Measuring up

So, you’re ‘doing’ Google Ads. You have your campaigns up and running, you peek at your Google Ads dashboard, but it gives you a headache with its many columns, stats, and acronyms. You see the cost on your bank statement each month. And you think, “What is it actually achieving for the clinic?”

Measuring your Google investment is key (and why I personally love Google Ads so much). Talking to advertisers, they often quote stats like: “Our click through rate is 2.5%”, “We’ve had 2,578 clicks”, or “We’ve had 34,000 people see our ads.” All this stuff sounds great but in my eyes, it’s immaterial. What you really need to know is, “How much have I spent and how many new patient enquiries has it generated my clinic?”

Google Ads should not be viewed as a cost, but an investment in the growth of your clinic. A cost is simply an expenditure of money, time, or resources. Whereas an investment is an expenditure that has a strong possibility of a return. And that’s what Google Ads is.

Here’s my four-step process for measuring success from your investment:

1. YOU NEED A GOAL

In other words, if you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve, how on earth will you know if you’ve achieved it or are at least going in the right direction? So, what do you want from your Google investment? It could be 20 additional patient enquiries per month at a cost of £50 per enquiry, for example. There is no right or wrong goal for your clinic, apart from not having one at all.

2. KNOW YOUR NUMBERS

It’s valuable to know how much a new patient is worth to your clinic. This allows you to review if what you’re spending on Google Ads is more or less than what it’s bringing to the clinic. So many businesses don’t consider this in their strategy, but without these numbers you’re flying blind. This is what you need:

• Average first transaction spend of a patient: This is the average, across all different treatments. The simplest way to do this is to take your turnover figure and divide it by the number of patient appointments. Once you get going you can then apply it to your business; for aesthetic clinics, it is preferred to work with these numbers at the treatment level as there can be wide differences – for example, laser hair removal and CoolSculpting are totally different in terms of repeatability and first client value. But let’s keep it simple at this stage.

• Average lifetime spend of a patient: Again, this is the average among your clients. The simplest way to do this is to take turnover and divide it by the number of clients you have.

• Your goal cost per enquiry: How much are you prepared to “pay” to get a new patient enquiry? Again, there is no right or wrong answer here, but the more you’re prepared to pay, the higher volume of enquiries you’re likely to achieve as it gives scope to the marketing activity and your investment.

• Your conversion rate from enquiry to booked appointment: For example, if you have 10 enquiries, how many do you turn into a paying customer? This could be, say, two in 10, which would be a 20% conversion rate. This rate is entirely unique to your clinic and much depends on the quality of enquiry, your offer and how well your staff handle the enquiries.

Once you have these numbers, you can then work out the value of an enquiry to your clinic. This is the golden key to track the success of your Google Ads.

3. TRACKING

Now you know what success looks like for your clinic, you need to make sure you measure this accurately in your account. This is called conversion tracking and it’s the foundation of Google Ads. In simple terms, a “conversion” is whatever physical action someone takes to show an active step in the sales process. It tells you how many leads and enquiries you’ve received. Not using conversion tracking would be like going to a sports match and not knowing the score – how do you know which team is winning? Much like sport, unless you follow the “score” for your campaigns, you can’t knowif they’re having any success. For your clinic, a conversion is likely to be:

• Calling after looking at your website

• Calling after seeing an ad

• Filling out an enquiry form

• Booking an appointment

• Contacting you on WhatsApp (if using this on your site)

• Interacting with a live chat bot (if using this on your site).

4. OPTIMISE

The previous steps represent the foundation for the last and very important step. Once you have conversion tracking and your goal cost per lead outlined, you can then accurately optimise to achieve this to get the best of what’s generating you the leads and stop or adjust what’s not. For instance, optimising bidding, split-testing ads, adding negatives, testing different calls to action, adjusting keywords and building new ad groups... the list goes on. In simple terms, actively managing your account so it’s getting you more of what’s working and less of what isn’t. This is where you see the highest value and return since feeding the right information and data to Google is key to get the best output from your investment.

All the metrics we’ve covered are important to help you measure the performance of your clinic but the bottom line is, if your campaigns aren’t delivering a positive return on investment, then it’s time to make some changes to make them profitable.

YBA offers a free Google Ads performance review with Laura for all Aesthetic Medicine readers. Email team@ybappc.co.uk quoting “Aesthetic Magazine April ‘21”.