Google Ads for Chiropractors

Kyle:  Hello, and welcome to the Google Ads strategy Show. I’m your host, Kyle Sulerud. And today I’m going to be talking with Fernando Vela. He runs an agency called Click Influx based in Gainesville, Florida. The reason I invited Fernando on today is because he’s been doing a lot of work for chiropractors. He has clients in other industries also. But a big chunk of his agency (I think over half) is chiropractors. So I wanted to kind of dig into that a little bit and talk about Google ads for chiropractors. So Fernando, welcome.

Fernando: Hey, thank you for having me. Great to be here.

Kyle:   And, am I correct that over half your clients are chiropractors?

Fernando:   Yeah, yeah that’s about probably I’d say 60-65% are Chiros. And then I got a few sprinkled throughout, a few other verticals…

Kyle:  Okay, cool. So, really excited to dig into that. I haven’t really worked with chiropractors. I think maybe five years ago, I had one chiropractic client, but I know a lot less about that niche than you. So let’s just kind of get started talking about you a little bit. So how did you actually get into Google ads?

Fernando:   Yeah, so I got my start in web design, web development, originally, about, 12 or 13 years ago. And so, I was in that for a number of years and, I will build websites out for folks and, eventually came to sort of have this not so great feeling with the knowledge that I was just putting websites out into the world that weren’t really necessarily moving the needle for the clients’ bottom line, you know what I mean? Make these brochure sites, and they just sit there in the internet, and no one finds them and no one, it doesn’t have an impact on their business goals. 

And so then I just naturally started to shift towards “Well, what is it that does move the needle for a business?” And it’s traffic, right? What drives traffic to the site? And so slowly, I just started to explore Google ads. And I explored SEO a little bit as well. Local SEO specifically. But sort of just settled on Google Ads because I just really enjoy the aspect of it, of knowing that the time that, the work that I’m doing is having a very direct impact on that business. And so that’s what I find most rewarding is doing something that drives the business’s goals.

Kyle:  So you’re doing Google ads, are you also doing website work for some of your clients?

Fernando:  I’ve got a couple of clients that I do the maintenance for their sites, like, from back in the day when I would manage their sites that I initially built out for them. But I don’t take on those projects anymore. But, having a background in web design has served me really well in Google ads. Because, I’m able to do anything that I want or need to do with the landing pages. I’m not constrained in any technical way, when it comes time to implement some sort of like weird conversion tracking thing or, complex CSS to change the look of the landing page. I’m very comfortable there. So it has served me really well in Google ads for sure.

Kyle:  So specifically now for chiropractors, what have you found to be unique about campaigns for chiropractors? Maybe it doesn’t apply to other types of industries?

Fernando:  Well, I would say one of the biggest things that make it unique is there’s a pretty short sale cycle with chiros, right? You throw your back out, you pinch a nerve, you get some kind of injury. You want to see a chiro right away. So you’re not gonna research it for a month and then decide who you thought was the better-qualified chiro. 

So it’s a short sale cycle, and that means that for me, at least, I’ve seen, really, really higher than average conversion rates for that very reason. And just real quick tip, if you or if you’re a chiro or you’re an agency doing a lot of chiro, if you’re able to do it same day adjustments (not every chiro does that) but if you’re able to take in walk-in patients and adjust them on that same day, I will definitely feature that pretty prominently on your landing page. Because that’s something that a lot of people are looking for, and not every chiro does it.

 And for the chiro’s that don’t do it, I’ve seen where the call goes something like “Hey, such and such chiro, how can I help you?” And they’re like “can you adjust me today?” and they’re like, “Oh, I’m sorry, first we do this, then we do that. And then on the third appointment, it’s when you can do that” And they’re like “bye!”…click…and they’re going to call the next person. 

So if you do that (same-day adjustment), or if your client does that, that would be a great thing to feature. 

And then this isn’t necessarily unique to chiros. I think this is just a universal thing, but a good offer is just so key. Having an aggressive discount or new patient special. or something like that. is going to have a huge impact on your conversion rates. 

And also for chiro’s, you can’t go too big in your geo, in your radius. I found that anything over about 12 miles and the cost per conversion starts getting really out of hand. And that depends on a lot of things like market saturation and population density and all that kind of thing. But you can’t go too far from the clinic’s address.

Kyle:  Yeah, interesting. It sounds like there’s two types of customers, correct me if I’m wrong. So you have the people who want to get in like today. And then you have the people who maybe don’t need to get in today but they’re looking for the best kind of deal, the best kind of new patient special. Is that kind of how it split up?

Fernando:   Yeah. Actually, that sounds about right. If you have a great offer, it’s going to help you so much even with people that would prefer a same-day adjustment. If your offer’s aggressive enough, you’re probably going to be able to lock a lot of those people down. I use CallRail for my call tracking and we record the call, so I’m able to listen in and get sort of a sense of what’s going on after the click, the quality of that lead. And I hear all the time people call in like “Can you see me today? No? Okay, well that’s, it’s a great price. So let’s start off today and then you’ll do the actual adjustment, maybe in a couple of days from now.” So if the offer is good enough, you can sort of compensate a little bit for those that want that same day thing if you don’t offer same-day adjustment.

Kyle:   Have you worked with many chiropractors who don’t have a good offer? They don’t have any kind of new patient special? And have you had to kind of talk them into trying to change that for Google Ads?

Fernando:  Yeah, actually, most are very hesitant to adopt any kind of aggressive new offering. It’s because a lot of chiros don’t have in place sort of long term treatment packages, right? And so they don’t have that in place. And so therefore, they don’t know what their lifetime customer value is. That lack of knowledge makes them very hesitant to acquire a patient at a cost that is below break-even for that first consult. And so, a lot of it is me educating them on these things so that we can, craft an offer that will be breakeven or below breakeven initially, but that will be a great return in the long haul.

Kyle: Yeah. So when a chiropractor comes to you, are they often trying to do this on their own, or they have someone else in their office running their ads? And what’s kind of the biggest mistake you see them making if they’re doing this on their own?

Fernando: So I would say probably the biggest mistake is going after what I call like symptom-based keywords. So you’ll see them trying to target things like neck injury, back pain, knee pain, and it makes sense, right? Because that’s what you treat. 

Maybe you want to get leads for a specific service. Maybe you want to focus on the needs, right, because, it’s covered by insurance or some other reason. But I’ve found that it’s not a great approach to try to go through the symptom. Because, a lot of those searches are going to be just informational types of searches where people are just researching different remedies for neck pain, maybe even home remedies, right. And also there’s many number of doctors that treat back pain or neck pain and things like that. So those people, they’re not just looking for chiros when they look for that, those words. But I see that a lot. They have a type of patient that they like to work with most, and so it’s natural that they will want to try to hone in on them, but I think I found it that they’re not very honeable in that way. 

And then other things are like just like not having ad groups that are honed in enough so mixing a lot of terms in a single ad group. Probably not doing a good enough job of excluding competitors by way of adding them to their negative keyword list. That’s a big one. 

People don’t appreciate just how corrosive competitor searches are to a conversion rate. That’s something I learned from your course, the importance of adding those competitor names to your negative keyword list. So the first thing I do is do a Google Maps search for chiropractors in XYZ city. I mean, just jot down every single one that comes up. In the past, I’ve even used people from Fiverr to scrape some Google results. I’ll say just send me all the Google results for chiro in XYZ city in a spreadsheet, and you’ll get hundreds of them sometimes.

Kyle:  So let me go back to when you’re talking about keywords. If it makes sense that you wouldn’t want to target a keyword like back pain, because there are dozens of solutions to back pain and chiropractic is only one of them. So does that mean pretty much all of your keywords have to be somehow specific to chiropractor, chiropractic? Have you found any other types of keywords that work?

Fernando: Honestly, I keep it very very simple in my account structure, and I just go for chiropractor or chiropractic. I don’t try to get too clever here with my keywords, and I found that that just gives me the best results. So yeah I go very literal in my keywords and very basic, just chiropractor near me, chiropractor in “city”, nearest chiropractors, stuff like that.

Kyle:  What would you say are the top three things people should focus on if they’re running Google Ads campaigns for chiropractors?

Fernando:  So like I said, developing a strong offer, right? That’s honestly the most important in my opinion. Really working on getting a clear sense of the lifetime customer value so that you can create the most aggressive offer possible. I love the old adage, “whoever can spend the most to acquire a customer wins.”  So I’m a big, big believer in that.

So if you find that your lifetime customer value is $3,000, well your price is better positioned as someone whose lifetime customer value is $1,500. And I think you can do twice as good as them. So, finding out what those numbers are, and then working backwards to develop a good strong offer. 

And then simplifying your account structure too. Like I said, I really don’t try to be super clever with my account structure. I have a handful of ad groups. And when I say handful, I mean literally five or less ad groups. And of those five, one of them gets 80% of the traffic. So don’t try to be super clever and think of all these permutation of how someone might do a search for a chiro, all these esoteric little rabbit holes that we go down. Because you’re going to dilute your data in the end of the day and, and you’re going to make your account hard to manage, and it’s just not going to be a great driver of profits anyway.

And then last one I would say is to stay humble with your landing page. And what I mean by that is, always assume that you’re doing something wrong on it, that if you improved it, that if you changed it, your results would improve. Always be paranoid about the quality of your landing page. And then therefore always be sort of split testing different things, changing it up. Six reviews, is that better than having three reviews? Is it better than having nine reviews? Testing things out constantly, changing things around and just seeing if you can get more because you probably can.

Kyle:  Okay, that pretty much wraps it up unless you have anything to add. I’ll just finish by asking you where people should go if they want to get in touch with you. 
Fernando:  Yeah, sure. So you can reach me on my website which is clickinflux.us. You can reach out to me there, I have an audit that I offer up to people, and a landing page analysis, and I got my contact info there as well.

Kyle:  All right, clickinflux.us. Alright, Fernando, thanks for coming on. I learned a lot about the chiropractic niche.

Fernando:  Awesome. Take care.

Kyle: This has been the Google Ads strategy show. Again, I’m your host Kyle Sulerud. And I will talk to you later.