It's 2 a.m. and a worried owner taps your ad. The phone rings in a dark building. Nobody answers, the owner hangs up and calls the emergency hospital across town, and you pay for the click anyway.
Nothing about that ad was wrong. The keyword was right, the copy was right, the bid was fine. The problem was a setting nobody changed, because Google's defaults assume every business is open whenever someone searches.
This chapter covers the settings to fix before any vet campaign launches: when ads show, when your phone number shows, where the ads reach, and the features Google switches on that most practices never asked for. Chapter 8 wrote the ads. This chapter decides when and where they appear.
Google Shows Your Ads All Day Unless You Tell It Otherwise
A new campaign runs "All day," in Google's words, every day of the week. An ad schedule lets you choose the hours and days your ads can show, and set bid adjustments to raise or lower bids for particular times.
For a general practice, the default is expensive in a quiet way. Ads keep showing after the front desk goes home, owners who tap to call reach voicemail or a recording, and some never call back. The study we used in Chapter 1 found that 15.1% of calls to vet practices reached no one, and those calls were made during the day. At night, with the building empty, a call from an ad has nowhere to land.
The fix isn't to stop advertising at night. It's to decide, practice by practice, what an owner can actually do when they see your ad at 9 p.m. or 2 a.m., and to set the schedule to match.
Match the Schedule to When Someone Can Actually Help
Vet practices keep very different hours, and the example market, Denver, shows how wide the range is. From the practices' own websites:
- Wheat Ridge Animal Hospital: "24/7, 365 days a year."
- VEG ER for Pets: "always open - 24 hours a day, 365 days a year - even on holidays and weekends."
- Sploot Veterinary Care: "open 8am-8pm, 365 days a year, including weekends and holidays."
- Banfield (Stapleton): weekdays 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
- Pets on Broadway: weekdays 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday morning until 2 p.m.
- True Companions: weekdays, with urgent and emergency care only on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons.
Each of those practices needs a different schedule. An emergency hospital's emergency campaign should run around the clock, because 2 a.m. is when it earns its keep. A general practice's campaigns should follow its office hours, with a little room at each end if the phones are covered. A practice that offers urgent care only on certain afternoons can give that ad group its own schedule.
Holidays deserve their own look. Many general practices close, and emergency hospitals get busy. The national shelter database Shelter Animals Count reported that from 2021 through 2023, July 5 was the single highest intake day for stray dogs in the country, and the pattern continued in 2024 around the Fourth of July. For an emergency hospital, the days around a holiday are exactly when its ads should be running and its phones fully staffed. For a general practice that closes, the schedule and the call asset should close with it, and its website should say where owners can go instead.
Once you have a few months of data, the same schedule lets you adjust bids by time. If your calls turn into bookings best on weekday mornings, bid a little higher then. If Saturday afternoon clicks rarely book, bid lower.
Schedule the Phone Number, Not Just the Ad
There's a middle path between running ads all night and switching them off at closing time, and many vet practices can use it.
Google lets you schedule a call asset, the clickable phone number on your ad, separately from the ad itself. You can set it to show "only when your business is answering phone calls," as Google puts it. That matters because a tap on the call button is billed like any other click: Google says those taps "cost the same as headline clicks."
So if your practice takes appointments online, the evening can still be useful. Keep the ad running after hours, switch the phone number off, and let owners book the next available visit from your website instead of reaching a ringing phone. The owner who searched at 10 p.m. for a checkup can still become a client. The owner who needs help right now can see from your ad and page that you're closed and look elsewhere.
Your Hours Have to Match Everywhere Owners Look
An owner checking whether you're open will look in several places: your Google Business Profile, your website, and the ad itself. If those disagree, the owner has to guess, and a guess at 7 p.m. often goes to the practice that's clearly open.
When we checked the example practices' websites, one site listed three different sets of hours on different pages. It's an easy mistake. Hours change, a banner gets added, and an old page never gets updated. But the ad schedule, the call asset schedule, the website and the Business Profile should all tell the owner the same thing. Check them together whenever your hours change, including holidays.
