Private healthcare practices rely heavily on local clientele, making targeted online advertising crucial for their growth. However, a common oversight in Google Ads settings could be significantly undermining their marketing efforts and budget. This blog post explores how a hidden default setting in Google Ads might be diverting valuable resources and what practitioners can do to rectify this.
Josh, the co-founder at Function 365, recently encountered a baffling situation with a private healthcare clinic’s Google Ads campaign. The clinic aimed to attract local patients but found that their ads were reaching users in distant countries like Nigeria and India. This discovery highlighted a critical issue with Google Ads’ default settings—specifically, the option that targets users based on their ‘interest’ in a location, not just their physical presence.
For private healthcare clinics, advertising to users outside their service area is not just ineffective; it’s costly. Google Ads’ default setting for location targeting is set to ‘Presence or Interest,’ which means ads may show to anyone who shows interest in your targeted location, regardless of their actual location. This default is not prominently disclosed, leading many practitioners to spend on ads that never convert to actual appointments.
To see how to fix this mistake and for more information on this, watch this video below:
