Google Ads for doctors: 862,000 searches a month, and they want a superhero.
Doctor Who, Doctor Strange, The Good Doctor and a Halloween costume. Broad keywords put medical practice ads in front of all of them. Connect your account with one Google sign-in and AdPilot’s AI takes it from there. It goes through the account unassisted, works out where the money is really going, and puts each fix in front of you in ordinary English. Tap approve, or skip it. No PPC knowledge needed.
Start free - no credit cardOne Google sign-in to start · No PPC experience needed · Flat price, never a cut of your ad spend · Free 7 days · You approve every change
PPC for doctors starts with the most contaminated word in search.
“Doctor” belongs to Marvel, the BBC and a Halloween costume before it belongs to your practice. That is not a figure of speech. Add up the film and television searches containing the word and you pass 860,000 a month in the United States alone.
A practice running broad keywords pays to reach a share of them. The clicks look ordinary in the report. They are simply people who wanted to know when the next season airs.
AdPilot links to the account and reviews it the way a consultant would if you had hired one. The searches that were never appointments. The evenings when the ads run and reception has gone home. The ads that earn clicks and no patients. Each finding comes back as a card in ordinary English. You approve it or you skip it. Nothing reaches your account until you do.
None of it happens behind your back:
- You approve every change. The AI proposes; you decide. Every budget, bid, keyword, or ad edit arrives as a plain-language card you approve or skip with one tap. Nothing is ever applied on its own.
- A snapshot before every change. AdPilot saves exactly how things looked before anything is touched, so you always have a clean “before.”
- One-click revert. Don’t like a change once it’s live? Undo it in a single click, straight back to that snapshot.
- A full audit log. Who, what, when, the old value and the new value, every change recorded. Nothing hidden.
- You keep the keys. You connect with one secure Google sign-in, and it only ever makes changes you approve. The account stays yours start to finish - you never transfer ownership, and you can disconnect anytime.
Where medical practice ad budgets actually leak
Real US search volumes from July 2026. Every line contains the word “doctor”, and every one of them is entertainment.
You can verify any row in about a minute. That is the point. Advice about medical PPC tends to stay vague, and vague advice is hard to argue with.
| What people search | Searches/mo | Why it is not a client |
|---|---|---|
| doctor who | 150,000 | A BBC science fiction series |
| the good doctor | 129,000 | A medical drama, not a medical practice |
| doctor sleep | 121,000 | A horror film |
| doctor strange | 113,000 | A Marvel character |
| doctor strange in the multiverse of madness | 87,000 | The sequel to the Marvel character |
| plague doctor | 61,000 | A Halloween costume |
| doctor doom | 56,000 | Another Marvel villain |
| good doctor | 37,000 | The drama again |
| the good doctor cast | 35,000 | They want the cast list |
| doctor odyssey | 28,000 | A television series |
| doctor strange 2 | 23,000 | Marvel again |
| doctor sleep cast | 22,000 | Cast list for the horror film |
US monthly search volume, Ahrefs, July 2026. Around 862,000 searches a month, and not a patient among them.
Negative keywords for medical practices. Free, no email, no form.
Use this whether or not you ever become a customer. Ten minutes, no cost, and in a category this contaminated it is the best-value ten minutes available to you.
- Film and television
- doctor who, good doctor, doctor strange, doctor sleep, doctor doom, doctor odyssey, plague doctor, house md, greys anatomy, cast, season, episode, trailer, netflix, marvel, movie, imdb
- Jobs and training
- salary, jobs, hiring, career, medical school, residency, mcat, how to become, nurse practitioner program, cv, locum
- Self diagnosis and home treatment
- symptoms, home remedy, at home, natural cure, what causes, is it normal, how long does, webmd, reddit
- Free and low cost care
- free clinic, low income, sliding scale, charity care, uninsured free, community health center
- Definitions and comparisons
- what is, meaning, definition, md vs do, difference between, wikipedia
- Costumes and merchandise
- costume, mask, halloween, cosplay, funko, poster, t shirt
Two warnings. Do not block “near me”: it is how patients search for a practice, and blocking it removes your best traffic. And do not block “cost” or “price”: a patient asking what a consultation costs is a patient, especially in elective and specialist care.
PPC for medical practices: five things that matter more than your bids
- Know what you may not do with health data. Google restricts personalised advertising built on health information. Remarketing lists assembled from people who viewed condition or treatment pages fall foul of it. Plenty of practices run those lists without realising, and it is the fastest route to a suspended account.
- Count booked appointments where you can. Calls are the default conversion and they overstate performance, because they include prescription requests, existing patients and billing questions. If your booking system can report a completed booking, that is the number bidding should chase.
- Advertise the condition, not the practice. Patients search for the problem, not for a clinic name. Ad groups built around conditions you actually treat consistently outperform a single campaign named after the practice.
