Dental Google Ads: Attracting More Patients with Digital Marketing

This is a guest post from Tyson Downs, founder of Titan Web Agency.

It goes without saying that in this day and age, having an established and robust presence online is crucial for dental practices wanting to grow. In the 12+ years we've been working with dentists, we've found that perhaps the best way to achieve the growth they are looking for is through properly run dental Google Ads campaigns. Think what you want about Google Ads, but it allows you to get right in front of your target audience at the best time—when they have a 'problem' and are looking for a solution. I know, I know, I hear it all the time:

But I NEVER click on the ads!

That's fine. We aren't talking about what you do. We are talking about your potential patients. Patients in your city are looking right now for a dentist to address whatever issue they may have. Never in the history of marketing has there been a more effective way to get in front of your target audience when they have an urgent dental problem that needs immediate attention.

What Are Dental Google Ads and Why Do They Work?

Google has multiple paid advertising products; today, we are going to talk about traditional dental Google Ads, which show up at the top of search results when a person searches on Google. People will often call this Google PPC (pay-per-click).

For those who know their numbers (cost of acquisition, first year and lifetime value of a patient, etc.) and invest in the hundreds of hours it takes to learn dental Google Ads (or who hire a professional), running Google Ads can be like a license to print money. That doesn't mean it's easy or immediate, but more often than not, it is going to bring you a consistently generous ROAS/ROI (Return on Ad Spend/Return on Investment) that will motivate you to continue to invest in dental Google Ads.

Key Takeaways

• Google Ads can help fill your dental practice with new patients by targeting the right audience and creating compelling ad campaigns.
• Understanding the power of Google Ads for dental practices is essential to maximize your budget and grow your online presence.
• It's important to track and analyze the success of your Google Ads campaign to ensure you are converting clicks into new patients.
• Leveraging dental Google Ads can help you reach a wider audience and attract new patients to your practice.
• Creating compelling ad campaigns and targeting the right audience can maximize your budget and grow your dental practice with Google Ads.

Step 1: Target the Dental Patient Audience

Reaching the Right Audience

The most important part of your dental Google Ads campaign is targeting the right audience. You can have the best offer in the world, the most helpful product or service, the most beautiful office, etc., but if you aren’t reaching your target audience, it’ll all be a waste. Google Ads uses search intent and location and demographic targeting to put you directly in front of the audience that is actively searching for you.  When combined, this means that you can tailor your ads to reach the right audience at the right time and in the right location, resulting in a greater likelihood of converting a website visitor to a lead and, ultimately, to a new patient.

Location Targeting

If you own a dental practice in Salt Lake City, you can use different and specific location targeting to show different campaigns (which are broken down by the service you offer) to distinct areas.

How does this work in the real world?

The chances of getting somebody coming into your Salt Lake City office for a new patient exam when they are 15 miles away in the suburb of Sandy are pretty low. Unless you have a unique value proposition or cater to a very specific niche of patients, most new patients will settle for an office down the road. To them, it makes no sense to pass 25-50 dentists as they go see you. Time is money. Usually, general new patient campaigns should be in the up to 5-10 mile range (though you’ll want to do your own research and confirm).

So for a new patient campaign, your location targeting will be fairly tight. I recommend looking in your practice management software to see where most of your patients reside, and then targeting those areas and perhaps a mile or two beyond that. No matter how fantastic you are as a general dentist, it is going to be difficult to pull from a wide area for general dental services. You'll want to keep this campaign to a smaller radius to avoid wasting money.

Let’s also say that you perform dental implants. There aren’t as many dentists that perform dental implants, and people are more willing to travel just a bit to get it done right.

That means you need to create a separate Google Ads campaign for dental implants with a much bigger radius than your general new patient campaign. You’ll want to do some research on your area to determine how large of a radius to target, but it isn’t unheard of to target 15-25 miles for more specialty services. Don’t take my word for it, though, especially when you can access the data you need to prove exactly what geographic locations produce the most valuable patients.

Using WhatConverts's lead tracking features, you can see exactly where every single ad conversion comes from. When new patients make an appointment, you can add the cost of the service they're requesting to their lead profile under "Quote Value," and then you'll be able to generate reports that show you which of your location-specific campaigns is generating the most qualified and valuable patient leads.

You can also build an insightful report on campaign KPIs (including leads generated and quote/sales value) in just two clicks.

Want this level of lead tracking insights? Start your free 14-day trial of WhatConverts today or watch a 9-min demo!

