Running ads for a clinic is not difficult. Google and Meta have both worked hard to make launching a campaign take four minutes.
That is precisely the problem. The four-minute version spends real money and tells you almost nothing about whether it worked. Here is what belongs in place first.
1. Decide what counts as a result — in a number
“More patients” is not a target. “Twenty-five enquiries a month at under ₹400 each” is, because at the end of the month you can say yes or no.
Work backwards from something you already know. If roughly one in four enquiries books, and a booking is worth ₹8,000 to you, then an enquiry is worth about ₹2,000, and paying ₹400 for one is sensible. You do not need precision here. You need a number you can judge against.
2. Track conversions — all of them, including the phone
Form submissions are the easy part and usually the smaller part. In healthcare most people call.
So you need:
- Form submissions firing a conversion event on the thank-you page or the submit event.
- Calls — either click-to-call taps from mobile, or a tracked number that forwards to your main line, so you can tell which calls came from which campaign.
- WhatsApp clicks, which in India is often the largest channel of the three and the one most often left untracked.
If you launch without this, you will be optimising on clicks. Clicks are not patients, and the campaign that buys the most clicks is frequently the one that buys the fewest appointments.
3. Send traffic somewhere built for it
Ads pointed at a home page convert poorly and always have. The visitor clicked an ad about one specific thing and landed on a page about everything.
A landing page for ads needs: the same treatment the ad promised, in the heading; one action, visible without scrolling; the phone number as a tappable link; a form short enough to finish on a phone in a lift; and proof that you are real — address, photos, registration details.
Load it on mobile data, not office wifi. If it takes more than about three seconds, fix that before anything else — it is the cheapest improvement available to you.
4. Read the healthcare policies before writing the ad
Google and Meta both restrict health-related advertising, and the rules change. Personalised targeting around health conditions is limited, certain claims are not permitted, and some categories need certification. On top of the platforms, medical advertising in India has its own regulatory position — worth a conversation with your legal advisor rather than a guess.
A disapproved ad costs a day. A repeatedly disapproved account can cost the account.
5. Set the exclusions you will otherwise forget
These are small and they all leak money:
- Exclude your own staff and clinic IP from analytics.
- Set the location radius to the area patients will realistically travel from, and turn off “people interested in your location” if you only want people in it.
- Add negative keywords from day one — “jobs”, “salary”, “course”, “free”, “government”. Review the search terms report weekly for the first month and keep adding.
- Cap the daily budget somewhere you would be comfortable losing while you learn.
6. Agree who answers
This is the one people skip and the one that decides the outcome. An enquiry that gets a callback in five minutes converts far better than the same enquiry answered the next morning. If your campaign runs until 9 pm and your front desk leaves at 6, you are buying enquiries you cannot serve.
Either match the campaign hours to the hours someone can respond, or put something in place for the gap — an automated acknowledgement with a realistic callback time is far better than silence.
Then launch
With the above in place, the first month is a measurement exercise, not a performance one. Run it, read the search terms, see which campaigns produce enquiries rather than clicks, and expect to cut about half of what you started with. That is the process working, not failing.
