By Mike Hadbavny — SEO Medics, Victoria BC
Updated March 2026 · 14 min read
After managing over $350,000 in Google Ads spend for healthcare clinics across Victoria BC and Canada, the same mistakes come up again and again. These aren’t exotic edge cases — they’re the standard errors that appear in almost every new healthcare account we audit. Each one wastes budget and suppresses results that could otherwise be significantly better.
Here are the 12 most common Google Ads mistakes healthcare providers make, with exact fixes for each one.
Mistake 1: Using Broad Match Keywords Without Negatives
Running ads on broad terms like “chiropractor,” “physiotherapy,” or “massage” without location qualifiers and negative keywords is the single most common budget drain in healthcare Google Ads. Your ads show for “chiropractic school Vancouver,” “physiotherapy assistant jobs,” “free massage techniques” — clicks that cost the same as patient-intent searches but produce zero bookings.
Fix: Use phrase match or exact match keywords with local qualifiers (“chiropractor Victoria BC,” “physiotherapist Saanich”). Build a negative keyword list from day one including: jobs, salary, school, course, free, DIY, home, video, YouTube, Wikipedia, how to. Audit your search terms report weekly for the first month to catch new irrelevant terms.
Mistake 2: Sending All Traffic to the Homepage
Someone who searched “ICBC chiropractor Victoria” and clicks your ad expecting information about chiropractic care for car accident injuries — then lands on your general homepage — leaves immediately. The homepage serves everyone, which means it’s optimised for no one. Healthcare practices consistently lose 50–60% of potential bookings this way.
Fix: Build dedicated landing pages for each service and each patient segment. Your ICBC campaign links to an ICBC-specific page. Your sports injury campaign links to a sports injury page. Each page should have: a prominent phone number, the specific service described, your location, a booking CTA, and trust signals (reviews, credentials). Dedicated landing pages typically double or triple conversion rates.
Mistake 3: No Conversion Tracking
Running Google Ads without tracking calls and form fills is equivalent to running a business without a cash register — you have no idea what’s producing revenue. Without conversion data, you can’t identify which keywords produce patients, which ads are wasted, or whether your cost per new patient is acceptable.
Fix: Set up conversion tracking before spending a dollar. For healthcare practices this means: call tracking (Google forwarding number or a third-party call tracking service), form submission tracking via Google Tag Manager, and ideally online booking confirmation tracking if you use Jane App, Cliniko, or similar. Every lead should be attributed to the keyword that produced it.
Mistake 4: Running Ads 24/7 When Phones Aren’t Answered
Healthcare patients searching at 11pm or 3am typically want to call and book immediately. If no one answers, they call the next result. Running ads outside of business hours produces clicks with near-zero conversion rates — wasted budget that could be concentrated on hours when bookings actually happen.
Fix: Use ad scheduling to run campaigns during business hours when phones are answered. For most Victoria healthcare practices this means Monday–Friday 8am–6pm, with optional Saturday morning coverage. The budget saved from off-hours can be redirected to peak conversion windows.
Mistake 5: One Campaign for Everything
A single “healthcare clinic” campaign mixing chiropractic, physiotherapy, massage, and ICBC keywords into one ad group is a structural disaster. Google can’t determine which ad is most relevant to which search, Quality Scores suffer, CPCs increase, and you have no ability to allocate budget between your highest and lowest-value services.
Fix: Separate campaigns by service and patient type. At minimum: a general new patients campaign, an ICBC/MVA campaign, and campaigns for any high-value specific services you offer. Each campaign has its own budget, keywords, ad copy, and landing page. This structure also makes it easy to scale what’s working and pause what isn’t.
Mistake 6: Ignoring Quality Score
Quality Score is Google’s rating of how relevant your keywords, ads, and landing pages are to each other. A low Quality Score means you pay more per click than competitors for the same position. Healthcare advertisers with poor Quality Scores can pay 2–3x more per click than advertisers with tightly structured, relevant campaigns.
Fix: Ensure tight alignment between keyword, ad copy, and landing page. If someone searches “sports injury chiropractor Victoria,” your ad should mention sports injury chiropractic, and the landing page should be about sports injury chiropractic. This relevance chain improves Quality Score, lowers CPCs, and improves ad position simultaneously.
Mistake 7: Violating Healthcare Ad Policies
Healthcare Google Ads has specific compliance requirements — and getting ads disapproved or accounts suspended mid-campaign is expensive and disruptive. Common policy violations include: outcome guarantees (“fix your back pain in 3 sessions”), before/after claims without proper disclosures, misleading efficacy statements, and in some cases, specific condition targeting that Google flags as sensitive health content.
Fix: Frame all healthcare ad copy around access and expertise rather than outcomes. “New patients welcome — book online” and “Victoria’s trusted chiropractors” are compliant. “Cure your back pain” and “guaranteed results” are not. For dental, counselling, and chiropractic specifically, also check your provincial licensing body’s advertising standards as these layer on top of Google’s policies.
Mistake 8: Underfunding the Campaign
Healthcare providers who set a $100–$200/month budget and then conclude “Google Ads doesn’t work” after an underwhelming first month have often simply underfunded the campaign. At those budgets, Google’s algorithm doesn’t accumulate enough conversion data to optimise, results are inconsistent, and the cost per lead stays high.
