In 2024, Google Ads have become a highly profitable investment for therapists across North America. From solo practices to large multi-location clinics, Google Ads for therapists are filling caseloads. Targeting their niche audience, developing insights on ad performance, and leveraging customer lifetime value data to increase profitability are all methods used for successful ad campaigns. Dive into our methods for succeeding with Google Ads for therapists as you scale.
The Method to Success: Setting Up Google Ads for Therapists
The First Pillars to a Stable Ad Campaign
Mastering the fundamentals is the first step to success. In order to have high-performing ads, you should have the following set up:
- Your brand
- A website
- Google Analytics
- Your website pages indexed with Google
- Your Google My Business account set up
Your brand is what helps communicate your value to your audience. It shows people that you’ve invested care and effort into your business, which reflects the level of care and effort you will provide with your service. It also helps them understand what sets you apart from your peers.
Your website is a vital tool for communicating to your audience, data collection, and facilitating prospects to become leads.
Google Analytics is a digital resource that collects valuable data from your website and ads, to inform you on which aspects of these digital assets are performing well and which aspects aren’t. This resource is essential for ads and SEO along the entire journey of growth. Once you assess this data regularly, you gain a progressively clearer picture of what your audience wants. The more you tailor your website and ads to this, the better the results will become.
Building Out Your Campaigns for Growth
The first step to understanding how to grow your results with ads campaigns is understanding how platforms work. You bid on specific searches that people conduct, which have varying degrees of competition, prices, and search volume.
General searches, such as ‘anxiety therapist’, will have high competition, high prices, and high search volume.
Starting with more specific searches, such as ‘anxiety therapist for children toronto’, is a better option given the lower competition and price, with still enough search volume.
Once you start to running your campaigns, Google will have valuable information regarding which searches yielding the highest amount of clicks, and you will have information regarding how many clicks resulted in clients. You will also know the value each client brought to your business (LTV).
Analyzing and Improving: Reinforcing Google Ads for Therapists
As you assess this information, you will reinforce which keywords yielded the highest Return on Investment, based on the cost of acquiring the clients and their lifetime value.
It is important that you assess your clients journey after they become a client, and combine this assessment with their journey of becoming a client, so you can yield the best ROI on your paid ads campaigns.
Certain services that you offer can have a much higher lifetime value than others, making them more profitable. Even if the Cost of Acquiring Clients is higher for these services, they could be a better investment of your advertising spend. Many therapists confuse themselves, as they believe that assessing the highest amount of leads, or even clients per dollars spent on a specific keyword is the metric to measure campaign profitability.
Google Ads for Therapists at Scale
One important dynamic to consider, is what works well at one level of scale may differ to the next level of scale. That is why, it is essential that you actively assess your data, across the entire customer journey.
If you notice that your most profitable set of keywords becomes less profitable as you increase your ad spend, you can zoom out and assess the results of all of your keywords. You can redirect some of the ad spend to more general keywords, and begin bidding on new keywords in niches that you were not bidding in before. As you try this new strategy in the short term, you can assess your results for one or two months to see how to recalibrate your ad strategy for the highest profitability at scale.
Synthesizing The Steps
You can launch high performing Google Ads for therapists with the correct methods at the right pace. Understanding how to get started effectively, and progressively pivot to an advanced strategy, is key for sustainable success. Analyzing data along the first touchpoint a client has with your brand, all the way to their last session is an essential asset to maximizing your ROI. Taking every aspect of our method into action is what can separate mediocre Google Ads from high performing campaigns. Reach your desired level of scale with a sustainable and scalable ads strategy.