180+ OPD Slots Filled Monthly via Google Ads
How a Hyderabad multi-speciality hospital went from 38 to 180+ monthly OPD appointments by rebuilding Google Ads around appointment intent — not clicks or impressions.
Overview
A 200-bed multi-speciality hospital in Hyderabad was running Google Ads managed by a generalist agency. Spend: ₹1.8L/month. Result: 38 OPD appointments per month traced to paid search, at a CPL of ₹820. The hospital's marketing team knew they were underperforming but didn't know why. The core issue: campaigns were optimised for website sessions and CTR — not appointment bookings. The algorithm was spending on people researching health information, not people trying to book a doctor.
The Situation
Challenge: Multi-speciality hospital needed OPD appointments, not just awareness.
- Conversion tracking was set up on the "Contact Us" page view — not the appointment form submission. Most conversions were people who saw the contact page and left.
- Campaigns included broad informational keywords: "symptoms of diabetes", "what is PCOD", "fever treatment at home" — zero purchase intent.
- Call extensions were not active despite 60%+ of bookings happening via phone call.
- Speciality-specific landing pages didn't exist — all ads landed on the hospital homepage.
- Competitor keywords were missing entirely. Patients searching for competitor hospital names had zero coverage.
The Approach
We rebuilt around a single north star metric: tracked, confirmed OPD appointment bookings. Every keyword, bid, and creative decision was evaluated on its ability to generate confirmed appointments — not clicks, sessions, or form submissions.
Tracking & Conversion Architecture
- Replaced page-view conversion with form submission + call tracking (Google Forwarding Numbers per campaign)
- Imported offline conversions: confirmed appointments from hospital's booking system fed back into Google Ads weekly
- Set up call duration filter — only calls > 90 seconds counted as conversions (eliminates misdials)
- GA4 funnel tracking: landing page → speciality selection → doctor selection → appointment slot → confirmation
Campaign Restructure by Speciality
- Paused all informational keywords — kept only transactional and navigational intent terms
- Built separate campaigns for top 6 specialities: Cardiology, Orthopaedics, Gynaecology, Paediatrics, Oncology, General Medicine
- Added competitor brand terms with comparison-focused ad copy and USP callouts (wait time, doctor credentials, insurance acceptance)
- Geotargeting tightened to 15km radius from hospital — removed statewide targeting that was eating 35% of budget
Speciality Landing Pages
- Built 6 speciality-specific landing pages — doctor profiles, credentials, insurance accepted, appointment slot preview
- Added click-to-call button above the fold on mobile — 71% of traffic was mobile
- Trust signals: NABH accreditation, Google reviews (4.6 avg), doctor MBBS/MD credentials, years of experience
- Appointment booking form reduced from 11 fields to 4 (name, phone, speciality, preferred date)
Bid Strategy & Scaling
- Target CPA bidding enabled per speciality after 30+ conversions per campaign
- Dayparting: 65% of budget shifted to 8–11 AM and 6–9 PM (peak appointment booking windows from historical data)
- Ad schedule exclusions: removed Sunday 12–6 PM (call team unavailable — wasted click spend)
- Monthly reporting: cost per confirmed appointment by speciality — resource allocation shifted to top performers
Results — Before vs. After
Key Insights
Informational keywords ("symptoms of...", "what is...") accounted for 41% of spend and 2% of appointments. Pausing them alone cut wasted spend without touching any performance metric.
Offline conversion import (confirmed appointments from the hospital system) showed that Meta lead form submissions had a 62% no-show rate. Google Ads phone call leads had an 18% no-show rate — a 3× quality difference invisible in platform metrics.
Speciality-specific landing pages drove a 3.4× improvement in appointment conversion rate vs. homepage — the biggest single lever in the entire rebuild.
Call duration filtering (>90 seconds = conversion) was critical for healthcare. Without it, misdials and general enquiries were training bidding algorithms on junk signal.
“Our agency was showing us good CTRs and "leads" every month. What we actually needed was patients in seats. Deepanshu looked at our actual appointment data and rebuilt everything backwards from there. Our OPD capacity is now at 94% fill rate from paid — that's a genuine business result.”
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