- Set the radius by how far patients really travel. For routine care that is a short drive. For specialist and elective work it can be an hour or more. Targeting a whole state for primary care spends most of the budget on people who will never attend.
- Say nothing you cannot support. Outcome claims and guarantees are both a policy problem and a regulatory one. The safest high-performing ads describe access instead: availability, waiting time, location, whether you take their insurance.
What a healthcare marketing agency charges, and why the bill grows as you do.
Agencies that specialise in medical practices price above generalists, and most bill a monthly retainer plus a percentage of your ad spend. Ten to twenty percent is the usual range. The more patients you chase, the larger their share.
Illustrative example. Agencies vary, so check your own contract. Every figure is visible so you can run it against your own agreement.
You spend $3,000/month on ads
Healthcare marketing agency
$1,650/mo
$1,200 retainer + 15% of $3,000 ($450) - on top of the $3,000 Google already takes
AdPilot
$99/mo
Flat, whatever you spend
You spend $10,000/month on ads
Healthcare marketing agency
$2,700/mo
$1,200 retainer + 15% of $10,000 ($1,500) - you grew, so their invoice grew
AdPilot
$99/mo
Flat, whatever you spend
You spend $25,000/month on ads
Healthcare marketing agency
$4,950/mo
15% alone is $3,750/mo, with the retainer still on top - and it climbs every time you scale
AdPilot
$99/mo
Flat, whatever you spend
At those rates the agency clears well past $20,000 in the first year and grows from there. AdPilot Growth is $1,188 a year and it does not move.
Google Ads management for doctors, shown as cards you approve one at a time.
What you actually pay a healthcare marketing agency for is the hands-on part. Building campaigns around the conditions you treat, digging through search terms for money leaks, keeping the account inside Google’s health rules, writing ads that bring in appointments. AdPilot’s AI handles that, and shows the reasoning behind each move.
Examples of what the cards look like - not results from your account
Builds your campaigns
Build a complete Search campaign for your specialty: 3 ad groups, 40 keywords chosen for people ready to book, and 8 ads. Assembled and held until you approve it.
Proposed change
What it’s doing: Producing the entire campaign, ad copy included, so the work does not start with an empty page. Nothing runs before your approval.
Finds wasted spend
You paid 52 times this month for searches containing “the good doctor.” That is a television drama. Add it as a negative keyword and the spending stops.
Proposed change
What it’s doing: Reading your search terms for money that never turns into an appointment, then closing the leaks. (A “negative keyword” simply tells Google not to show your ad for that search.)
Tightens your targeting
Your ads run around the clock, but nobody answers the phone after 5pm and evening clicks have booked nothing for six weeks. Move that budget into clinic hours.
Proposed change
What it’s doing: Matching your money to the hours and the catchment area where appointments actually come from.
Drafts better ads
Your ads describe the practice. Patients search for the problem. Here are 4 headlines written around the condition people actually type, without making a claim about outcomes.
Proposed change
What it’s doing: Writing ads that match the search and stay inside what Google allows a medical advertiser to say.
Set up in minutes. No PPC background needed.
You don’t need to know what a “match type” or a “quality score” is. AdPilot does the analysis and explains everything in plain English.
- 1
Connect your Google Ads account
One secure Google sign-in - nothing to install, no API keys, no technical setup. AdPilot analyzes your account and never changes anything until you approve it, one tap at a time. Disconnect anytime.
- 2
Answer a few plain questions
Tell AdPilot your goal - more calls? more sales? a lower cost per customer? - and a couple of simple numbers about your business, like what one customer is worth to you. Plain words, no jargon.
- 3
Approve improvements with one tap
AdPilot reads your account - or builds you a brand-new campaign from scratch - and hands you concrete moves as plain-language cards, each explaining what it does and why. Tap Approve on the ones you like. Skip the rest.
Free 7 days · No credit card · You approve every change · Cancel anytime
An empty clinic list does not wait for the monthly report.
Agencies review on a schedule. Next week’s diary does not.
On a monthly reporting cycle you find out in week five that week two went badly. The budget has gone and the appointments never existed. AdPilot surfaces the problem while there is still money left to redirect.
Seeing a bad search term on the Tuesday it appears, rather than in a summary five weeks later, is the entire point. One of those is driving. The other is reading a map in the car park.
AdPilot vs a healthcare marketing agency
An honest comparison, with nothing stacked in our favour.
What you pay
Healthcare agency: A retainer, usually with a percentage of ad spend on top. Healthcare specialists charge above the generalist rate, and their cut rises as you grow.
AdPilot: One flat monthly price. It does not move when your ad spend does.
How fast a problem gets fixed
Healthcare agency: You raise it, it joins a queue, you hear back next week.
AdPilot: The account is read continuously. A leak reaches you as a card while the budget is still there to save.
