowed to dictate when the ads run which day, what time of day. And if you don't control those settings and edit them, you'll be running your ads 24 over seven.

Josh Weum
We find that. And as you can assume, people typically make the best decisions and the best interactions on ads at the normal hours of the day, not at two or three in the morning. There are exceptions, of course, but we have a lot of user data from 1015 years and we kind of know what health care user behavior looks like and where to run ads when specifically to really utilize that budget most effectively.

Josh Weum
Conquest And we talked a little bit about this. Google right now is if you're advertising on Google, they are giving your rivals your name as a as keyword bait. You know, they want you to advertise against your competitors. And as I mentioned earlier, this isn't this is aboveboard, right? We're not we're not showing up as or stealing their their equity we're providing an alternative for someone who might be looking for a hospital system or a clinical provider or something like that.

Josh Weum
So keywords can be used. You can never use the competitors name in your ad copy if you see or if you see your name in an ad that isn't yours. That's something that our team escalates to Google and those ads get taken down. But you can use it as a keyword. Pepsi will bid on Coke and for little bit on Chevy, they're just not going to say, Hey, we're serving you.

Josh Weum
Same thing applies to healthcare, folks.

Stewart Gandolf
And this is an example here of three different businesses promoting on the page search side for the Pain Center, which is a brand name in Arizona. And there are actually conquests in that. So I can see that here.

Josh Weum
Brand defense is essentially the opposite side of the coin for conquest thing. If you are if you are a well-known brand, you really don't want to have to pay to show that ad and have that that click. However, in the event that you're not paying for a Google and usually your competitor will be happy to take that top spot on your name and get it for a very low cost.

Josh Weum
Google looks at relevance. If it's your brand and you're bidding on it, you're going to pay a very, very small amount for that comparative win. It's not something we want to do, but brand defense is the thing that we really need to be mindful that if we're not showing up on top of that page, someone else will be in.

Josh Weum
They'll be stealing equity that we would like to Login script is a big entity in our world. You know, this covers certification for advertising for the pharma industry, for addiction treatment, and many other industries as well. It's been around for quite a while. It's sort of five years now. It's been working for addiction treatment. It's been longer than that for pharma, but the policies there have changed a bit since the beginning.

Josh Weum
We've worked with legit scripts for quite some time, very intimately actually, to both certify our clients and help people get through the gantlet of questions.

Stewart Gandolf
That's again area.

Josh Weum
Okay, we're talking about YouTube and Spirit, but religion.

Stewart Gandolf
Okay, here we are.

Josh Weum
Sorry about that back. So Google right now YouTube ads are again we talked about how YouTube is sort of a blend between social and direct response. It kind of covers both ends of the funnel if to no cost asset. Right now, if you go to YouTube to create a YouTube channel that's going to cost you nothing. If you advertise towards that channel, you're going to see really good both, you know, awareness as well as people clicking through your YouTube.

Josh Weum
That's to go to your website or to any landing page that created there are looking at local search that a lot of people ask us how do I show up on Google Maps? Well, there's no Google Maps ad platform and you can't tell Google, hey, I'd like to pay to show up on your maps app, as it's called.

Josh Weum
There are a couple of ways to do it, though, when you're opting into campaigns that we talked about, your performance maps, your smart campaigns, These campaigns allow for functionality that ties in to Google Maps. And so you've got a couple of sponsored ads here. If you'll notice, the search here was for physician one, which is an urgent care provider in the New England area.

Josh Weum
The two ads that show up, first on Google Map Pack are not physician one. These are people who've opted in to Google's smart campaigns or are using an ad extension for directions, directions to our facility. You see those directions putting their buttons there. Paid search Gbpusd. I won't say too much here. Google business profiles are critical. They used to be called Google Maps, but we we see a ton of value with these and you can actually point ads directly to these profiles.

Josh Weum
If you've got good reviews or you're looking for them, I would encourage you to incorporate Google business profiles into your advertising. Maximize conversions. We do it. Tracking is big for us. So we're we're really keen on keeping phone calls, forms, charts, everything that happens as far as converting and events activities on your website. We want it all tracked because as we look at that data and analyze and share with you, we're able to tell what has worked, what is actually driving patient volume and what we need to do to optimize the campaigns.

Josh Weum
Another thing we can do with this is, you know, a lot of people aren't too aware of how to make great offline conversions into your campaigns, but we are also big on that when it comes to health care. If we know that people are are converting offline, there are means that we have enough that we can show that data in the States.

Stewart Gandolf
So I'll cover this section, maybe bring it home here and then what's commentary for my team here. So one of the things about my I've been saying for years is, you know, we've talked today about some of the tactics. And, you know, the thing about Google is you can get into Google ads and begin advertising really quickly. And so it's kind of like reading a book on poker.

Stewart Gandolf
You can read a book on poker and sit down and play. I would probably advise against sitting down at the high stakes poker table. And that's really what this is today. High stakes poker is what we're playing. You know, most clients that we're working with now have substantial budgets and very competitive marketplaces, too, where, you know, the competition is keen.

