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What Does a Paid Media Agency Actually Do?
If you’re in a healthcare marketing team, you’ve likely heard of “paid media” - and maybe even worked with an agency. But what are you actually paying for when you bring in paid media experts? What goes on behind the scenes? And how do you know if you’ve picked the right partner?
In this article, we’ll open the black box. We’ll walk through what a paid media agency does, step by step, and how a great agency differs from the rest. Spoiler: It’s about more than managing Google Ads.
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It Starts with Understanding Your Business Goals
Before any campaigns are launched, a good agency starts with one simple question: What are you trying to achieve?
This sounds obvious. But you’d be surprised how often existing ad accounts are misaligned with business goals. An agency might inherit a campaign set up to drive traffic, when what the business really wants is new patient bookings.
So the first job of a paid media agency is to ask the right questions, and listen hard to the answers. What’s the clinical service focus? What are the performance benchmarks? Where are the gaps?
Diagnosing the Existing Setup
If you’re not starting from scratch, the agency’s next job is to audit your existing ad account. That means diving deep into campaign structures, keywords, bidding strategies and (crucially) past performance data.
Done well, this is forensic work. Agencies look for misfiring campaigns, bloated keyword lists, or budget waste (which is common in healthcare accounts that overuse broad match or don’t apply branded negatives).
Sometimes 60% or more of a client’s spend is effectively wasted. Spotting that early is the difference between growth and stagnation.
Planning with Precision
Once the account has been unpicked and goals are clear, the real strategic work begins. A great agency builds a roadmap: what needs to change, how we’ll test, and how to phase budget over time to align with seasonality and location-based performance.
In healthcare, this might mean shifting budgets to higher-performing postcodes, or optimising ad delivery around the working hours of your call handling team.
And unlike many agencies, we don’t rely on guesswork. Our team brings sector-specific benchmarks and advanced tooling - like AI-powered postcode analysis and conversion cost modelling - into every decision.
Going Beyond “Optimisation”
Every agency claims to “optimise” campaigns. But in reality, that word covers a huge range of activity: writing better ad copy, refining targeting, adjusting bids, testing creative formats, monitoring competition, applying exclusions, improving tracking accuracy…
In healthcare, optimisation also includes working around regulatory constraints and platform policies. That might mean using AI to benchmark your ad copy against Google’s sensitive content policies, or adjusting landing pages to minimise the risk of disapprovals.
Our team takes this seriously. We’ve even trained AI models to proactively flag compliance risks before campaigns go live.
Tracking What Matters
Good agencies don’t just report clicks and impressions. They map activity back to actual outcomes: patient enquiries, bookings, and revenue.
But this can be tricky. Many healthcare systems make it hard to track leads through to appointment or procedure. That’s why we work closely with clients to marry ad data with CRM outputs—often on a postcode, service line, or conversion journey basis.
In short: we don’t just ask what’s working in the ad account. We ask what’s working in the real world.
Why Our Clients Stay
We’ve seen too many healthcare providers burned by paid media agencies who set and forget. Who deliver just enough performance to get by, but never challenge the strategy.
Our approach is different.
We provide an onboarding experience that’s thorough, honest, and collaborative. We bring healthcare-specific insight that generalist agencies can’t. And we’re proactive—using AI, benchmarking data and good old fashioned curiosity to push performance month after month.
Because in a sector where every conversion could mean a life changed, “good enough” isn’t good enough.