RB&HH Specialist Care Paid Search Case Study

International expansion and tailored bidding solutions help drive 58% increase in leads Year on Year

Client

Royal Brompton & Harefield Hospitals Specialist Care (RB&HH) is the largest specialist heart and lung centre in the UK. Patients can access private care at three convenient locations; Royal Brompton, Chelsea, Harefield Hospital, Uxbridge, and Outpatients & Diagnostics facility, 77 Wimpole Street.

Private patients come to RB&HH Specialist Care from all over the world to receive first class, round-the-clock medical care and treatment. As a large postgraduate teaching centre, RB&HH Specialist Care offer the very best care, 24 hours a day, with the benefit of on-site support services uncommon in other hospitals. As well as being clinicians, many of consultants and surgeons are innovative researchers who are seeking to find new ways to treat heart and lung disease.

Bespoke Bidding

Together with Stand Out Digital, RB&HH Specialist Care switched their account to time decay attribution in Google Ads. In contrast to the last-click attribution model that RB&HH Specialist Care had been using,  time decay in Google Ads is a multi-touch attribution model that gives some credit to all the keywords that led to your customer converting, with that amount of credit being less (decaying) the further back in time the keywords was interacted with.

Next, Stand Out Digital implemented Google Ads Smart Bidding for RB&HH Specialist Care. Smart Bidding uses information produced via the data-driven attribution model to optimise for conversions or conversion value in each and every auction. They chose two automated strategies, Target CPA and Enhanced CPC, to automatically set the right bid to help get the most conversions at the best cost per click within their daily budget.

The target CPA was reviewed on a fortnightly basis to ensure that the Cost per Acquisition was as efficient as possible as there is a risk when using Google’s automation tools to “set-it-and-forget-it” which can impact the effectiveness of the media buying activity. Fortnightly incremental reductions in target CPA and maximum CPCs helped reduce CPC down 22.7% versus the previous period and increase traffic 30.8% with only a 1% increase in budget.

As a final step, Stand Out Digital used Drafts & Experiments in Google Ads to assess how the new bidding approaches affected performance. The results showed that combining data-driven attribution with Smart Bidding in Google Ads produced 57.9% more conversions than the historic bidding strategy, with a 20.7% higher conversion rate and a 35.9% lower cost per lead.

International Expansion

As a world-leading centre of excellence for heart and lung care, RB&HH Specialist Care are proud to welcome patients from across the world. With a large volume of organic and Facebook traffic coming from the Middle East and high net worth individual in the Middle East being one of the most profitable audience segment for the trust, the paid search team hypothesised that we could increase the volume of valuable leads from international clients by launching a test paid search campaign targeting two testing country in the Middle East.

With the Trust offering premium self funded medical care, we implemented a bespoke targeting strategy to reach only high net worth individuals in the selected countries by using advanced geographic and language targeting layered over a very specific keyword set to minimise wastage on non low value audiences. Campaigns were set to target only the largest most affluent cities of the different countries, and in English, important as we were looking for an international audience, happy to travel thousands of miles to get the best possible private medical care. The keywords were focused on very specific private care related queries to further reduce wastage on audience interested in private care.

After a successful test campaign in Egypt and the United Arabic Emirates, the strategy was rolled out over the rest of Middle East and now covers Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon and Qatar.

Results

International expansion and tailored bidding solutions help drive 58% increase in leads Year on Year .

The launch of a best in class bidding solutions for RB&HH Specialist Care helped produced 57.9% more conversions than the historic bidding strategy, with a 20.7% higher conversion rate and a 35.9% lower cost per lead.

Middle East campaigns now represents more than 2.5% of paid search leads and a significant proportion of revenue. The next steps will be to launch campaigns in Arabic to increase volume further and to replicate the success of our Middle East campaign across other regions of the globe.