Google Ads for Patient Recruitment: It’s Not About Clicks, It’s About Fit

DALLAS, TX (June 21, 2023)

Google Search Ads can be a powerful digital marketing tool for recruiting patients to clinical trials, helping you to reach patients exactly when they're actively searching online for information about their health.

But not all clicks are created equal. If those clicks don't translate into eligible participants, your campaign isn't just ineffective, it's draining your budget by wasting clicks on the wrong users.

In today’s blog post, we dive a bit deeper into how to set up your Google Search advertising campaigns to ensure your ads are only shown to people actively searching for relevant treatments and trials.

Beware the Cost of Irrelevant Clicks

To really highlight the impact of poor keyword selection in Google Search Ads, let’s start with a quick story about a recent client we worked with. The client in question was targeting participants with unilateral lower-limb amputation and chronic post-amputation pain, using a keyword strategy that included broad terms such as:

At first glance, some of these terms appear relevant. However, many are too broad or ambiguous and risk attracting a mixed audience, such as casual browsers, researchers, students, or individuals just looking for general support.

The result? The client team was generating a lot of clicks that didn’t translate into conversions or patient enrollment, quickly exhausting the recruitment budget without meaningful results.

Select Keywords Based on Patient Intent

As this example shows, effective patient recruitment isn't just about broad exposure, it's about precision. Your keywords need to align closely with the intent and mindset of potential participants that are actively looking for solutions, treatments, or trials.

For example, a search term like “chronic pain” could reflect a wide range of intent, from general curiosity, academic research, students looking for a dictionary definition, or even just personal interest. However, terms like “chronic pain clinical trial,” or “treatment options for chronic pain” reveal clear intent. These are the queries of people actively seeking help and who are more likely to be open to clinical interventions (and therefore joining your trial).

What happens if we apply this strategy to the previous example targeting patients experiencing chronic post-amputation pain?

As you can see in the image below, pivoting to focus on high-intent keywords shifted campaign performance dramatically, and we began capturing conversions from patients clearly targeting treatment options.

Build a High-Intent Keyword Framework

So, how do you systematically identify and target these high-intent keywords? Over time, we’ve developed a reliable framework that consistently drives relevant, motivated traffic. Here’s a simple, actionable structure you can follow:

For instance, a campaign targeting migraine patients would include keywords like “migraine clinical trial,” “migraine treatment options,” and “migraine management study.” These terms clearly reflect patient intent, and would ensure the ad spend translated directly into qualified leads.

Given the above, in general, our recommendation is to start with a narrow set of high-intent keywords. Once you’ve validated that your campaign is converting, you can gradually expand your list, increasing the scope of your campaign in a thoughtful and measured way.

"Building the desired intent into your keywords is the fastest way to move the needle in the right direction on Google Ads campaigns. It's like the coarse focus knob on a microscope.
Ad copy, negative keywords, locations, and other settings are like the fine focus knob and will help refine the quality of your traffic but nothing will snap your campaign into focus like careful, intent-based keyword selection."

Michelle Goody

Supreme Optimization,

Director of Paid Search

Tap Into the Power of Negative Keywords

Next, let’s talk about one of the sharpest, yet most underutilized assets in your Google Search Ads toolkit: the negative keyword list.

If you’re running Google Search Ads and you’re not obsessively updating your negative keywords, you’re likely wasting budget on inappropriate audiences (and irrelevant clicks) in your paid media campaigns.

Negative keywords block your ads from showing up in searches that might technically match your target audiences, but are completely off-base when it comes to relevance.

But as you can see in the image below, Google’s autocomplete feature suggests that users are searching for a wide range of topics with that keyword as the base.

If someone searches for “pulmonary fibrosis treatment in dogs” and you are not using an effective negative keyword list, there is a risk that your ad will be shown. If the user clicks (either deliberately or by accident), you just paid to attract an irrelevant visitor to your trial website.

A simple fix to this problem would be to add “dogs” as a negative keyword. Instantly, you filter out the noise, ensuring your ads are only seen by the people who matter.

Think of your negative keyword list as a dynamic, evolving line of defense. Make sure you review and update it at least once a week, especially during the first month of your campaign. The sooner you spot and weed out these budget-draining keywords, the faster you can ramp up your ROI.