Google Ads Management for Vet Practices
We run Google Ads for vet clinics and judge them by what they earn you, not by clicks.
The ad's job is small and important: put your clinic in front of the right pet parent at the right time. This page shows how ours are built, connected to your calls and bookings, and checked every week.
What ads are for:
Some pet parents search because their dog is sick and they want to be seen today. Others have a new puppy and compare clinics for a week. An ad's job is to be there at that moment, saying something true, and to earn one click.
An ad cannot make a stranger trust you. That job belongs to the website, and how we build a website a stranger trusts is its own page.
Ads are the fast channel. SEO builds over months; an ad can be in front of pet parents this week. And if your clinic does not need them, we will tell you so. Adventure Vets, a mobile vet in Tasmania, runs no ads at all, because they do not need them yet.
Stage 1 / Research
Everything here happens before a dollar is spent. The account is planned against your real competitors and your real suburbs.
We read your competitors' ads first, so yours says what theirs cannot
Google publishes every ad a business runs. We pull the ads from the clinics around you and read what they all say, because your ad will sit next to theirs. That reading decides a lot: what your ad says (the one true thing about your clinic that none of them can claim), which services are worth bidding on, which offers to ignore, and where there is a gap nobody near you is advertising.
Every ad is written and argued over until it sounds like your clinic
Each ad is written from what the research found about your clinic, then argued over from five different angles and rewritten until Google's own scoring rates it Excellent, which Google rewards with more showings, and it still sounds like you.
We choose which searches your ad shows for, so you control what you spend
Vet near me can mean a puppy's first vaccination, a cat that needs to be seen today, or someone hunting for free advice. Before launch we decide, search by search, which of those your money goes to and which it never touches.
Your ad shows only where your clients come from
Targeting is set by real drive times, not a circle on a map. A suburb twenty minutes up the highway matters more than one across a bridge nobody crosses, so your money is not spent on suburbs that never book.
Every ad is checked against your vet board's advertising rules
Every ad is reviewed against your state veterinary board's advertising guidelines and consumer law before it runs. We once made a client delete "#1 vet" from their own site, so the board never had to ask.
Stage 2 / Setup
Google can only learn from what it can see. So before the ads run, every call and booking is connected back to the account, and Google learns which searches turn into clients.
Every call and booking is counted before the first ad runs
Before any ad runs, every call to the front desk, every online booking and every enquiry form is connected, so results are counted from day one. It is the step most accounts skip: 63% of the advertising clinics we checked have nothing on their site telling Google Ads which clicks became calls or bookings.
Google learns which clicks became clients
Every call that became a consult and every online booking is reported back to Google, so it shows your ad to more of the people who look like the ones who booked. Google Ads, Analytics, Search Console and Tag Manager are all connected to make that happen.
Every call is tracked to its ad
Many pet parents call rather than book online. A tracking number shows which search and which ad made the phone ring, so no result goes missing.
Searches that would waste money are blocked before they spend
Layers of blocked searches are set up, so free vet advice, vet nurse jobs or is chocolate toxic to dogs never spend your money.
Your existing clients are kept out of the ads
The longer a clinic runs ads, the more of the clicks come from people who already know you: current clients searching your name or vet near me, old clients checking the hours. Their share grows every month and can eat half the budget or more. So your existing clients go on a list the ads are never shown to, and searches for your clinic's own name are blocked, so the budget only pays for pet parents who have never heard of you.
For big services, the ad lands on a page built for that search
For big services like dentals and desexing, we build the page the ad lands on, shaped to that search. Only ad clicks ever see it, so it never competes with your own rankings, and Google charges less when page and search truly match.
Stage 3 / Tuning
Every week, our software reads the whole account: every search, suburb, time of day and dollar, against our vet campaigns going back to 2020. When something moves, it works out the likely reason, and we decide what to do. The data can only show what happened: the suburb that has started calling, the search that got dearer. What to try next is creative work, and it stays with us: a new ad for your dentals, a page for a suburb you have not tested.
Every row of the account is read every week
The account produces more rows than a person could read. Every week all of them are read: which suburbs and times pay off, where budget is being lost to a higher bidder, how the page each ad lands on scores, and what competitors changed. Anything worth watching carries forward to the next week.
Spend that brought no calls or bookings gets turned off
Searches drift. The search puppy vaccinations starts matching puppy training classes, and money follows. The weekly check finds spend that brought no calls or bookings, and it gets turned off.
Google starts by chasing clicks, then switches to chasing bookings
At the start Google bids to get clicks, because it has nothing else to learn from yet. Once enough real calls and bookings have been counted, we switch it to bid for bookings instead: it shows your ad to more of the people who look like the ones who booked, and less to the ones who only clicked. We time that switch on the numbers, not on a calendar. Google calls the two settings Maximise Clicks and Maximise Conversions.
FAQ
How much do I need to spend on ads?
We start small, usually around $1,000 a month, and watch what comes back in calls, bookings and the revenue behind them. Then we scale it, carefully, because the return is not a straight line. Say $1,000 brings back $10,000. That does not mean $3,000 will bring back $30,000; it may bring back $15,000, because the cheapest clicks come first and every extra dollar buys dearer ones. So before the budget goes up we look at everything, including what Google tells us about the other clinics bidding on the same searches (it calls this auction insights): how often they show above you, and how many of the available searches you are already winning. That shows where the sweet spot is, and we set the budget and the bidding there.
How long until it works?
Calls and bookings show in the report from the first week. The ads usually settle over the first 4 weeks and improve from there. You can watch it move the whole way, so nothing rests on our word.
We tried Google Ads before and it didn't work
The old account usually shows why: calls that were never tracked, nothing blocking the wrong searches, ads that read like everyone else's. That is common: in our check of 559 vet websites, only 2 sites in 501 showed any call tracking. We read the old account first, so the rebuild starts from what actually happened.
Is the ad budget marked up?
No. Your ad budget goes to Google at cost, and we never add a margin to it. What you spent and what you paid us sit in the report, line by line.