Stop bidding on your own brand name

When a clinic bids on its own name in Google Ads, the campaign starts winning clicks from people who were already searching for the clinic by name. These aren't new patients. They're existing clients trying to find your phone number to rebook, or to cancel an appointment, or to check your hours. The clicks are cheap because nobody else is bidding on your brand name. The conversions look great because returning clients convert at high rates. Everyone in the meeting is happy.

But the campaign earned none of those bookings. Those people were going to find you regardless. They typed your clinic name into Google. The first organic result was you. The campaign just bought the click on top of the result that was free.

The honest answer is mostly that nobody asked them to stop. The cynical answer is that bidding on the brand name makes the monthly report look better. Both are true at the same time. Some agencies set it up deliberately because the conversion numbers prop up the relationship. Others set it up by accident because their default keyword research includes brand names and nobody noticed. Either way, the result is the same: you're paying for traffic you'd own for free.

The other answer you'll sometimes hear is that competitors might be bidding on your brand name, so you need to be there to defend it. That argument applies in product-based businesses where someone clicking the wrong link buys the wrong thing. It does not apply to a service-based clinic. If a patient is searching for your clinic by name, they have a relationship with you. They might accidentally click the competitor's ad at the top of the page, but the moment they land on the wrong website they realise it's the wrong one and back out. They'll find you. You don't need to pay to make sure of it.

Open your Google Ads account. Go to your campaign. Find the negative keywords list. Add your clinic name as an exact-match negative. Add the common variations: with and without spaces, with and without 'clinic' or 'physio' or 'OT' on the end, common typos. Save.

That's it. From the next ad auction onwards, your campaign will stop bidding on your brand name. Any patient who Googles you specifically will go through to your organic listing, the way they should have all along.

If you're working with an agency, the version of this is to send them a one-line message: 'Please confirm our clinic name and common variations are negative keywords across all campaigns.' If they push back with the 'we need to defend the brand' argument, share this article. If they still push back, that's information about the agency, not about the strategy.

Two things move. First, your reported cost per booked patient goes up, because the cheap brand-name conversions stop padding the average. That feels uncomfortable. It's not. It's the real number, finally visible. The campaign was always performing at this level. You just couldn't see it.

Second, your monthly ad spend drops a little, because the budget that was being spent on brand-name clicks is now being spent on patients who actually didn't know about you yet. The ones the campaign genuinely earned. Those are the patients worth paying for. The brand-name ones were never on the table either way.