Fix: The practical minimum for most healthcare specialties in BC is $300/month — enough to generate 40–80 targeted clicks and give the algorithm something to work with. For competitive specialties in larger markets (dental in Vancouver, for example), $600–$1,000/month may be needed to be competitive. See our Victoria cost guide for detailed numbers.
Mistake 9: Not Using Ad Extensions
Ad extensions add additional information and clickable elements to your ads — phone numbers, location, service links, callouts — at no additional cost. Healthcare ads without extensions look smaller, provide less information, and have lower click-through rates than ads that use them. For a healthcare practice, the call extension alone (showing your phone number directly in the ad) can significantly increase call volume.
Fix: Set up at minimum: call extensions (your phone number), location extensions (links to Google Maps), sitelink extensions (links to specific service pages), and callout extensions (“No referral required,” “Extended health accepted,” “New patients welcome”). These are free and improve both CTR and conversion rates.
Mistake 10: Setting It and Forgetting It
Google Ads is not a set-and-forget channel. Campaigns that aren’t actively managed deteriorate over time — search term patterns change, competitors adjust their bids, seasonal trends shift demand, and the algorithm’s optimisation requires human oversight to ensure it’s moving in the right direction.
Fix: Monthly review at minimum. This means: reviewing the search terms report to add new negatives, checking which keywords and ads are converting vs. draining budget, adjusting bids toward top performers, testing new ad copy variations, and reviewing geographic performance. This is what professional Google Ads management looks like — not just setting up a campaign but continuously improving it.
Mistake 11: Not Separating Brand vs. Non-Brand Campaigns
Running your clinic’s name keywords (“Saanich Chiropractic,” “Peninsula Physio”) in the same campaign as non-brand keywords (“chiropractor Victoria,” “physiotherapist near me”) is a structural mistake that distorts your data and misallocates your budget. Brand searches convert at a much higher rate and much lower cost than non-brand searches — mixing them makes your campaigns look better than they are and hides where new-patient acquisition is actually happening.
Fix: Create a separate brand campaign for your clinic name and practitioner names. Keep the budget low (brand clicks are cheap) and bid enough to occupy the top spot. Your main budget should sit in the non-brand campaign targeting net-new patients who don’t know you yet. This split also protects you from competitors bidding on your name — a common tactic in competitive healthcare markets.
Mistake 12: Skipping the Search Terms Report
The search terms report shows you exactly what people typed before clicking your ad. Most healthcare advertisers glance at it once and move on. This is a significant missed opportunity — the search terms report is the single best source of negative keywords, new keyword ideas, and real-world insight into what your prospective patients are actually searching for in your market.
In a typical healthcare account, the first 30-day search terms report reveals 15–25 irrelevant search categories that should be immediately added as negatives. Common ones: job titles and careers (people looking for employment), student searches (physio students, chiro students), DIY and home remedy searches, general health information searches with no booking intent, and competitor clinic names you may or may not want to exclude.
Fix: Review the search terms report weekly for the first month, then monthly after that. Every irrelevant term you catch and exclude is budget redirected toward searches that actually convert. Build a shared negative keyword list across campaigns so you’re not repeatedly adding the same exclusions.
What a Properly Built Healthcare Google Ads Account Looks Like
For context, here’s the structure we build for a typical BC healthcare clinic:
- Campaign 1 — Core services, non-brand: Phrase/exact match keywords targeting your primary services with city or region qualifiers. Dedicated landing pages per service. Ad scheduling aligned to clinic hours. Daily budget matched to realistic CPC and target lead volume.
- Campaign 2 — ICBC / MVA (if applicable): Separate budget, separate landing page, separate ad copy focused on car accident recovery. ICBC patients are high-value and search with distinct intent — they need their own campaign.
- Campaign 3 — Brand protection: Low budget, your clinic name + key practitioner names. Keeps competitors off your brand terms and captures high-intent branded traffic efficiently.
- Conversion tracking: Call tracking live before launch. Form submissions tracked via GTM. Online booking confirmations tracked if your booking platform supports it.
- Negative keyword list: 50+ negatives from day one covering jobs, schools, DIY, unrelated conditions, and competitor names (if desired). Updated monthly from the search terms report.
- Extensions: Call, location, sitelinks to key service pages, callouts for differentiators (No referral required, Extended health accepted, New patients welcome).
This structure typically produces a cost per new patient lead of $25–$65 for most BC healthcare specialties, depending on competition and budget. Without it, the same budget often produces leads at $80–$150+.
Audit Your Own Account
If you’re currently running Google Ads for your healthcare practice, check your account against this list. Finding even 3–4 of these 12 issues and fixing them can dramatically improve your cost per new patient without increasing your budget.
If you’d like an expert audit of your existing account — or want to start fresh with a properly-built campaign — get in touch. We review existing accounts as part of onboarding at no extra cost.
SEO Medics — Google Ads for healthcare practices across Victoria BC and Canada. $199 CDN/month flat fee. No contracts.
📞 519-777-2210 | 🗓 Book a free consultation | ✉️ info@seo-medics.com
Related: Google Ads Management Victoria BC · Google Ads Cost Victoria BC · Google Ads for Chiropractors · Google Ads for Physiotherapists · 7 Signs Your Healthcare Site Needs an SEO Overhaul · Pricing
