Healthcare Paid Search Case Study

Optimizing paid search performance and conversion rates for a large academic medical center.

Situation

An academic medical center in the Southeast United States built paid search into a core patient acquisition channel, but performance was dismal. Rising competition and escalating CPCs drove costs up while conversion rates stayed nearly flat. Leadership needed to reverse that trajectory without increasing budget. The challenge was doing more with the same spend.

Approach

Audited the full paid search program: campaign structure, keyword targeting, bid strategies, ad creative, and conversion tracking
Identified significant wasted spend driven by broad match keywords and misaligned campaign architecture
Restructured campaigns around patient intent and condition-specific search behavior
Eliminated low-performing keywords and prioritized high-intent queries across core service lines
Refined bid management strategies to improve efficiency and reduce unnecessary spend
Optimized ad copy to improve click-through rates and align messaging with patient decision-making

Results

The restructured paid search program delivered across every key metric simultaneously — less spend, higher conversions, better returns. A 35% reduction in ad spend combined with a 40% increase in conversion rates and 36% improvement in ROAS demonstrated that the prior program had significant structural inefficiency. The rebuilt campaign architecture also created a more scalable foundation for continued growth across the system's specialty service lines.

What this means

Paid search is the ad space at the top of Google. Organizations bid for those spots, and every click costs money whether or not that person ever books an appointment.

This program was buying a lot of clicks that went nowhere. The marketing team built campaigns around the words they assumed patients used. Patients were searching differently. Every budget increase just bought more of the wrong traffic.

Rebuilding the structure around real search behavior did three things at once. The system spent less. More of the people who clicked became patients. And every remaining dollar worked harder.

In plain terms: the organization cut its ad budget by a third and got more patients out of it. That is not a media buying trick. That is what happens when the machinery underneath the spend finally matches how people actually search for care.