Google Ads works well for audiology clinics and fails badly for them, and the difference is almost always structure rather than budget. A single campaign pointed at a homepage will spend money on over-the-counter device shoppers, unrelated free-test promotions and people in suburbs you do not serve. A campaign split by intent, with a serious negative list and pages that match the search, books assessments. This guide sets out the structure we use for Australian clinics and the compliance points that shape the ad copy.
Split campaigns by intent, not by keyword volume
Four campaigns cover almost every audiology clinic.
Hearing assessment. The core commercial campaign: hearing test, hearing check, audiologist near me, hearing assessment plus suburb. These searchers are looking for an appointment and convert on practical clarity — what the appointment involves, how long it takes, what it costs, how soon they can be seen.
Hearing aids. Device-led searches, including brand names you actually fit. Intent here is comparison, and the competition includes national retail networks. Ad copy should focus on what professional fitting and follow-up involve rather than on price alone, because a price war against a chain is not a war an independent clinic wins.
Tinnitus. A distinct audience, often distressed and searching outside business hours, frequently looking for an explanation before a provider. This campaign needs the most careful language of the four: you can describe assessment and management, but you cannot promise relief or imply a cure.
Paediatric. Low volume, high value, and usually searched by a parent who has been prompted by a teacher or GP. Keep it separate so its budget is not consumed by the adult campaigns and so the ad copy can speak to a parent rather than a patient.
Separating these lets you set different budgets, different bids and different landing pages, and it makes reporting legible — you can see which service is producing rather than staring at a blended cost per enquiry.
Negatives are half the job
Audiology attracts an unusually noisy set of adjacent searches. A negative keyword list should be built before launch and extended weekly from the search terms report. Common exclusions include:
- Over-the-counter and self-fit device terms — cheap hearing aids, hearing amplifier, buy online, Amazon, chemist
- Free-test promotions run by unrelated businesses, and general "free" shopping language where you are not running a compliant offer
- Employment searches — audiologist jobs, audiology course, salary, degree, university
- Veterinary and animal hearing terms, which appear more often than clinics expect
- Repair-only searches if you do not service devices you did not fit
- Suburb and city names outside your catchment, which appear through broad match even with tight location settings
Reviewing search terms weekly for the first two months is not optional. It is where most of the wasted spend is found and removed.
Location and age targeting
Set locations by radius or suburb list around each clinic, not by state, and set the targeting option to people regularly in or who have shown interest only where that genuinely helps — for most clinics, presence-based targeting is the safer default. Exclude the suburbs you cannot realistically serve, even when they are nearby, because a click from someone who will not travel is pure cost.
Age signals are useful but should be applied carefully. Adult hearing assessment demand skews older, but the person searching is often an adult child researching on behalf of a parent, so excluding younger age brackets entirely can remove genuine demand. A better approach is bid adjustment rather than exclusion, and a paediatric campaign that deliberately targets the parent demographic.
Schedule ads to match reality. If nobody answers the phone at 8pm, either send that traffic to a page with a working booking form or reduce bids outside staffed hours.
Landing pages decide the outcome
Each campaign needs its own page, and each page needs to do four things above the fold: confirm the service the person searched for, state where the clinic is, make the next step obvious, and answer the practical question that stops the booking. For assessment traffic that question is usually what happens in the appointment and how long it takes. For hearing aid traffic it is what brands you fit and what follow-up is included. For tinnitus traffic it is what an assessment can and cannot tell them.
Send paid traffic to the homepage and the clinic pays for a click and then asks the visitor to do the navigation. That is the single most expensive mistake in healthcare paid search.
Why "free hearing test" needs its full terms
Free and discounted offers are common in audiology advertising and they are the fastest route to a compliance problem. Under section 133 of the National Law, an offer used in advertising a regulated health service must state the terms and conditions — what is included, who is eligible, any exclusions, and when the offer ends. "Free hearing test" on its own does not meet that requirement, and the responsibility sits with the practitioner rather than the agency running the campaign.
Practically, that means the ad and the landing page need the terms visible, not buried behind a link, and the eligibility criteria need to be real. It also means the offer should be one you can honour at volume — an offer that produces enquiries you decline is worse than no offer.
The same section shapes the rest of the ad copy. No testimonials about clinical services, no claims that create an unreasonable expectation of benefit, no comparative superlatives you cannot substantiate, and no implication of a guaranteed outcome. Our free AHPRA advertising compliance checker screens ad text against these rules in a few seconds, which is a useful last step before anything goes live.
Tracking, or you are guessing
Conversion tracking should count booked appointments and phone calls of meaningful length, not form loads and clicks. Call tracking matters more in audiology than in most sectors because a large share of this patient cohort will phone rather than fill in a form. Without call attribution, the campaigns look worse than they are and the wrong keywords get paused.
What to expect in the first quarter
Expect the first month to be noisy while the negative list builds and the search terms settle. Expect cost per enquiry to fall through months two and three as wasted terms are removed and the best-performing pages are identified. Expect the hearing aid campaign to cost more per click than the assessment campaign, because that is where the retail networks bid hardest.
Paid search is not a substitute for the free asset you already own. Run it alongside a properly maintained profile — the checklist is in Google Business Profile for audiologists — and budget it with the cost drivers set out in how much audiology marketing costs in Australia. If you want it built and managed as part of a wider programme, that is what our audiology marketing and medical SEO engagements cover.
