What we had:
- Site: hotmu.ru
- Business sector: Healthcare services in China
- The target audience: Russian-speaking clients from Russia and the CIS
- The initial problem: lack of leads.
Image 1. Home page.
What we achieved
After two months, we reached the level of 100 leads per month with a potential to grow up to 200 leads.
Content
The problems we faced
Advertising of healthcare services in Russia and some of the CIS countries is strictly regulated by law.
It is banned to advertise:
- Abortion and birth control services;
- Prescription drugs;
- Healthcare services;
- Alternative medicine, etc.
The only way out is to use neutral language and to constantly monitor the status of ads. In 90% of cases, advertising is rejected after an automatic bot check and after that we have to negotiate the issue with Yandex and Google technical support.
Image 2. Standard tech support response.
So for example, we had to prove that insulin is not only a medicine but also a transport hormone. And that drugs always have trade names. Technical support stubbornly defended their opinion and forbade us to advertise “diabetes treatment” because insulin was mentioned on the landing page as they considered it was a prescription drug. As a result, we had to send links to biology textbooks and federal laws.
Thus, the most important thing in healthcare sector is to go through the first stage - launching campaigns and copying with all problems with ad bans.
That is why, due to difficulties with legal regulations, most companies refuse to do large-scale advertising campaigns, select accurate landing pages, since all this increases the number of problems exponentially. You have to negotiate every banned ad with tech support and there can be hundreds of such ads.
Image 3. Typical ad ban. Even if an ad is perfectly correct, there can be a lot of problems on the landing pages.
Advertising strategy
To ensure quality leads, we decided to choose a quite complicated strategy. Just driving traffic to website by wasting the budget won't give any stable results.
Therefore, we focused on collecting as many keywords as possible to cluster them. So, we collected 60,000 keywords and after filtering them we had 2,000 quality keywords. Then we clustered them so that they matched the audience needs.
For example, if a person enters "spinal disc herniation treatment in China" which means that ads should respond this search query. And the landing page should also be about the treatment of spinal disc herniation. That is a bad idea to make a client browse the entire site for information.
Image 4. Example of when ads do not match a user's search query.
To avoid such problems, we created special ad groups for each health problem with over 150 ads per group where texts are relevant to the content of the landing pages. If there were no relevant pages, then we created them from scratch.
Image 5. Examples of our ad groups.
It may seem that this is an obvious solution, however, taking into account the above problems with moderation, it is quite understandable why some web agencies prefer not to deal with advertising in this area.
So, within the first month, we managed to achieve a very good conversion rate of 9.57%. This means that every ninth out of a hundred visitors completed a commercial goal. They left their contact details or booked an online consultation.
Image 6. First month results of the Google ad campaign.
Analytics
The main value of online advertising is not about only quick results. The most important thing is collecting accurate data which helps you draw objective conclusions. The thing is that thanks to tracking systems, we can almost always find out the exact information about the visitor:
- Traffic channel;
- City;
- Advertising campaign;
- Keyword query and etc.
It allows us to adjust ad campaigns and their budgets more precisely.
For example, our initial theory that the border regions of Russia and China will give us the best percentage of successful deals turned out to be wrong. As it turned out, the pattern of consumption of services in those regions was very different from the rest of Russia. For locals, going to China is as usual as to go to the market, so they do not have any need to look for information online. It is word of mouth and local Chinese representatives that really work there.
So, after analysing the statistics we were able to adjust our campaigns:
- Switch off ads with weak topics (sanatorium and preventive treatment in China);
- Increase bids for more active cities (increased bids by 20% for Moscow);
- Replace non-conversion pages and etc.
As a result, we manage to increase conversion rates by almost 2.5 times without increasing the budget.
Image 7. Results of the Google ad campaign after having been adjusted.
To sum up
Overall, advertising healthcare services requires:
- Covering as much audience as possible by using a lot of quality keywords
- Clustering the audience according to their needs
- Fixing moderation problems and ad bans
- Analysing and monitoring the performance to make adjustments on time.
This is what you really need to gain better conversion rates. It is all about studying carefully all the aspects. It is comprehensive strategies and quick adaptation to users' needs that make your ad campaigns efficient.