Considerations for Choosing a Pay-Per-Click Budget

You may have just received a budget analysis for running Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads or you’ve been asking yourself, “how much should I spend on PPC?” Either way, it’s a great question!

There is no cookie-cutter solution for determining a PPC budget. When deciding how much money you need to spend on your PPC efforts there are a few factors you need to consider.

How competitive is your market?

If you are the only practice in town you likely do not need to be as aggressive as a practice in the middle of a metropolitan area. Either way, your competitors play a role in how much money you spend since the entire premise of PPC includes bidding a cost value that you are willing to pay for each click you receive. If there are quite a few practices competing for the same click, the cost per click is almost certain to be higher. If not, click costs will be lower.

How much are you willing to pay per lead?

Determining how much you can pay for a lead is very important. Are you willing to pay $10 for a lead or $50? The key requirement is to determine how much you can pay for each potential new patient and still be profitable.

You’ll need to know the percentage of leads that become eventual patients and how much a patient is worth to you over time. You may not know exact figures so ballpark numbers are perfectly fine.

To perform the calculations you’ll need the following:

Sample monthly budget (you can pick a range)
A range of expected click volumes
A range of expected conversion rates
The percentage of leads that convert to being eventual patients for your practice
The lifetime value of a patient at your practice

At this point there’s a good chance you’re feeling overwhelmed and unsure of how the actual math will work. Don’t worry! There are many great calculator tools available for plugging in these numbers and coming up with a budget like this one from HubSpot.

What services will you be targeting?

If you expect to dominate search results for every service your practice offers then you will be spending quite a bit of money.

For example, a doctor looking to rank for Invisalign, crowns, bridges, fillings, root canals, etc. will need to think of each category as a different campaign. You will need to spend a certain percentage of your entire ad budget to rank for all keywords that relate to an Invisalign campaign (and so on).

Focusing on all of your service offerings will increase your budget dramatically. However, if you are concerned about dominating visibility for one or several core services you’ll be able to generate more visibility by having PPC campaigns for only those services rather than the full gamut of what you offer.

What geographic areas do your patients come from?

What geographic proximity do your patients come from? Just the city or town where your practice is located? Surrounding cities too? Is your practice located in a densely populated area? The proximity from which you draw patients should factor into your ad budget.

In simplistic terms, the larger the geographic radius you’re targeting the more you will pay in ad spend. Why? Because the more you expand the reach of your ads the more impressions your ads will get and, likely, the more clicks you will get. The trick, though, is in ensuring that the clicks you’re attracting are from people who are prospective patients rather than people who will ultimately decide that your practice is physically located too far away for their needs.

In the end, the amount of money you spend on your budget directly correlates to the needs of your business. In order to help you break down your needs, feel free to reach out to Sesame.

We will analyze your market and help you create a budget that works with your practice goals in order to help you run a successful PPC campaign.

—Rebekah McBride, Senior SEO Specialist, Sesame Communications