Truce Media · Paid Search Review
A read on how the new TM campaigns are performing against the previous account, where the wins are, and what we do next to grow privately insured admissions.
View the live PPC lead tracker →Prev. blended cost / lead
$71
Apr–May, all old campaigns
…but brand share of leads
65%
at just $32 each
True new-demand cost, prev.
$142
non-brand cost / lead
New TM best structure
$69
Broad patient campaign
Read this first — the account hit a rough patch, and it has recovered
The clinic's website carries drug & alcohol content, which puts a Google "addiction services" policy flag on the whole ad account. At the end of June that flag tightened and briefly pulled every ad offline.
The account went completely dark from 26 June to 1 July, then recovered on 2 July. All ads are now approved and serving again — 10 July was the single biggest traffic day of the whole period. So the June–July averages below carry a five-day blackout that drags them down; the account's current, recovered performance is stronger than the blended numbers suggest. The live constraint now is simply budget: since recovery the patient campaigns are losing 51–67% of available searches to their daily cap, not to policy.
The baseline we inherited. May is when the old agency added a "Psychiatrist Treatment" and a "Competitor" campaign — both weak; the main mental-health campaign did nearly all the work.
| Period | Spend | Clicks | Leads | Cost / lead |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| April · main MH campaign | $2,006 | 282 | 39 | $51 |
| May · MH + Psychiatrist + Competitor | $5,816 | 1,072 | 71 | $82 |
| April + May combined | $7,823 | 1,354 | 110 | $71 |
This is the finding that reframes everything. Splitting the April–May search terms into brand (contains "wyndham") versus everything else:
Here are the actual searches behind it. These few brand queries alone produced ~71 of the 110 leads, converting at 26–33% because the person already wanted Wyndham:
| What the person typed | Cost | Clicks | Leads | Conv. rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| wyndham clinic private hospital | $988 | 110 | 33 | 30% |
| wyndham private clinic | $575 | 54 | 14 | 26% |
| wyndham private hospital | $199 | 34 | 9 | 26% |
| wyndham mental health clinic | $165 | 23 | 7 | 30% |
| wyndham clinic mental health | $127 | 26 | 2 | 8% |
| wyndham private mental health | $71 | 9 | 3 | 33% |
| wyndham clinic private | $41 | 3 | 1 | 33% |
| wyndham psychiatrist | $19 | 3 | 1 | 33% |
| wyndham clinic werribee | $19 | 2 | 1 | 50% |
For contrast, the non-brand searches the same budget paid for — "psychologist near me", "psychiatrist near me", "bulk billing psychologist" and similar — returned almost zero leads, which is what drags the true new cost per lead up to $142.
This is not a case for bidding on the brand. The clinic has chosen not to advertise on its own name, and we support that. It matters here only because it explains why the previous account's headline cost looked lower than the real cost of winning a genuinely new patient.
TM runs no brand campaign — by the clinic's choice — so it competes almost entirely on non-brand traffic, the harder and more valuable kind. The patient pillar is the only converter, and inside it a clear winner has emerged.
| Campaign | Spend | Leads | Cost / lead | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Patient Admissions — Search | $2,694 | 20.5 | $131 | core, pricey terms |
| Patient Admissions — Broad (new, Jul 1) | $757 | 11 | $69 | winning |
| Family & Carer | $245 | 0 | — | no leads |
| Psychiatric Treatment | $210 | 0 | — | no leads |
| Referrer Pathway | $309 | 0 | — | ~0 demand |
| Competitor / Conquest | $152 | 0 | — | no leads |
Winning: the new Broad patient campaign at ~$69 per lead — roughly half the cost of the exact/phrase ad groups, whose spend is dominated by one expensive term ("private mental health hospital"). Broad matching with automated bidding is finding cheaper high-intent volume.
Not working: about $916 across the Family, Psychiatric, Competitor and Referrer pillars for zero leads. Some of that is the policy blackout, but paid-search demand for those pillars is genuinely thin — especially GP/referrer, where almost no one searches.
And here is what those campaigns are matching now. The build is reaching a whole cluster of exactly the searches we designed for — "private mental health hospital", "private psychiatric hospital", "inpatient mental health", "mental health facility" — at clicks of just $2–$24. Several already convert; the rest are the right patient at a cheap price and simply haven't filled a bed yet. The only real drag is a few competitor names and generic "near me" clicks still absorbing budget at $90–$120 each.
| What the person typed | Cost | Clicks | Leads | Read |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| private mental health hospital melbourne | $13 | 6 | 0.5 | our core target |
| private psychiatric hospital | $22 | 3 | 0 | high intent |
| private psychiatric hospital melbourne | $13 | 1 | 0 | high intent |
| mental health hospital | $16 | 4 | 0 | high intent |
| mental health facility melbourne | $13 | 5 | 0 | high intent |
| private inpatient mental health facilities | $14 | 2 | 0 | high intent |
| psychiatric hospital melbourne | $2 | 2 | 0 | cheap reach |
| mental health inpatient melbourne | $4 | 1 | 2 | cheap + converts |
| dandenong psychiatric hospital | $24 | 1 | 2 | converts |
| psychiatric hospital victoria | $4 | 1 | 1 | cheap + converts |
| mental health clinic melbourne | $18 | 2 | 1 | converts |
| psychiatrists near me | $107 | 1 | 1 | expensive |
| waratah moonee ponds (other facility) | $93 | 2 | 1 | dear |
| victoria clinic prahran (competitor) | $64 | 3 | 1 | dear |
| north park hospital bundoora (competitor) | $123 | 1 | 0 | wasted |
The pattern is clear: our target "private mental health hospital / inpatient" searches convert at $4–$24, while a handful of competitor and "near me" clicks cost $90–$120 each. Tighter negatives steer more budget toward the terms that actually admit patients.
Because TM runs no brand yet, the honest test is new-patient (non-brand) cost against the old account's non-brand cost. On that basis TM is already ahead — even after losing five days to the June blackout.
Two moves to make now, plus one to keep watching. The theme is simple: take what is working in the patient pillar and give it more room.
Fold Family & Carer, Psychiatric Treatment and the Competitor / Conquest campaign into a single broad-match campaign — the same setup winning at $69 in the patient pillar — and see if the result repeats. The GP / referrer pillar stays switched off; there is effectively no search demand there.
Since the account recovered on 2 July, both patient campaigns are capped hard — the winning Broad campaign is losing 67% of available searches to budget and the Search campaign 51%. That is proven, in-demand traffic we turn away every day. Raising the cap is the single highest-leverage move, and it gives the broad-match test above the room to gather data.
This flag caused the late-June blackout, but the ads have since been re-approved and are serving normally, so it is resolved for now. The flag still sits on the account, though, and Google could tighten again — we are watching it. LegitScript certification remains the permanent safeguard if it recurs; something to keep on the radar, not to act on today.