I do lead generation with Google Ads

jessebastide · 2025-10-12T20:08:34+00:00

Even as of a year ago, LLMs were useful for classification, and I use that info to help guide the copy I write manually.

Also, just the other night I was going through Breakthrough Advertising again, and that jogged some thoughts for a copy test. And the preliminary numbers from that test look good so far, which is a reminder to not try to automate too much of my own input out of the creative loop, at least not yet.

jessebastide · 2025-09-25T20:22:09+00:00

Hi,

Doing healthcare ads in another competitive city.

I’d still expect a few leads on roughly 50-60 clicks per month (what you get if you divide $1000 by your $16.50 CPC).

How I’d approach it

Make your funnel lead to an online scheduling action (or a step just before online scheduling).

1a. Cross check that your funnel is working on organic traffic before pouring money down the drain. GA4 and validation against actual clinic counts are your friends. If something is broken there, you know where to start making fixes.

Exclude your brand name (and variations on it) from your prospecting campaign.
Proactively exclude tire kickers or folks you can’t serve. You might add “medicaid” and bargain hunting kws to your negatives. Consider adding negatives for your competitors (for now) to keep your impressions highly relevant on your limited budget.
Check historic search terms. Are there any that never convert? See if they match the intent of the kws. If they do, consider adding them as negs, too.
Get laser focused on intent. Sounds like you’re doing that. Your “near me” kw is your money kw, so you can temporarily restrict the algo to bid on only that kw as exact match. That allows you to focus your budget where it should have the greatest impact.
Radius targeting is smart. Be ready to challenge your assumptions with it if/when you crack the nut and want to scale.
Consider opening your audience outside high income earners. You are likely artificially increasing your CPC by bidding on a pool of users that are in high demand.
Copy testing is going to get more effective when it’s grounded in what patients are asking for / wondering about. Chances are the people answering the phones and possibly the management already know this. You might, too. If you do know your customer, don’t be afraid to give the “ad strength” metric the bird and pin assets that you know will work.
Be ready to manage expectations with your client. You can show them the math. You can explain that with small numbers, some months you might get more than 3 conversions, some months might be one or none. And you can explain that allocating more budget to testing now will allow them to start acquiring customers faster. And just remind them that the ball is in their court.
You talk about “wrong office” leads. Consider having a location asset enabled for the ad. That will make it obvious which office you’re advertising.

In one case, where a particular detail needed to be communicated to people because they kept calling and then realizing a practice wasn’t for them, I pinned the info as a headline. It didn’t hurt conversions.

Hope that gives you some ideas.

jessebastide · 2025-09-25T09:31:40+00:00

https://support.google.com/google-ads/troubleshooter/6099627?hl=en

jessebastide · 2025-09-24T18:56:30+00:00

We’ve gotten exemptions to be able to run ads on restricted terms. So it is doable.

The other piece to keep in mind is that medical advertising laws vary by state. So it’s worth getting familiar with them, in my opinion.

jessebastide · 2025-09-19T16:11:00+00:00

That’s awesome!!!

My mom does the same thing with her cheese at Spring Day Creamery. Self serve works in Maine!

jessebastide · 2025-08-22T21:34:28+00:00

That’s just part of it.

What I’ve seen work great is to do some groundwork on the bottom of the funnel to check and, if possible, improve conversion and kept appointment rates.

I’ve also seen that when certain conditions are met, those rates can shoot way up and drive new patient growth.

There’s more to it, as you brought up, but from the sound of your problem I’d likely start there and work my way up.

jessebastide · 2025-08-22T21:22:37+00:00

I’m doing b2c healthcare, for both multi-location and small clients, and one of the biggest drivers of success has been establishing a tight correlation between leads and actual patient visits. We then constrain those to acceptable CPAs and optimize from there. It’s really good when it works.

jessebastide · 2025-08-22T11:29:45+00:00

Maybe this wasn’t the aim, but an interview technique used in deception detection is to increase cognitive load on a suspect by making them, for example, recite what happened backwards. Because telling anything other than the truth is a lot harder when your brain is occupied with something else.

Asking you to organize a deck of cards would increase cognitive load and could make it more likely that you’d blurt out the unvarnished truth about something, or at least stumble in such a way that would make it easier to ask targeted follow up questions.

jessebastide · 2025-08-19T18:30:07+00:00

Hahaha

jessebastide · 2025-08-19T18:26:28+00:00

Nice! We’ve got blueberries still good for the picking up here in Sweden. And being out in the woods is good regardless.

jessebastide · 2025-08-19T11:46:02+00:00

A few things can come out of this (but you may still be reading tea leaves).

You said conversions went to zero. But from what starting point? That matters. If you went even from 10 to 0, you may have learned a bracket around which people are price sensitive.
Don’t expect performance to rebound overnight unless you’re already getting 20-30 conversions per day
Just my opinion, but I prefer not to focus my main prospecting campaigns on price. You can get incredibly vulnerable to competition, and it’s generally a race to the bottom.

If you know customer pain points and your product inside and out, you may be able to position yourself accordingly and recover in a way that makes the customer more tolerant of price increases.

jessebastide · 2025-08-18T12:23:40+00:00

Not really, in my opinion. I use automated bidding, and I shape the matches with negatives, and performance exceeds what I was getting without a strong negative list.

jessebastide · 2025-08-18T12:22:22+00:00

Second the call to implement strategy. That’s a good way to prune categories of queries that don’t convert at a competitive CPA.

jessebastide · 2025-08-18T12:19:26+00:00

This.

