Google Ads for Optometrists: The Complete Guide to Filling Your Exam Schedule

Eye care websites carry more buttons for existing patients than for new ones, and the booking often finishes on a scheduling vendor's site. Count only new patients:

• A booked exam
• An appointment request form
• A call of 30 seconds or more

Google's customer data rules treat exams and contact lenses as health purchases, so booked exams go back by click ID, with no patient details. Then price the patient by the optical shop and the years: a patient who also buys glasses is worth about $363 in the first year.

For every symptom search, about ten eye care searches are ready to book, so the account starts at the bottom, in what we call the Isolation campaign: exact match, one ad group per visit (a routine exam, a contact lens exam, a child's exam, a medical visit), each on a page that says which kind of eye doctor you are.

Feed Keyword Planner a chain's website and much of what comes back is frames: one retailer's 2,608 ideas included 1,610 designer frame searches. Exam searches nearly double in January, so the budget rises in December, and the ads sell the doctor rather than the discount.

New Search campaigns switch on AI Max, whose text customization can turn a line from your own website into a claim your board limits. It goes off at launch. The location is set to people who can walk in, search partners and Display go off, and the ads run when someone is there to answer the phone.

An Exploration campaign (also our name) takes broad match once the account records about 30 bookings a month, usually in months two or three and sooner for bigger accounts. Performance Max follows around months six or seven, aimed at booked exams, steered by a segment built from the chains' websites, with medical pages out and your patient list kept in the office. Demand Gen runs a summer flight to parents before school exams are due. Local Services Ads and AI Max come later, if at all.

Every plan you take gets its own ad group, and a red eye may bill a vision plan or medical insurance, so the ad names only the plans you accept. Against the chains' bundles, the FTC's Eyeglass Rule says the exam can't depend on buying glasses, so answer with what your exam includes. Medical eye care bids on the condition and names the drug only in the ad: “blepharitis” draws about 201,000 US searches a month.