Stewart Gandolf
Your competitors have agencies, your competitors have experts on their team. Some of them have competitive or experts in their employ, plus an X agency. I'm looking at some of the questions I had already received in chat, and there's some very sophisticated questions in the chat and we'll try to get to in a few moments here. So recognize that it's the concepts are easy.

Stewart Gandolf
It's the winning part that's more difficult. We just for the sake of time, guys, I want to talk through some of these. So we see mistakes are just grow it. We can see, you know, campaigns. We look at our audit, we see sending to the wrong page, the wrong websites, and we've seen them sending clicks to their competitors by accident.

Stewart Gandolf
Somebody was not paying attention. The wrong keyword match sites can be brutal. I'm going after high funnel terms like instead of asking for a doctor near me or something comparable, it's asking about, you know, what is lung disease. That's a very high profile or five funnel term, not something you typically want to spend money. Let the organic channel that are not maintaining the account set it and forget it.

Stewart Gandolf
You know, negative keywords are crucial. We all the time, you know, job inquiries or, you know, three terms like that. And this is just a rabbit hole. This account structured poorly, the budget not allocated correctly, not taking advantage of all the things we talked about. You know, extensions are the business logo, the name, all these things are really, really common.

Stewart Gandolf
And we see and so this is where the big gains happen. We're often taking care of these things on the first days of the campaign to make sure that we're solving this in terms of analytics and reporting. The actually had a really good question to come up in chat here. I'll try to address this, but first, the those you don't know the Office Civil Rights Policy, updated guidance regarding the use of tracking technologies including pixels from for matter and Google meaning specifically Facebook and Instagram and Google Analytics.

Stewart Gandolf
Essentially for our company, we've ceased using the pixel entirely. Google is a little different. We just got back from systemd, which is a big hospital strategy conference. This was the talk of the day among the speakers and attendees, and this is more than I can get into today much detail. It's a whole separate webinar that we probably will have shortly, essentially allow it to be safe with your digital marketing, you need to make sure that you're happy with your vendor address.

Stewart Gandolf
And so we use, for example, call rail with our clients, which as well signed via different forms. These are all really, really critical. And the Google specifically will not sign up for Google Analytics. So there are some workarounds. There are alternative analytics platforms here that we're mentioning. Fresh paint is a pretty amazing provider. They're expensive, They're very expensive, but they can actually adapt and work with removing the Google pixel and anonymizing data just sort of re-enable gen4.

Stewart Gandolf
And there are and right in the heart of this particular with hospitals and health systems now it's a really big issue. Our team is working with all of these vendors and providing different layers of recommendations for different clients, but recognize this is out there. It's a really important issue to keep in mind. Also, this relates to Google has its own terms of use and there are state privacy laws and ADA compliance.

Stewart Gandolf
And so one of the questions was in New York, there's recently got a new against geofencing, which again is not the same thing as geofencing. It is a display and programmatic tactic. And yes, the answer is we won't do that in New York. So it's really important to have expertise when you're looking at these things. And as a marketing firm, we're not a law firm, we're an agency, but we are aware of most of the issues.

Stewart Gandolf
But we always work with our clients, in-house team and legal counsel to make sure we're there. Again, this is a big issue. It's deeper than we have time for a day, but there are alternatives that's to remain compliant and to be compliant. I imagine there are multiple call tracking platforms. You can actually listen to the calls in a compliant way.

Stewart Gandolf
We primarily we use others, primarily use call around so you can actually record the calls, hear how the calls are doing and make adjustments to the campaign based upon the calls you're getting. The again, we recommend ideally working with tracking platforms. So for the marketing agency you use needs to have a tracking platform. And certainly we see all the time people are spending massive budgets and really don't get much reporting, if any at all.

Stewart Gandolf
So our firm, for example, uses a 24 hour platform to share all the critical results. We also work with our clients to have the reporting much more in-depth in terms of what does it all mean. And again, a tracking here is pretty tremendous. What you can do in terms of what's available with regard to the clients or client results.

Stewart Gandolf
I'm going to do a 32nd commercial here that I'm going to do jumping to Q&A. So if you're interested in this topic and you're interested in working with us, the reasons why people hire us all the time is Personally, I do have a couple of decades of specialized health care experience. Our digital team, which includes but is not limited to Garik and Josh, is spectacular.

Stewart Gandolf
They have the passion I call passion and optimization. They have the experience, which is our budget, like your own. And really at the end of the day, we act as though we're an extension of your internal team. The for those that are interested in more than page search, we are usually working in conjunction on an integrated program with KNOW page, social programmatic, SEO, creative design, branding, All those things are the whole package.

Stewart Gandolf
So if you're interested in that working with us, I encourage you to contact us for a paid search checkup and we'll take a look at what you're doing and give you some feedback without any obligation. So Q&A, we have a number of questions here, so I'm going to go through these.

Josh Weum
A couple of them. One of them I wanted to defer to you, so please asking about and talking about the, you know, the new concerns around data and privacy.

Stewart Gandolf
Go ahead, Josh, are fading out for some reason.

Josh Weum
Stuart, I was just saying that I answered a couple of those questions. Shelby had a question around the hip and the OCR guidelines that you've been talking about here lately.