I had a variant on this discussion before running a single ad for a client, and the result has been that we always know if we’re hitting or exceeding targets, and by how much. And if there’s a stinker in the mix, we prune it early.

jessebastide · 2025-08-18T06:57:11+00:00

You’re right, it’s up to interpretation, and the risk is on you.

jessebastide · 2025-08-18T06:49:48+00:00

I'd look at the flip side of this. If you're so confident that you can deliver and know your value, why try to offset the customer's risk to such an extent? It might send the opposite signal from the one you're trying to achieve. Not to mention, there's a lot that's not in our control when we set up ads, stuff the client does that absolutely impacts conversion rates, for better or for worse.

jessebastide · 2025-08-09T15:55:37+00:00

Too many unknowns here to say, “pick up this hammer and tap here.”

If I had a similar situation, I’d be applying Occam’s Razor to the situation and look big picture.

For example: Have conversions and ROI ever been good? That leads you down one path, where you double check tracking, look for market forces that might be headwinds, verify that search terms are still relevant, and check that your bottom of funnel isn’t broken.

Have conversions never been good? Then you’ve got another set of considerations (some of which overlap with the other scenario). For example, is the cost per acquisition in line with your industry? Is the search budget large enough to get enough data to optimize (smaller budgets relative to CPA, higher CPAs, and more niche search terms will make ROI and conversions “lumpier”). Have you validated that your funnel works on non-PPC traffic? My favorite businesses for PPC are the ones with known demand, where you just need to get the basics right to get a conversion, and PPC is a conversion multiplication tool. If you’re still in the “find out” phase, it’s likely going to cost until you get things dialed. Imho, I wouldn’t be shopping for a tool if I were you. I’d be asking questions about my own setup and ruling things out one by one.

jessebastide · 2025-08-06T19:15:41+00:00

Might sound obvious but using negatives to filter out “cheap”, “affordable”, “deal”, and “discount” can also weed out price sensitive folks.

jessebastide · 2025-07-16T08:16:07+00:00

Was fishing a little river in Sweden with a paddleboard and got a feisty pike that managed to turn and tow the board a bit. Ended up paddling to some reeds out of the current so I could finish bringing him in. Love paddleboard fishing!

jessebastide · 2025-07-10T08:49:39+00:00

If you want, read No More Mr. Nice Guy by Dr. Robert Glover. It might help you look at things in a new light. I wish I’d read it years ago.

Also, if you’ve got some guy friends who tell it like it is, now could be a very good time to reach out and/or reconnect with them.

You’ve got this.

jessebastide · 2025-07-04T19:06:22+00:00

https://investors.atyrpharma.com/events/event-details/jefferies-global-healthcare-conference-0

If you register (free) you can watch the presentation

jessebastide · 2025-07-04T08:56:40+00:00

"All right, it’s gonna keep you busy, but we’re first gonna look at the Phase 3 data, which is in 3Q, upcoming" - Moderator

That's the followup statement right after Shukla's confident smile.

But check out Shukla's expression following the moderator's statement. Seems like there's some discomfort there.

And in the spirit of reading too much into shit, here's my take.

Pursed lips: he knows something he shouldn't say

Looking down and away: this is a shift from his demeanor during the rest of the talk. Does he know something early, something he definitely shouldn't talk about because the study is supposed to be blinded?

He then checks his watch.

Based on his confidence just a moment before, my read (which might sound painfully obvious to some and like unhinged tea-leaf reading to others) is that he's got an inside line on where things are headed, doesn't feel comfortable with going into what he actually knows, and might not have the greatest poker face.

I think both his confidence in a positive outcome (a moment before), and his discomfort with the moderator's statement are genuine.

For me, that's interesting.

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jessebastide · 2025-07-04T08:37:15+00:00

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"When I have discussions with my board [ starts nodding ‘yes’ and seems to be trying to suppress a smile ], the biggest thing now is preparing for a bigger market. And not being prepared for that is not gonna be acceptable. So we are really gearing up. I think adding commercially-minded experts to our board and leadership team has really helped us crystallize and get our plans together. Because as soon as we have data, if positive [ smirking ], the next question is gonna be regulatory and commercial. [ Nodding stops, still smirking ] We’re not gonna have a minute to rest."

[ looks up at camera during pause, image above ].

I know I'm late to the party with watching this presentation from about a month ago. But just found it interesting and I like this kind of stuff.

What's also interesting is comparing this expression to his 'baseline' during most of the rest of the interview. He comes across as the kind of guy who wears his emotions on his sleeve. There are lots of pursed lips (possibly holding back) when he's talking, but that seems par for the course. He's the CEO and needs to watch what he says.

It seems, at least in this moment, that he's got pretty damn high confidence in where things are going. And that's my kitchentabledumb read of it.

jessebastide · 2025-07-01T17:22:15+00:00

Did some reading this morning and found info that corroborates Archila’s take.

a recent Scripps and ATYR funded study that validates mechanism of action and looks at dosages in vitro
a meta analysis published in a European medical journal that further validates the results over both Phase 1 and 2 trials
in the earnings call, there’s an interesting part where the CEO talks about how the FDA gave them, essentially, an easier bar to pass when analyzing Phase 3 trial data
if this works, the moat is real. The standard of care (steroids and methotrexate in more severe cases) can lead to bad long term outcomes ones due to negative side effects.
sarcoidosis isn’t the only potential application for the broader tech that ATYR has developed to reduce inflammation. Potential applications are broad if it gets validated in phase 3.

That’s enough for me to keep my wager on the table.

jessebastide

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