Isolation, Exploration, the brand campaign, Performance Max: each one waits for a foot problem to become a search. Isolation answers "podiatrist near me." Exploration catches the long, specific searches. Performance Max builds on the conversions both of them found. All of it starts the moment someone types.
Heel pain doesn't work that way. Most people with a sore heel don't search for a podiatrist for weeks or months. They search for what's wrong, buy insoles, try stretches, ask friends, and keep walking on it. By the time they type "podiatrist," they've been living with it a long time. Demand Gen is the campaign that reaches them during that stretch, on YouTube and in the Discover feed, before the search.
Most Heel Pain Never Types "Podiatrist." It Tries Insoles, Stretches and Cortisone First.
Chapter 2 measured this in our example market, Los Angeles. Only about 23% of heel pain search volume asked for a doctor or a treatment, and just 0.2% named a doctor. "Heel hurts" alone drew about 2,900 searches a month. Those searchers are describing a problem, not shopping for a podiatrist.
What happens next shows up on Reddit, where people talk it through at length. We collected 1,335 posts and comments from patients about foot problems. 155 were about heel pain or plantar fasciitis, and they describe a long road:
- 41 mention months or years of pain.
- 41 mention a cortisone shot.
- 35 mention insoles or orthotics, and 26 mention shoes.
- 16 mention stretching, 16 physical therapy and 8 a night splint.
One poster wrote: "I spent almost 2 years believing I had plantar fasciitis." Another asked: "what exactly does a podiatrist treat and when should you see one instead of an orthopedist or regular doctor?"
A caution about these numbers: 105 of the 155 came from a forum for plantar fasciitis, where people tend to post because the problem has dragged on. The long road is real, but these are the harder cases. Treat the counts as a picture of what patients try, not a measure of how long everyone waits.
Some reach the end of the road and still aren't sure. One lowest-rated Google review in our sample read: "turns out, all I needed was $20 Dr. Scholl's plantar fasciitis insoles." That patient came in too early for their taste; many more on Reddit describe coming in too late. Both are people a clear explanation would have helped.
The point for a podiatry practice is the gap. There are months between the first sore morning and the first search for a podiatrist, and a practice that only runs Search ads isn't anywhere in those months.
Demand Gen Puts a Video in Front of Them on YouTube and Discover
Demand Gen is the Google campaign for people who are scrolling and watching, not typing. Google lists five homes for it: YouTube with its Shorts, the Discover feed inside the Google app, Gmail, Maps and the Display Network, and a practice picks among them with channel controls.
Podiatry is health care, and Google treats health as a sensitive category. For a sensitive advertiser, Google says image and video ads can serve on YouTube and the Discover feed within Demand Gen, as long as the campaign uses appropriate predefined Google audiences. So a podiatry Demand Gen campaign runs on those two surfaces, with Google's own audience segments, and nothing else.
That still leaves a lot of room. On YouTube, the ads run before and between videos and in Shorts, where a heel pain video can reach someone who's watching a running channel or a shoe review. The Discover feed is the stream of articles in the Google app on a phone; an image ad there sits between stories someone chose to read. Both are places people spend time, not places they go looking for a doctor.
It also comes late in the rollout. Demand Gen reaches people who aren't looking yet, and in the accounts we run it converts more slowly and costs more per lead than Search. It belongs after Isolation and Exploration (our names for the exact and broad match Search campaigns, not Google's) are converting steadily, and the practice knows from real numbers what a lead costs. For most practices that's well into the first year.
Google Has No Heel Pain Audience. Runners, Walkers and Shoe Shoppers Stand In.
We searched Google Ads' full list of predefined audiences for anything related to feet. There is no segment for foot care, podiatry, orthotics, heel pain or diabetes. For a health advertiser, that's by design: Google doesn't let advertisers aim ads at people based on a health condition.
What exists are audiences built around what people do on their feet:
- Affinity audiences (long-term interests): Running Enthusiasts, Footwear, Active & Outdoor Wear, Outdoor Enthusiasts, Golf Enthusiasts, Tennis Enthusiasts.
- In-market audiences (people shopping now): Athletic Shoes, Running Apparel, Shoes, Gyms & Athletic Clubs.
