Mobile traffic is dominating the internet — but can healthcare dominate mobile ads?
This year, 52.2% of all website traffic worldwide has come from mobile devices, officially establishing mobile’s position as dominant over desktop. In addition, Google rolled out an all-mobile Speed Update to all users in July, and in the same week, it announced another mobile update in the form of the Mobile Landing Page Speed Score in the Google Ads UI. For marketers across industries, it’s never been more important to optimize ads for mobile.
If current trends continue, mobile will only become more dominant, meaning that there’s no time like the present to improve mobile marketing efforts. Recently, WordStream released their 2018 report of Google Ads Mobile Benchmarks for a number of industries spanning from Arts & Entertainment to Computer & Electronics.
Though healthcare performs well in some cases compared to other industries, it’s below average in other areas. Healthcare marketers can look to this report and to the performance of other industries — as well as of other healthcare marketers — to learn from their examples and see how they stack up. Effective mobile marketing strategies can help healthcare professionals design campaigns that reach potential patients more effectively.
In their cross-industry data points, WordStream measures four key metrics that provide the greatest insights into how marketers are using their ad spend and what effects they’re seeing:
By tracking these metrics across mobile search campaigns on Google AdWords and Google’s Mobile Display Network, WordStream was able to see how sixteen industries performed in relation to each other on mobile for both search and display ads.
For example, the report shows that CTR for healthcare came in at 3.79% for search and 0.51% for display ads. While this is below the average across industries, which is 4.10% for search and 0.60% on the display network, it’s higher than healthcare’s search CTR for desktop, which is 3.27%.
Healthcare is similarly below average for CPC. The average cost-per-click for mobile Google Ads across industries is $2.67 for search and $0.60 for display; for healthcare, the CPC is $3.24 and $0.68 for search and display, respectively. Healthcare also has room for improvement when it comes to CPA. The average CPA across industries was $80.89 for search and $148.68, but for healthcare, the average search CPA is $95.92.
However, for display ads, healthcare performs better than average: the CPA is $99.05. The most exciting news for healthcare, though, is its CVR. While the average across industries is 3.48% for search and 0.72% for display, respectively, healthcare has a CVR of 4.24% and 0.80% for search and display, respectively.
This means that when people do click on mobile healthcare ads, they frequently end up becoming patients. It’s ultimately up to healthcare marketers to increase the rate at which they click and lower the costs involved, though.
Of course, when looking at this report, we can’t entirely separate the findings from what we know about the nature of the industries involved. For example, the travel, entertainment, and dating industries all tend to incur above-average CTRs, likely because those industries allow marketers to easily create eye-popping and even provocative content that encourages viewers to click.
However, healthcare’s relatively high CVR indicates that consumers seeking out healthcare information are serious about their searches and thus likely to become patients if they click. This means that it’s up to medical marketers to make their display ads as compelling as possible and to increase their likelihood of being discovered by searchers. Strategies for achieving this include taking advantage of the right long tail keywords, or even working with negative keywords, to reduce campaign costs and target users more specifically.
Additionally, when optimizing searches for mobile, medical marketers should ensure that their websites and search ads are suited for voice search. As voice search continues to increase in popularity — and especially on mobile — it’s important that marketers understand the differences between voice and text search and tailor their keywords to both types.
Understanding the rapid changes in how consumers interact with and search for medical information is medical marketers’ first step to reducing costs and increasing key metrics.