Improved Targeting = Increased Conversion Rates

What does all this mean? By targeting and reaching the right audience, your practice can increase your conversion rate, resulting in more new patients and increased revenues.

In other words, you’re going to be much happier with the results you get!

Step 2: Create Compelling Dental Ads

To get the most from Google Ads, your dental ads need to be eye-catching. You’ll want to make sure that your ad stands out from the competition in some way, shape, or form.

You can use several different angles in your ads to stand out:

• Highlight your unique selling proposition (USP). Is your office the most centrally located? Mention it. Does your office have award-winning staff? Mention it. Does your office provide amenities that other offices don’t? Again: mention it. Do you have a new patient special? Yep, mention it.
• Include a strong call to action. Perhaps you have a new patient special or are trying to hit some end-of-quarter/year numbers. You could mention in your ad that the new patient special is good until a certain date. Create a sense of urgency.
• Do you offer a unique service that others don’t? This ties in with the first one I mentioned, but if your office caters to those with a phobia of the dentist, be sure that your ad mentions that. Speak a different language? It may be helpful to mention that. Speak their language.
• Mention awards, education, etc. If you graduated from a prestigious institution, then you should mention this. If you’ve been awarded in the top 1% of Invisalign providers, make sure to include it in your ads. That builds instant credibility.

Let’s now look at a couple of examples from Google Ads.

When you have a dental emergency, you want help and relief from pain now.

This ad touches on everything you’d want:

• Help with Pain-Relief
• Chat Now
• Call Now or Chat
• 24/7
• Walk-in Emergency Dentist

People who are searching for an emergency dentist are less price-sensitive and more concerned with immediate service and relief. This ad addresses all of the (literal) pain points they may have.

How long should your dental ad copy be? Be as concise but comprehensive as possible in the amount of space given.

Here’s another example, which is for Invisalign in Houston:

If you offer Invisalign, you likely know it is one of the most competitive spaces in dentistry. When people search for Invisalign, they already know what it is and what their options are. They don’t need too much of an explanation (though it is often good to highlight certain lesser-known features or qualities).

This dental ad capitalizes on this knowledge well:

• It has a URL that ends in /Invisalign (which tells me that I’m going to a relevant page)
• Price is listed right up front
• Free consult (no commitment upfront)
• Creates a sense of urgency with the price limited to the first 20 patients
• Throwing in a free retainer (even if they are normally free—this helps create differentiation)

When your dental Google Ads ads are informative, persuasive, compelling, unique, and speak to your ideal patient, you exponentially increase your odds of qualified leads clicking on your ad and booking an appointment.

Step 3: How to Maximize Your Marketing Budget With Google Ads

It’s extremely important for you to understand your metrics. Become familiar with these numbers:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Click-through Rate (CTR)
• Conversion Rate
• Cost per Click (CPC)
• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

One thing we like about Google Ads for dental practices (compared to other marketing strategies), is that it allows a start-up dental practice, or one that is tight on budget, to get the most and the quickest wins from running Google Ads.

While we think SEO is great, and nearly all dental offices can benefit from it and improve search engine rankings, it is a bit more complicated to compare money going out vs. money coming in. With SEO, you can't necessarily say "X amount was spent on SEO in this timeframe, so my estimated return should be Y amount in Z days." (Though you can get close to this level of accuracy with lead-based SEO tracking and reporting.)

In reality, SEO work that is done today may not show dividends until months later. That's not because the content isn't compelling; it's just the nature of organic search as a marketing channel.

With Google Ads, things are much more clear and immediate, which means dental offices have more control over how they adjust their budget in response to campaign results. While I don’t recommend it, theoretically, a dental office could adjust its budget daily or weekly with Google Ads, allowing a practice to set a daily maximum budget for each campaign. This helps a practice stay on budget, ensuring they are only spending what they can afford while still reaching their target audience and getting noticed.

As we mentioned before, the targeting options allow you to get the most out of your budget. That, along with bidding strategies available in Google Ads, allows you to do something that organic or non-paid marketing channels don’t allow.

Example:

You can use device and location targeting in Google Ads to ensure that your ads are being shown to the most relevant audience, and Google's built-in bidding strategies can help optimize your bids to get the most value for your money. When you connect your Google Ads to a platform that can send back qualified conversion data, you can optimize these bidding strategies to maximize not just clicks in general, but clicks from qualified leads.

