Like any other industry sector, health and wellness is a digital business. If patients can’t find your locations online, you’re effectively invisible — regardless of how well your services suit a prospective patient’s needs.
This need for visibility drives many multi-location organizations to invest in paid search as a key component of their marketing strategy. But managing so many disparate campaigns can quickly become an overwhelming burden on your team. What begins as a straightforward initiative quickly transforms into a labyrinth of tedious tasks. And all of these tasks must be managed while trying to demonstrate ROI to stakeholders demanding results.
Without the PPC right tools and expertise, your marketing team likely drowns in minutiae rather than making an impact on your business goals.
Why Traditional PPC Management Falls Short for Health & Wellness Organizations
Standard PPC management simply doesn’t scale when you’re managing campaigns for 10, 20, or 50+ locations. Every one of your locations requires:
- Customized geographic targeting based on patient travel patterns
- Locally relevant messaging and provider information
- Location-specific budget management and optimization
- Compliance with ever-changing healthcare advertising policies
- Performance reporting broken down by location
This complexity is further compounded by the realities of certain healthcare marketing. Google places strict guidelines around what you can and can’t advertise, such as HIPAA requirements, extended patient conversion cycles, and fragmented data sources.
On top of that, siloed EHR systems, separate analytics accounts for each location’s website, different systems tracking phone appointments — all of these generate data you need to consolidate.
When managed manually, these requirements create an unsustainable workload that leads to cutting corners. The result? Wasted ad spend, inconsistent messaging, missed opportunities, and diminished returns on your marketing investment.
How to Use Automations in Multi-Location PPC Management
Forward-thinking health & wellness organizations are leveraging advanced automation tools to solve these challenges and generate more leads from their PPC efforts. The right agency partner will deploy process automation software that uses the Google Ads API to revolutionize multi-location PPC campaign management by addressing three critical pain points:
1. Automate Budget Management and Pacing
Instead of manually checking campaign spend and making daily adjustments across all your locations, a tool like Fluency will continuously monitor performance and adjust accordingly. The software provides a way to automatically increase or decrease budgets to ensure optimal pacing throughout the month.
This approach eliminates countless hours of tedious management time and ensures remarkably accurate budget utilization. Rather than over- or undershooting your budget even by small percentages, you can hit 100% of your target spend. When you need to demonstrate efficient use of your marketing budget to stakeholders, this level of precision becomes increasingly valuable.
2. Replace Temporary Ad Text Without the Hassle
One of the more arduous aspects of multi-location PPC management is handling time-sensitive messaging. Highlighting a new specialist joining one of your locations or promoting a seasonal service means you need to update dozens of ads across multiple campaigns. Then, you and your team have to manually change them back. If you have 30 ads per campaign across 60 campaigns, this is a long, tedious task.
Automation tools offer features allowing you to schedule temporary text replacements. For example, you can automatically insert “Welcoming Dr. Smith” in a specific headline position across all relevant ads for exactly six months. After which, the system will automatically revert to the original text.
3. Access AI-Powered Reporting and Analysis
Comprehensive reporting across all your locations typically requires hours of manual data compilation and analysis to demonstrate marketing ROI to your stakeholders. Automation software can now generate branded reports that pull together performance data across all locations, complete with automated insights and recommendations.
Some platforms even offer AI-powered analysis tools that allow you to prompt the system with specific questions about your data. For example, “How did mobile performance compare to desktop across all locations over the past 90 days?” Automation software enables you to identify trends, spot outliers, and make data-driven decisions without having to spend hours manipulating spreadsheets.
Beyond Automation: The Technical Toolkit for Multi-Location PPC Excellence
While process automation software provides the foundation, other specialized tools provide a way to further enhance your effectiveness managing multi-location campaigns:
Google Ads Editor: Essential for Bulk Management
The Google Ads Editor app enables bulk campaign management far beyond what’s possible in the standard web interface. This tool allows you to:
- Make changes across multiple campaigns, ads, and ad groups simultaneously.
- Copy successful campaigns and adapt them for new locations.
- Create and implement location-specific messaging.
- Deploy bulk changes without navigating through the tedious web interface.
For multi-location health organizations, it’s simply not feasible to manage complex campaigns through the standard web interface. With this app, you gain a critical advantage when trying to perform bulk functions like quickly replacing ad text.
Bulk Upload Templates and Custom Scripts
Applying bulk upload templates allows you to create entire campaigns through spreadsheets. This is especially useful when your organization launches new locations or services across multiple areas.
Custom scripts add another layer of automation through rules-based management. For example, you might create a script that automatically pauses campaigns if they exceed a certain budget threshold before month-end. With this process in place, your organization is protected from unexpected overspending that impacts your marketing ROI.
Experience Counts: Why Technology Isn’t Enough
While these tools and automations are powerful, they still require guidance from the right PPC experts to deliver their full potential. GLIDE Health is your skilled ally forged by years of experience navigating the specific challenges faced by your multi-location health organization.
Without this specialized knowledge, even the most sophisticated automation tools can lead to HIPAA compliance issues or underperforming campaigns. For instance, rich call tracking provides valuable conversion data, but tools must be HIPAA-compliant and covered by a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) to protect patient privacy.
The technical aspects of these tools require considerable expertise to extract the most value from your PPC campaigns. If you’re not well-versed in the many details required to work in Google Ads, you can quickly make a lot of unintended changes, such as applying allergy-focused messaging to your asthma treatment campaign.
The Value of Strategic Oversight When Managing PPC Campaigns
Automation tools can efficiently execute your strategy, but they can’t create it. GLIDE Health can provide strategic guidance on details such as:
- When to deploy specific campaign types (like Google’s Performance Max).
- How to structure campaigns for optimal performance.
- When to adjust bidding strategies based on market conditions.
- How to allocate budget across locations based on strategic priorities.
The Fractional Strategist Advantage
Many healthcare organizations can’t justify the expense of hiring a full-time PPC specialist with healthcare expertise. But you need this level of guidance to succeed. This is where the “fractional strategist” model with GLIDE Health provides tremendous value.
By working with a team that specializes in healthcare marketing, you gain access to senior-level expertise on a part-time basis. This approach delivers enterprise-level strategy without the enterprise-level cost, allowing you to benefit from the latest techniques and tools while keeping your marketing budget in check.
How to Transform Your Approach to PPC Campaigns
The digital landscape for health and wellness organizations is overcrowded, and organizations that leverage automation and specialized expertise gain a significant edge. While your competitors are bogged down with manual processes and general marketing approaches, you can deploy sophisticated, location-specific campaigns that deliver exceptional results with less manual overhead.
The result? Better visibility across all your locations, more efficient use of your marketing budget, and ultimately, improved patient access to your services—all without drowning your marketing team in tedious tasks.
By combining automation technology with healthcare-specific expertise, you can transform PPC from a time-consuming burden into a strategic advantage that connects patients with your services. At the same time, you’ll gain better visibility into your marketing to ensure it delivers the ROI metrics your stakeholders demand. Ready to get started?
Dan Raiani
Senior Digital Marketing Manager
Dan Raiani is the Senior Digital Marketing Manager at GLIDE Health, where he leads paid media and SEO strategies that help healthcare organizations drive patient acquisition and measurable growth. With over a decade of experience and certifications in Google Ads, Tag Manager, and Analytics, Dan brings a strategic and analytical mindset to every campaign. Dan’s passion for long-term success and operational excellence makes him a trusted partner in executing high-performance marketing systems for multi-location health brands.