Stewart Gandolf
Okay. Okay. I see. Yeah. And well, and essentially, yes, exactly. I hear that answer that Shelby, that we do have. It's a big part of what we do to make sure we stay in compliance. Any other questions before we wrap up? Why? We're waiting to see if there's any other questions. Garrick We've been uncharacteristically silent. I would love you to share some anecdotes of how you know, how why the kinds of things you do, some of the additional nuances.

Josh Weum
Well.

Garrick Gaffney
Again, I think the biggest thing I mean, again, we're we're obsessed with the results each and every day. I love to come in to audit campaigns, to look at campaigns and see what we can do differently, how we can we can build performance and expand into new opportunities, new experiments. Tracking is everything. I think the last couple of years, tracking has really been accelerated with the communication with our clients, how we can get more granular, more transparent, whether it's tying in CRMs and third party appointment booking platforms.

Garrick Gaffney
We within Google ads that really takes are our campaigns to the next level. Give you an example. We have a client in the mental health space who brought out a new CRM that was able we were able to tie that, integrate that with Google ads essentially, and all the assumptions went out the door wondering what keywords, what campaigns, what ads were, not just purely driving phone calls and forum submissions, but actual people enrolling in their program.

Garrick Gaffney
And we were eight and we are able to report every single month how many new patients that are enrolling in your program are coming directly from Google ads. And I had made an assumption that specific types of keywords under trauma and grieving may not lead to these new patients enrolling. And I was the first to say I was wrong.

Garrick Gaffney
After integrating the CRM and learning more about our keywords, that was actually our most powerful group moving forward. And we were able to adjust and just saw with our performance So we're seeing a lot more of that with a lot more clients. And again, it's enhancing things and taking them to the next level When it comes to conversions, ROI, all the things that matter the most.

Josh Weum
Jolene's going to question How do you see smaller hospitals using YouTube? Yeah, a lot of people do use it as a how to or, you know, for expert explainer videos, if you will. But honestly one of the best ways to promote your content on YouTube a lot of times will have hospital systems that have video content showing their waiting rooms, patient testimonials, maybe a little blurb from one of the providers on how much they like working there.

Josh Weum
But one of the best ways to promote that content on that YouTube, which again is free, you know, you procure all that content on there, is to run an ad that features one of those videos because then and you can run video ads on YouTube for very low costs. But when you get a little bit of paid media kind of thriving to that one of those videos, you'll see a proliferate across that channel and you'll see a little bit of organic activity start to swell up after you've done that.

Josh Weum
So, you know, there's some guidance that we provide on what kind of video content works to the size that the video is key when it comes to the promotion and the marketing value of 15 and 32nd videos are paramount. Those are the top two sizes for video promotion. And so those are a couple of tips. But YouTube, it's one of a couple of platforms that you can start and build quite a community for no cost and then later on promote those assets.

Garrick Gaffney
And Josh, for hospitals on YouTube, I think I feel like it's it's a great outlet for promoting events, right? For like for example Breast Cancer awareness Month different things that come throughout the seasons and throughout the year, also highlighting physicians having specific videos that relate to positions, rotate those out. I'm giving everyone some love, so those are some ideas too.

Garrick Gaffney
I think you can mix in there.

Josh Weum
Yeah, YouTube is very powerful. It does quite a bit and again covers all all areas of the funnel. So we highly encourage and those are a few tips we'd say is promote one of those videos at some point and make sure that those links are of ideal length for, you know, social media for for popularity and propagation generally.

Stewart Gandolf
And what's one other thought too, that the we find that things like YouTube can really work well internally. The doctor is going to excited, the staff gets excited. And so it's something that you can promote to the external audiences, but it's ways of engaging your internal audience and sharing them with the great world out there. Particularly difficult with a hospital because you have so many different doctors, even the smaller ones.

Stewart Gandolf
So it's a great way to engage your internal and external audiences and most people.

Josh Weum
A creative person or someone who's really good on camera that's featured in some of these videos. So check out your staff. But oftentimes you'll have someone who's a great fit for content like this.

Stewart Gandolf
So I'm going to wrap up here with a couple of thoughts. The one is that, you know, people often ask, well, Jesus, you know, paid search expensive. I'm going to spend, you know, $10,000 a month. And I'm like, wait, you said we figure out the math and you're bringing in 100,000. Like, well, let's spend 100,000 bringing in a million, right?

Stewart Gandolf
So it's really an ROI strategy. And I recognize there's constraints in terms of what, you know, budgets, particularly with an institutional. But the idea is to grow carefully, constantly drag ROI. But when you get that right, combination of variables, paid search is so powerful, we often talk about it or I often talk about being profitable, predictable and to the client passive.

Stewart Gandolf
In other words, it's free and it's profitable. And then once it's up and running, it's predictable, and then it's very long live for the client. It's a lot of work for the client. It's it's very passive. So it's a it can be a game changer. It's really, really powerful. So hopefully you've enjoyed today's meeting. We've brought some of our strongest people from our digital team to the call.

Stewart Gandolf
I appreciate everything I've done. Thanks, Josh, Thanks for being great presenters today. Thanks to everybody.