The most common ABA Google Ads complaint we hear from practices that aren’t yet clients: “We’re getting leads, but they’re not the right families.”
Wrong insurance. Wrong diagnosis. Outside the service area. Looking for speech therapy, not ABA therapy. Parents who have not yet received a diagnosis and aren’t in the buying window. The form submissions arrive. The qualified enquiries don’t.
This isn’t a Google Ads problem. It’s a keyword architecture problem, a targeting problem, and sometimes a landing page problem, all of which have specific solutions.
The Keyword Architecture Problem
Most ABA practices that run Google Ads independently, or through a general agency, make one of two keyword mistakes:
Too broad. Bidding on terms like “therapy near me,” “behavioral therapy,” “child therapy,” or “autism support” captures a wide audience that includes parents seeking speech therapy, occupational therapy, general child psychology, and ABA. Clicks from these terms are cheap and plentiful and almost entirely non-qualifying.
Too narrow. Bidding exclusively on exact-match “ABA therapy” terms captures the parents who already know what ABA therapy is, but misses the parents describing their child’s situation without clinical terminology (“help for autistic child,” “autism therapy 3 year old,” “behavioral support for kids with autism”) who are genuinely high-intent ABA prospects.
The right keyword architecture operates at three tiers:
Tier 1: Direct ABA intent. “ABA therapy [city],” “BCBA near me,” “applied behavior analysis [state],” “ABA therapy for autism.” High cost-per-click, highest qualification rate. These are parents who know exactly what they’re looking for.
Tier 2: Diagnostic and insurance intent. “Does Medicaid cover ABA therapy,” “ABA therapy covered by insurance [state],” “ABA therapy for 4-year-old with autism.” These parents are further in the research journey, often with a diagnosis in hand, and are high-intent ABA prospects.
Tier 3: Problem-aware intent. “Help for child with autism,” “behavioral therapy for kids with autism,” “autism specialist for toddler.” Lower cost-per-click, requires qualification on the landing page. These parents describe the problem without clinical terminology, but they’re describing an ABA-relevant situation.
The balance across these tiers depends on the practice’s budget, payer mix, and geographic competition. A well-structured campaign deploys all three with appropriate bidding and match type management.
The Negative Keyword Problem
Equally important: what the campaign excludes.
Without a robust negative keyword list, ABA campaigns will accumulate clicks from:
- Parents seeking speech therapy, OT, or PT
- Adults seeking ABA therapy for themselves (some adult ABA is appropriate, but most practice populations are paediatric)
- Teachers or school staff researching ABA for professional purposes
- Students researching ABA for academic assignments
- Parents in states or areas outside the service area
- Searches related to “ABA” as an acronym for other terms (American Bar Association, for example)
We maintain a negative keyword library built from ABA campaign data across 18 US states. It’s applied to every new client account from the first day. A general agency builds negative keyword lists from first principles and learns what to exclude over months of wasted spend.
The Geographic Targeting Problem
Many ABA practices have tighter service areas than they realise. A centre-based practice in Norwell, MA doesn’t serve families 60 miles away, even if they’re searching for ABA therapy. Yet a campaign with county-level or state-level geographic targeting will serve ads to those families, who will click, submit forms, and then be disqualified at the intake call.
The fix is zip-code-level or radius-based geographic targeting configured to the practice’s realistic service area, accounting for the maximum distance most families will travel for a centre-based programme, or the maximum travel radius for in-home providers.
The Landing Page Problem
The final piece: where the ad click lands.
An ad that promises “ABA Therapy in Norwell, Accepting New Families” that sends clicks to the homepage creates a disconnect. The parent has to navigate from the homepage to find the information the ad promised (accepted insurance, location, availability, and how to enquire). A fraction of them will. Most will leave.
An ABA-specific landing page, built for the ad’s audience, opening above the fold with the promised information, naming accepted insurance prominently, with a single clear CTA (call or form), converts a materially higher percentage of clicks to enquiries.
We build landing pages for every ABA Google Ads programme. The landing page isn’t an afterthought. It’s half of the conversion equation.
What Good Lead Quality Looks Like
A well-configured ABA Google Ads campaign with correct keyword architecture, geographic targeting, negative keyword management, and a purpose-built landing page should produce enquiries where 60% to 75% of form submissions are qualified (right insurance, right diagnosis, right geography) at the intake call stage.
If the current qualification rate is significantly below that, the problem is almost certainly in one of the areas above, not in Google Ads as a channel.
Reputation Elevation manages Google Ads exclusively for ABA therapy providers. Every account starts with ABA-specific keyword architecture, negative keyword libraries built from 18 states of data, and landing pages built for ABA parent conversion. Schedule a strategy call.