Presence Keeps Your Ads on Owners Who Can Reach You
Where your ads show matters as much as when. Google's default location setting covers people in your area, people who are there regularly, and people who have merely shown interest in it. That last group is the catch. Someone three states away who searches for your city can see your ad, and for a service that happens in person, that's usually a wasted click.
The alternative is called Presence: "Reach people in or regularly in your targeted locations." For almost every vet practice, it's the right choice. A pet has to come through your door, so the owner has to be nearby, or be nearby regularly.
Then decide how far "nearby" goes. Owners care about distance: 40% of owners in the AVMA's 2023 survey put a practice close to home among their top three priorities, and in the phone study from Chapter 1, the practices that booked callers were an average of 6.4 miles away. A general practice might target a few miles around the clinic, or the ZIP codes most of its current clients come from. An emergency or specialty hospital can reasonably draw from much farther, and its emergency campaign should cover a wider radius than its wellness ads.
Google Switches On Four Things You Didn't Ask For. Turn Them Off at Launch.
A new Search campaign arrives with several features switched on or easy to leave on. Four matter most for a vet practice's first campaign.
- Search partners. Google adds them to every new Search campaign automatically. They show your ads on sites outside Google Search. Turn them off at launch so your first results come only from Google Search; you can test them later.
- The Display Network. Check the network settings and make sure your Search campaign isn't also showing banner ads on websites. Display belongs to later chapters, in its own campaigns.
- AI Max. Google's help page confirms that AI Max comes switched on for every new Search campaign. It lets Google widen your keywords and rewrite ad text. It has a place later in the rollout, covered in Chapter 13, but not in an exact-match Isolation campaign. Switch it off.
- Automatically created assets. Look for settings that let Google generate headlines or descriptions for you, and turn them off until you've seen what your own ads do.
A few other settings to confirm while you're there:
- Broad match off in Isolation, as Chapter 6 set up.
- Auto-tagging on, so conversions connect to the right clicks.
- Call reporting on, so Chapter 1's call tracking works.
- Ad rotation set to prefer the best-performing ads.
- Your practice's name in its own brand campaign.
One setting you can ignore: the marketing objective Google asks for when you create a campaign. In our experience it doesn't change how the campaign runs once it's live.
Vets Skip the Health Settings Human Medicine Needs
If you've read setup guides for dentists or other medical practices, you'll see extra steps for health rules: age exclusions, income exclusions, limits on how health-related audiences can be used. Human-health advertisers deal with those because Google treats a person's own health information as sensitive.
Pet care mostly sits outside those rules. As Chapter 1 noted, HIPAA covers people, not pets, and Google's health category is written around a person's own health. That means a vet campaign has fewer restrictions to work around at setup. It also means audiences such as past website visitors and your own client list stay available to you, though our method holds them for the later campaigns in Chapters 10 and 11 rather than the first Search campaign. The one real exception, audiences built around end-of-life care, comes up in Chapters 10 and 15.
Start the Budget Low and Read the Bid Estimates
The last setting is the daily budget. Start below the number you worked out in Chapter 3. If that monthly figure was about $1,800, a daily budget near $60 would spend it; starting closer to $40 a day leaves room to learn before you commit the rest. For the first couple of weeks, the job is to learn what clicks, calls and bookings really cost in your market, and Google's estimates for a new account are rough.
Watch the searches, the costs and the calls for two weeks, then raise the budget toward your target on the ad groups that are booking visits. It's easier to grow a budget that's proven itself than to explain one that ran out before the phones rang.
Next: Performance Max Can Use Your Client List
With the first campaigns set up correctly, the rollout eventually reaches Google's most automated campaign type. Chapter 10 covers when a vet practice is ready for Performance Max, how its own client list can guide it, and which pages to keep out.
The whole guide, chapter by chapter, is on the Google Ads for Veterinarians guide home. And if you'd like us to check your settings before launch, it's the first thing our Google Ads management does for a new vet account.