Who holds the account
Healthcare agency: You hand over access. Changes happen and you read about them in the report.
AdPilot: You keep the keys. Every change waits for your one-tap approval, with a snapshot and one-click revert behind it.
Conflicts of interest
Healthcare agency: Healthcare agencies often take several practices in the same specialty and metro. Your budget may be funding a competitor’s learning curve.
AdPilot: It is software. It works on your account only, and it has no other practice in your area.
Contract
Healthcare agency: Six or twelve month minimum terms are common.
AdPilot: Month to month, cancel anytime. Free 7 days first, no card.
Free 7 days · No credit card · You approve every change · Cancel anytime
You keep control, and you stop being dependent.
Most practice owners never learn how their own Google Ads account works. Nobody explains it, and an agency has little reason to start. AdPilot is built the other way round. Every card tells you:
- What it changes - for example, pause a keyword that spent $319 and booked nobody.
- Why it helps - the thinking, not only the instruction.
- What it is based on - figures pulled from your own account.
Approve one and a snapshot is saved first. Then a before and after dashboard shows what happened to cost per new patient, clicks and spend, in words that do not require a marketing course. After a month or two you know which levers actually fill the diary.
Flat, predictable pricing. It never grows with your ad spend.
Seven days free to begin with, no card taken. Choose a plan when it ends or do not. Pricing is flat either way: at $2,000 a month in ad spend or $30,000, the AdPilot bill is identical. We take no percentage of anything.
Full plan details on the pricing page.
AdPilot is new - and we’d rather earn your trust than fake it.
We could plaster this page with five-star quotes and a “trusted by 10,000 businesses” banner. We won’t - because AdPilot is new, and inventing proof would be lying to you. Instead, here’s what actually protects you:
- You risk nothing to try it. 7 days free, no credit card. If it isn’t useful, you walk away having spent nothing.
- Your account is never at risk. Nothing is ever applied without your one-tap approval, a snapshot is saved before every edit, every change has one-click revert, and a full audit log records it. The worst case is a suggestion you don’t like - so you just don’t approve it.
- Guardrails you can’t trip by accident. AdPilot never deletes campaigns and never touches shared budgets. Some doors simply don’t exist.
- Built by an operator, not a VC-funded black box. Software made to give small businesses the Google Ads work an agency charges a retainer for - without agency prices or the loss of control.
Judge us on the work, the math, and the safeguards - on your own numbers, not our adjectives.
Questions, answered straight
What are Google’s rules for healthcare advertising?
The part that catches practices out is personalised advertising. Google restricts targeting and remarketing built on health information, so audience lists assembled from visitors to condition or treatment pages are a policy problem rather than a clever tactic. Outcome claims and guarantees are also restricted. Ordinary search ads for a practice are fine. AdPilot explains a block in plain language rather than leaving you with a disapproval code.
Can I use remarketing to reach people who visited my site?
Carefully, and not with lists built on health interest. General site visitors are treated differently from people grouped by a condition they looked at. If you are unsure which of your audiences falls where, that is worth checking before it becomes a suspension rather than after.
What should count as a conversion for a practice?
A completed booking if your system can report it, a phone call if not. Calls flatter your numbers, because they include prescription requests, billing questions and existing patients. AdPilot checks what is being tracked before recommending bid changes, since bid advice on the wrong conversion is worse than none.
We are a specialist practice. Is the catchment area different?
Usually much wider. People travel for specialist and elective care and rarely travel for routine care. Setting one radius for both is a common and expensive mistake, and it is one of the first things AdPilot looks at.
Do I need existing campaigns to start?
No. AdPilot can build the whole thing from nothing, keyword set and ads included. If you already run campaigns, it improves those instead. Your call.
Is Google Ads worth it if we are already fully booked?
Probably not for volume, and we would rather say so. It earns its keep when you want a different mix of patients rather than more of the same: a service line you are trying to grow, a new location, or elective work that patients research before choosing.
Will AdPilot change anything on its own?
No. Never. AdPilot proposes and you decide. Nothing is written to your account until you approve that specific change with one tap. If you approve nothing, nothing changes.
What if I don’t like a change I approved?
One-click revert. A snapshot is saved before every change, so it rolls straight back to how it was. The audit log shows exactly what happened, old value and new value.
Does the price go up as I spend more on ads?
No. Your plan price is flat no matter what you spend. Unlike an agency, AdPilot never takes a percentage of your budget.
See what your practice is actually paying for.
Connect your account with a secure Google sign-in. Answer a few plain questions about what you treat and how far patients travel. Then work through concrete improvements one approval at a time, each backed by a snapshot and a single-click undo. One flat price. No retainer, no cut of your ad spend, no contract.
Start free - no credit cardFree 7 days · No credit card · You approve every change · Cancel anytime