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Osteopathy and physiotherapy · Medstead and Alton
The patients who search their symptoms, not your treatments.
Michael Boyd runs two clinics in Hampshire, at Medstead and at Alton, and they were already the best known in their part of the county. The question was never how to fix something. It was how to reach the people who have the problem and have never thought of seeing an osteopath.
The last thirty days
Google Ads spend£297
Confirmed bookings17
Other enquiries9
Cost per booking£17.47
Return on ad spend1,431%
£17.47
to fill one confirmed booking
£11.42
per enquiry of any kind
26
bookings and enquiries in thirty days
1,431%
return on the ad spend
The problem
A busy clinic with an invisible market.
Medstead Physical Health was not short of patients. Michael’s two clinics were already the best known in their corner of Hampshire and the work came in. A clinic in that position does not need rescuing, which makes most of what an agency normally offers useless to it.
What Michael wanted was harder. Within ten miles of those clinics there are people who have had back pain for months, have never considered seeing an osteopath, and would not recognise the word physiotherapy as the answer to it. They are not comparing clinics. They are typing in what hurts.
What we did
Three things, in this order.
1
Advertised on symptoms, not services
Instead of bidding on osteopath and physiotherapist, which only reaches people who already know what they want, we built ad groups around what people actually type: back pain, neck pain, sciatica, sports injuries. The ad and the page it lands on then explain what the treatment is, because the person reading it may genuinely not know.
2
Closed what did not work, quickly
We started with six condition groups. Two of them, headaches and foot and ankle pain, turned out to have very little local demand and were not paying for themselves, so we stopped them rather than waiting for them to come good. The budget moved to the four that were working.
3
Added the treatment searches afterwards
Once the condition groups were tight we added osteopathy and physiotherapy groups, to catch the people who do know what they want. The order matters. The harder audience first, the obvious one second, so the obvious one is not quietly eating the budget while you are still learning.
Something we keep seeing
Rural patients search symptoms. City patients search treatments.
This has turned out not to be specific to Medstead. Across the clinics we work with, the further a clinic sits from a city, the more of its patients arrive through a search for a symptom rather than a search for a treatment. In a city people seem to know the category already and look for a physiotherapist. In a village or a market town they look up what hurts.
That is an observation from our own accounts rather than a published study, and we would not stake a whole budget on it without testing it first. But it changes where we would start for a rural clinic, and it is why the condition groups came first here rather than second.
The results
Thirty days of it.
Bookings here means appointments completed in the clinic’s own booking system, not clicks on a Book Now button. The two get reported as the same thing far too often and they are nothing like it.
17
confirmed bookings in the last thirty days, from £297 of spend.
£17.47
the cost of filling one appointment, plus nine further enquiries through the contact form at £11.42 apiece.
1,431%
return on the ad spend, on the clinic’s own figure of about £250 for a patient.
And the part Michael asked for
Most of these people arrived through a search for a symptom. They were not choosing between clinics. They did not know the clinic was there.
The numbers
The last thirty days, line by line.
Straight out of the account, with nothing averaged or projected.
| Measure | Last 30 days |
|---|---|
| Google Ads spend | £297 |
| Confirmed bookings | 17 |
| Other enquiries | 9 |
| Bookings and enquiries together | 26 |
| Cost per confirmed booking | £17.47 |
| Cost per enquiry | £11.42 |
| Value of a patient, the clinic’s own figure | About £250 |
| Return on ad spend | 1,431% |
Worth saying
What this does and does not show.
Thirty days is a short window, and this is one clinic in one part of Hampshire. We are showing it because the figures are clean and checkable, not because a month settles anything on its own. It has at least been running long enough for two of its ad groups to have been shut down, which is the part most case studies leave out.
The return figure rests on one number that is the clinic’s rather than ours: about £250 for a patient across a course of treatment. Seventeen bookings at that value is roughly £4,250 against £297 of spend. It also assumes each of those bookings turns into a patient. Move either of those and the percentage moves with it, which is true of every return figure you will ever be shown, including the ones that are not spelled out like this.
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