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Tips for Success: Health & Wellness Sites & Forums

Make the most of AdWords with customized tips designed to help boost traffic and improve return on investment for your healthcare website or forum.


In this tips section we'll cover:


Account structure: Let your website be your guide

An organized account structure is essential to running targeted campaigns and reaching the right audience. When setting up your account structure, your sitemap can be a great guide for structuring your AdWords account. Using your website as a blueprint, you'll have an easier time making changes, choosing specific keywords, monitoring your success, ensuring that all your site topics and resources are covered, and allocating your budget effectively.

For example, if your website offers information and resources relating to allergies, try setting up campaigns for different types of allergies, such as food allergies, pet allergies, and seasonal allergies. Next, create one ad group for each type of information you offer, such as causes, symptoms, and treatments. This will allow you to create specific, more relevant ad text that will attract more qualified clicks.

The Keyword Tool: Create strong keyword lists

As a content provider, you probably care about furnishing a broad spectrum of health information and getting your target audience to your website. To maximize the traffic to your site, expand on your core keywords by adding relevant synonyms and plural terms. For example, instead of just using information, expand your keyword lists to include advice, support, and articles. To find effective keywords to drive more traffic to your site, use the Keyword Tool. With this tool, you can get new variations based on keywords you enter into the tool, or get keyword ideas based on your website content. The Keyword Tool shows search volume trends and advertiser competition levels for those keywords. And, it will generate ideas for negative keywords – your ad won't appear when a user's search query contains one of your negative keywords.

When looking for new keywords, place yourself in your potential visitors' shoes – what terms might they search for to find a site like yours? Don't be afraid to try less obvious keywords – you can always pause or delete a keyword at any time.

Keywords: Know your match types

Keywords automatically default to broad match, which means your ads can appear for expanded matches, including plurals and relevant variations of the keywords you entered. For example, if you select a general keyword like cancer information, expanded matching may show your ad for queries like breast cancer and cancer treatment. While broad match is great for generating traffic to general health sites, using phrase match may be a better solution for social sites focusing on a specific health issue. If your site is a forum for breast cancer patients, then using "breast cancer support" as a phrase match keyword will help you curb traffic from users who may be looking for cancer symptoms or treatment information.

To learn more about keyword match types, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Ad text: Say it loud and clear

Be transparent about what visitors will find once they click on your ad. If your ad takes users to a lead-generation form, be sure to make it explicit in your ad text that access to your content requires an online registration or paid subscription. By disclosing your intentions up front, you'll increase your conversion rate and improve your return on investment, since you'll only attract people who want to register for your site content, and avoid paying for clicks made by people who aren't interested.

Your landing page: Deliver on your ad's promise

The best way to keep visitors and customers on your site is to take them directly where they want to go. To do this, you'll need to choose your landing page wisely, and be sure that it reflects what was promised in your ad. For instance, the easier it is to get treatment information, the more likely you'll build trust with the user. A forum site, however, should aim to create community and provide resources to users. In this case, the best landing page will specify what options are offered on the site and provide an easy-to-read sitemap.

Website Optimizer: Put your site to the test

To boost your website's conversion rates, try experimenting with your site content and design to learn what visitors respond to best. With Website Optimizer, a free landing page optimization tool, you can continually test different combinations of site content and layouts. You'll save time and eliminate marketing guesswork by simply letting your visitors tell you what works best. Start optimizing your most important web pages and see detailed reports within hours.

Track performance: Google Analytics and conversion tracking

Your website is crucial to driving business, so chances are the following questions have kept you up at night:


  • Where are my visitors from, and how did they reach my site?

  • What do people do while on my site? Where do they spend the most time?

  • How can I generate more conversions from my landing page?

  • Which of my AdWords keywords and ad texts are most effective?

  • How does my site compare to others in my industry?
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Don't just guess! Find answers with Google's free tools, designed to help you gain customer insight and achieve a higher ROI. To measure your AdWords campaigns' effectiveness, use conversion tracking to learn which of your keywords and ad variations lead to online sales. Also, try Google Analytics, a powerful tool that integrates with AdWords and tells you everything you want to know about how visitors find and interact with your site. With a variety of useful data delivered in a number of formats, Analytics helps you focus your marketing resources, improve site navigation, and increase ROI. You can easily visualize and track the performance of all of your online advertising initiatives, including search campaigns, emails, and banner ads.

You can even use the Analytics benchmarking service to compare your metrics to those of other websites related to health and wellness. You can use this data to gain broader context for your site and identify areas for improvement. Some of the available categories include:

  • Medical Literature & Resources
  • Health Conditions
  • Health Education & Medical Training
  • Health Foundations & Medical Research
  • Fitness
  • Alternative & Natural Medicine
  • Mental Health
  • Vision Care
  • Dental Care
  • Weight Loss

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