These aren't people with heel pain. They're people who spend a lot of time on their feet or are buying shoes, which is where heel pain tends to show up. Runners are the clearest fit: 30 of the 155 heel pain posts we read mentioned running or came from a running forum. Start with runners and athletic shoe shoppers, and add golfers, tennis players and outdoor enthusiasts once the first audiences show what they produce.
Exclude Health & Medical Jobs, an in-market audience of people job hunting in health care, who are watching podiatry content for a different reason.
The tools other advertisers use aren't available here. Chapter 10 covered why: patient lists aren't supported for health, and custom segments built on sensitive pages don't serve in Demand Gen. The predefined audiences are the whole toolkit.
They're also enormous, national audiences, so the location setting does the rest of the narrowing. Set it to Presence, as Chapter 9 did for Search, and keep the map to the area patients actually drive from. A runner three states away watching a marathon recap is in the audience; the location setting is what keeps them out of your budget.
A Video That Answers "When Should I See a Podiatrist?" Earns the Click
With broad audiences, the ad does the targeting. A video about heel pain gets watched by the people who have it and skipped by the people who don't. So the video's job is to speak to someone in the middle of the long road.
The Reddit question above is the brief: when should you see a podiatrist instead of waiting, or seeing someone else? A good heel pain video answers it plainly, in the doctor's own voice:
- Open on the symptom, in the patient's words: pain with the first steps in the morning, pain after sitting.
- Name what they've probably tried: insoles, stretches, new shoes. Don't dismiss it; say when it's time to stop trying alone.
- Say what a podiatry visit adds: an exam, a diagnosis that confirms it's plantar fasciitis and not something else, and a plan.
- End with one next step: book a visit, with the practice name on screen.
Keep it under a minute, shoot a vertical version for Shorts, and caption every line, because many people watch with the sound off. Film it in the practice, with the real doctor. Chapter 8 found patients praise podiatrists for explaining; a video is the purest form of that. Once the heel pain video is working, the same format carries to the practice's other slow-building problems: bunions that get a little worse each year, and toenail fungus people put off for months. One short video each, filmed on the same afternoon, gives the campaign something to test.
The Discover feed needs images, too. Use real photos from the practice: the doctor at eye level with a patient, the exam room, a foot model on the counter. Pair them with a headline patients have already written for you in their reviews (Chapter 8), like "Where Patients Feel Heard," and a short line about heel pain.
Keep the claims modest. Health ads can't promise results, and Chapter 8 covered Google's rule on testimonials that claim them. A doctor explaining what an exam checks for is information. "Heel pain gone in one visit" is a promise, and one the practice can't keep for every patient.
A $38 Podiatry Lead Means Demand Gen Needs About $380 a Day
Here's the hard part. Google's help page sets a floor for Demand Gen: the daily budget should be ten or more times the target CPA, meaning the average a practice wants to pay per heel pain lead. With a smaller budget, the campaign can't learn fast enough to find its footing.
Use this guide's own numbers. Chapter 3's benchmark put a podiatry lead at about $38. Multiply by ten and a single heel pain campaign wants about $380 every day. Over a month that's in the neighborhood of $11,500. And if Demand Gen leads cost more than Search leads, as they tend to in our accounts, the real target is higher still.
For a large podiatry group, that can make sense. For a solo practice spending a few thousand a month in total, it usually doesn't, and the honest advice is to wait. Put the money into Search, where heel pain patients eventually arrive, until the account can fund Demand Gen properly. A Demand Gen campaign at a tenth of the budget Google recommends mostly teaches you that it was underfunded.
When it does run, give it time. People reached before they search may book weeks later, after the video has done its work and the search finally happens. Read Demand Gen's results over at least 30 to 60 days, not week by week, and compare its cost per lead with Search's on the same basis.
Judge it on conversions from the start, with the same goal the Search campaigns use (Chapter 1). Google offers a quick health check too. A campaign that hits its target while spending roughly four-fifths of its daily budget, or less, has room to work. If it's spending the full budget every day, it's constrained, and results will suffer until it's raised or the target is loosened.
If you'd rather have someone decide when Demand Gen is worth the budget, that's a call our Google Ads management team makes on every podiatry account.
Next: Local Services Ads, and Why They Wait
Demand Gen is one way to widen a podiatry account. Google offers another built specifically for local providers. Chapter 12 covers Local Services Ads for podiatrists: the category exists, but it isn't a launch-day campaign.
For how Performance Max fits alongside Demand Gen, see Chapter 10. Every chapter is on the guide home.
