Radiance Multispecialty Hospital was running one generic hospital-wide campaign that quietly wasted spend on searches its departments couldn't compete on. Here's how department-level campaigns cut cost-per-appointment by 38% while doubling booked volume.
Radiance Multispecialty Hospital
Multispecialty hospital, Chennai
One generic hospital-wide campaign
High cost per appointment, no department-level targeting or reporting
4 months
Now an ongoing performance marketing retainer
Performance Marketing
Department-specific paid search & social, call tracking
Radiance ran a single hospital-wide paid campaign covering cardiology, orthopedics, fertility, dermatology and half a dozen other departments under one generic "book an appointment" message. A patient searching "knee replacement surgeon near me" and a patient searching "IVF success rate clinic" saw the exact same ad, landing on the exact same generic homepage, with the exact same broad keyword set bidding against every competing hospital's entire specialty list at once. Cost per appointment kept climbing because the campaign was competing on expensive, broad hospital-brand terms instead of the specific, lower-competition searches patients actually typed for each specialty. Nobody could tell which department the ad spend was even working for — the reporting was one blended number covering nine very different patient journeys.
Broke the blended campaign apart by department, mapping exactly which specialty-specific searches each was losing money on and which were being ignored entirely.
Rebuilt paid search into nine separate department campaigns — cardiology, orthopedics, fertility and more — each with its own keywords, budget and creative.
Every campaign now sent traffic to a department page matching the exact search intent, instead of a generic hospital homepage.
Dedicated tracking numbers and booking forms per department, so every appointment could be attributed back to the specific campaign that generated it.
Shifted spend weekly toward the departments with the strongest cost-per-appointment performance, away from the historically expensive blended terms.
Department-specific retargeting on social for patients who visited a specialty page but hadn't booked, closing the loop on longer-consideration specialties like fertility.
Splitting the campaign was the real fix, not just optimizing it. Two departments — orthopedics and fertility — accounted for most of the wasted spend under the blended structure. Once they ran on their own budgets and keywords, cost-per-appointment for the entire hospital dropped inside six weeks.
Department-level targeting eliminated spend wasted on searches each specialty couldn't realistically compete on.
Volume doubled from the same overall budget once spend followed department-level performance.
Every specialty now has its own keywords, landing page, budget and attribution — not one shared number.
"Splitting our advertising by department sounded like more work, but it did the opposite — we cut our cost per appointment by 38% while doubling the number of patients we booked, on the same budget we were already spending. We finally know exactly which department every rupee is working for."
Cost-per-appointment and volume figures come from ad platform spend data reconciled against the hospital's own appointment booking system, department by department, comparing the engagement period against the prior blended-campaign baseline. Timeframe and starting baseline stated above, as with every case study we publish.
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