Flexible Thinking Psychology: From 2 Bookings a Month to a Full Calendar

When we took over the Google Ads for Flexible Thinking Psychology, a registered psychology practice in Earlwood, Sydney, it was producing 2 bookings a month after a Smart campaign that started strongly and fell away. The campaign has since delivered 10 to 15 booked appointments a month, and the practitioner's calendar is full.

The challenge

When we took over in February 2022, the practice's Google Ads were producing about 2 bookings a month, and its website was a single page hosted on GoDaddy.

The campaign was a Google Smart campaign. Its early conversions came from generic searches such as "psychologist", "psychologist near me" and "best psychologist", and then it dropped away sharply. We believe the dip followed the early success a Smart campaign tends to deliver, before an account settles into the results it can actually sustain.

Fixing one campaign wouldn't have been enough. The practice needed a website, a search presence and a booking flow that worked together, so we started with the site.

How it unfolded

We started with the website, then the ads, and kept refining both. Here's the work, newest first.

The results

Google Ads has delivered 10 to 15 booked appointments a month, up from 2, and the practice's calendar is full.

thanks for keeping the calendar full, it's been great :)

— Tim, Flexible Thinking Psychology

Those figures are Google Ads bookings only. In the most recent 30 days Google Ads recorded 6, with the calendar already full.

The account data also showed three things that shaped how we ran it:

• Tracking revealed the real cost. In one 60-day window Google reported 116 conversions at about $26 each. But 87 of those were clicks on a booking link, and only 29 were confirmed bookings, which put the real cost at about $104.
• Click prices rose as competition grew. On the broad keyword "psychologist" the average cost per click went from $1.79 to more than $5, while the Quality Score and click-through rate stayed flat. Google's Auction Insights report shows online therapy and telehealth platforms gaining share over the same period.
• Owning the practice's name organically cut waste. Because SEO already put the practice first for its own name and suburb, we stopped paying for those clicks, including clicks from existing clients.

A typical new client attends ten sessions, the number Medicare covers with a GP mental health plan. At the practice's published private fee of $180, that is up to about $1,800 in fees per new client, so even the highest recent cost per confirmed booking, $343, is about 19% of it.

We've written up the full data in a companion article for practices whose Google Ads have stopped performing.

What we learned

Three things stood out. Google can only optimise for what it's told, and before the fix it wasn't receiving the booking event from Halaxy, so it had nothing real to learn from.

Money spread across too many ad groups buys too few clicks in each. Separate ad groups for depression, anxiety and grief thinned the budget, so we concentrated it and let the website carry the specificity with a page for each condition.

And a practice that already ranks first for its own name shouldn't pay to be found by it. The ad budget now goes to people who haven't heard of the practice yet.

Want the same for your practice?

If your Google Ads have stalled, or you can't tell what your conversions are really counting, get in touch with firstSites for a look at your account.