Health and wellbeing clinic
When your brand campaign is carrying the whole account
June 2026 against May 2026, after the account was rebalanced away from brand-driven conversions. Cost per conversion down 46% on almost identical spend.
The situation
This is a health and wellbeing clinic running Google Ads for lead generation. On paper the account looked fine. Leads were coming in, cost per lead was not outrageous, nothing was obviously on fire.
The problem was where those leads were coming from. The brand campaign was responsible for the large majority of conversions, which meant people who already knew the clinic, already intended to book, and were searching the business name to find a phone number. Those count as conversions. They are not new customers. The account was reporting success while doing very little to actually grow the business.
What they wanted was more genuine enquiries from people who had not heard of them, at a lower cost per lead, and ones that turned into real bookings at their end rather than just form fills.
What I did
Give brand its actual job back
Rebalanced brand into what it should actually be
Brand campaigns matter. If you are not bidding on your own name, competitors will, and you end up paying to win back people who were already looking for you. So brand stayed. What changed was its job.
It was restructured into a target impression share campaign with a deliberately very low maximum cost per click, so it does what brand protection is supposed to do — holds the ground and keeps competitors off your name — without soaking up budget or taking credit for conversions the rest of the account should be earning. Brand protection should be cheap insurance, not the engine of your account.
Built out non-brand by service, area and enquiry type
Instead of broad acupuncture campaigns running across the whole city, I split it up. Someone searching for pain relief acupuncture in a specific part of New York now sees an ad written for exactly that. Someone searching more generally sees something different. Matching the ad to what the person actually typed is not complicated, but it makes a substantial difference to whether they click and whether they enquire.
Let non-brand do the work of building brand
This is the part people miss. Well-targeted non-brand campaigns generate branded searches later, because people who have seen you once come back and search your name. Your brand campaign volume should be a result of the rest of your advertising working, not a substitute for it.
The results
June 2026 against the previous month
The important part is where that growth came from. Conversions nearly doubled while brand was contributing far less than it had been, which means the increase came from people who did not previously know the clinic. That is the difference between an account that looks like it is working and one that is genuinely bringing in new customers.
The clicks figure is worth a mention too. The account bought fewer clicks and got almost twice as many enquiries. Cost per click rose about 15%, which is exactly what you expect when you stop leaning on cheap brand traffic and start competing for people who have not heard of you. Those clicks cost more and are worth considerably more.
Being straight about the data
Two things I would rather say than have someone spot.
This is one month against another, not a year against a year, and it is 31 conversions. That is a small sample. One unusually good or bad week moves numbers like that around. The direction is clear and the reasoning behind the changes is sound, but I would not present a single month as proof of anything permanent, and this account will be judged over a much longer run.
The other thing is that this is lead generation, so any conversion value or return on ad spend figures in the account are nominal placeholders rather than real revenue. The measures that matter here are cost per conversion and the volume of genuine new enquiries.
The takeaway
Keep your brand campaign. Bidding on your own name is worth doing and giving that ground away to competitors is an expensive mistake.
But check what share of your conversions it is responsible for. If brand is producing most of them, your reporting is telling you your advertising works when what it is really telling you is that people who already know you can find you. Those are very different things, and only one of them grows a business.
Every one of these started with an audit
Is brand carrying your account?
I go through the account, tell you honestly what is working and what is not, and you keep the report either way. If we have not worked together before, that first audit and conversation is completely free.