Paid search suits physician practices better than almost any other channel, because the intent is unambiguous: somebody typing a symptom, a procedure name or a specialty plus a city is looking for care now. It is also one of the easiest places for a practice to waste money and to create a privacy problem at the same time. The constraints in healthcare are not the usual advertising ones, they touch what you may track, what you may claim, and what your vendor may see. This page describes how the channel actually works for a practice, what moves the cost, and the specific questions that separate a competent medical account manager from a generalist.
Why clicks cost what they do in healthcare
Physician keywords are expensive because the lifetime value of a patient is high and because hospital systems, private equity backed groups and lead brokers are all bidding on the same terms. A single procedure term in a competitive metro can cost several times what a local trades keyword costs. That is survivable if you understand what you are buying: not a click, but a share of a small pool of people who need the service this week. The practical consequence is that broad specialty terms are usually the wrong place to start. A new practice account almost always performs better on procedure-specific, insurance-specific and neighbourhood-specific terms, where the searcher has already narrowed their question and the competition thins out. Ask any candidate agency to show you the query list they would start with, and check that it reads like something a patient would type rather than a category a marketer would name. Practices usually buy this alongside their wider paid search programme rather than as a standalone product, so make sure the same standards apply to both.
Tracking, tags and patient privacy
This is the part most generalist agencies get wrong. Advertising and analytics tags placed on appointment pages, symptom checkers and patient portals can transmit information that identifies an individual and relates to their health, and doing that without a valid authorisation is a serious problem. The federal privacy rule sets out exactly what a valid authorisation for disclosing protected health information must contain, and a checkbox on a booking form is not it. The safe pattern is to keep third party advertising tags off authenticated pages and off any page where the URL or form content reveals a condition, to avoid passing names, emails, phone numbers or appointment details into ad platforms, and to use conversion events that record that a booking happened without recording what it was for. Ask a candidate to walk you through their tagging plan page by page. If they cannot explain which pages are excluded and why, they are not ready to run a medical account.
What you may say in the ad
Health claims carry a higher evidentiary bar than ordinary advertising claims. The Federal Trade Commission's health products compliance guidance sets out that objective claims about health benefits need competent and reliable scientific evidence behind them at the time they are made, and that qualifying information has to be clear rather than buried. In practice this rules out most of what agencies instinctively write: superlatives about outcomes, implied guarantees, before and after results presented as typical, and testimonials describing recoveries a typical patient would not experience. It also interacts with your state medical board's advertising rules, which frequently constrain the use of the word specialist, board certification claims and patient testimonials. Ask the agency who reviews ad copy before it goes live, and build a rule that nothing publishes without a named clinician approving the claims.
What good management looks like month to month
Ask what the agency does in an average week, and listen for search term review, negative keyword work and landing page changes rather than reporting. Negative keywords matter unusually much in healthcare, because symptom searches attract students, researchers, worried readers and people in other states, all of whom click and none of whom book. Call tracking matters more than form tracking, because most patients ring, and calls need to be counted honestly: a two second hangup is not a lead. Agree in advance what counts as a conversion, who listens to call recordings and whether recordings are stored somewhere appropriate for health information. On fees, the common structures are a flat monthly management fee or a share of ad spend, and the second creates an incentive to spend more. Neither is wrong, but ask which one you are on, what the notice period is, and confirm that the ad account is owned by the practice rather than by the agency.
Questions people ask about paid search for physicians
How much should a practice budget to start?
Enough to buy a meaningful number of clicks on your target terms each week, which in an expensive specialty is more than most practices expect. A budget that produces a handful of clicks a day cannot generate enough data to optimise, so it is usually better to run one tightly scoped campaign properly than four broad ones thinly.
Can we use patient testimonials in ads?
Sometimes, but two separate rules apply: your state medical board's advertising rules, and federal advertising law requiring that endorsements reflect honest experience and that atypical results are not presented as typical. Get written authorisation from the patient and have a clinician approve the wording.
Should the agency own the Google Ads account?
No. Create the account under the practice, then grant the agency administrative access. If they insist on their own account, ask what happens to your history and your remarketing lists when the relationship ends, and get the answer in writing before you start.
Is paid search better than SEO for a practice?
They answer different questions. Paid search buys visibility this week and stops the day you stop paying. Search and maps work compounds and is usually the better long term investment, particularly for a local practice. Most established practices run both, using paid search to cover the terms they do not yet rank for.