We work with a dentist who runs an emergency dental campaign. We’ve found that telling visitors in both the ad copy and the landing page to text us decreases the resistance and increases conversions.

By "speaking their language" and removing resistance, we can improve the performance of your ad campaigns and help you grow your practice by maximizing your marketing budget so you're getting seen by the targeted audience.

Step 4: Track and Analyze the Success of Your Dental Google Ads Campaign

Once your practice has launched your Google Ads campaigns, it’s best to monitor and track their performance so that you can make informed decisions about optimizing for increased results.

One thing to be aware of is that there is typically a "learning phase" when you launch your Google Ads campaigns. It isn’t uncommon for Google to take around 90 days to "learn" your campaign and understand the type of traffic to send to your ad and landing page. So don’t rush into any rash decisions initially.

Once you are ready to analyze the data, then from within the Google Ads dashboard, you can view several different metrics to gauge how well a campaign, ad group, specific ad, and keywords are performing.

You’ll be able to view data such as:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Conversions
• Cost per click
• Keywords generating clicks
• Demographics
• And more

As you track this data, you’ll get insight into what is driving clicks and what isn't. Of course, those clicks will include both spam clicks and clicks from valuable leads, so you'll need a lead tracking platform to get more helpful insights like which campaigns and ads are driving qualified leads and real sales value.

This will allow you to optimize the campaign further to decrease your COA (cost of acquisition) and CPL (cost per lead) to increase your ROAS (return on ad spend).

For example, if a particular landing page is getting a lot of targeting clicks but very few leads, you’ll know that perhaps the landing page is the issue. It could be that the message of the landing page doesn’t match the ad very well; it could be that the traffic is coming from mobile, and your landing page isn’t very mobile-friendly; it could be that you are offering a service that will cost the potential patient $5,000+, and you don’t do a very good job of positioning yourself as an expert on the treatment (no awards, no reviews, no before and after photos, etc).

One thing to note: as you get data, don’t immediately rush to conclusions. Often, it takes several months to have enough data for an adequate sample size.

Here’s an example of a client of ours that we noticed was getting a good amount of highly targeted traffic, and was converting decently (5-9% conversion rate), with a fair amount of leads coming in each month (around 15).

Based on our experience, we thought we could do better.

We saw how high quality the incoming traffic was. We also studied competitors' landing pages and determined that updating the landing page to a more laser-focused page that did a better job at showing our client’s expertise would pay off in the long run.

We created a new landing page and kept everything else the same (when making adjustments to your campaigns, in most cases, it’s best to change one thing at a time so you can definitively tell what impacts potential movement.

Fast forward a few months, and that landing page is converting at 13-17%, and the lead volume has increased from 15 per month to 30-40 per month.

We can easily run reports in WhatConverts that let us see a snapshot of all the data that we need. Here’s one report that breaks down leads by

• Landing Page
• Medium
• Type of lead (call/form/message)

Here’s another report in our dashboard that gives us a summary of our month. One of the features we love is the ability to see what source/medium is converting the highest.

We absolutely love that WhatConverts automates reporting for us. It has pre-built reports that are loaded into the dashboard, allowing our team to quickly see what is going on with our clients.

Step 5: Convert Clicks into Chairs: Turning Ad Traffic into New Patients

Optimizing Your Website Landing Page for Conversions

Hopefully, you are sending at least most (if not all) of your ad traffic to a specific landing page. I used to be all in on only sending Google Ads traffic to landing pages, but as I’ve learned and opened up to new ideas, I do think there is some value (if you have leftover budget) in sending some traffic to your homepage or service page. In my opinion, it allows people to get to know you just a bit better. The more specific your page is, and the less "noise" there is on your page, the greater the chances of converting, assuming your message matches what your audience is looking for.

But, for the most part, here’s how you want it to work:

Yes:

• Emergency Dentistry Ads → Send to Emergency Dentistry Landing Page
• Invisalign Ads → Invisalign LP

No:

• Emergency Dentistry Ads → Homepage
• Invisalign Ads → Homepage

A high-converting landing page will have the following features:

• Strong call to action
• Simple, clean, easy to navigate design
• Compelling headline that matches your ad
• Social proof (reviews/awards, etc)

Check out this example of a landing page from a Hollywood Orthodontist, Clover Orthodontic Studio.

Leveraging Conversion Tracking and Remarketing

To improve even further, you’ll want to leverage the data that you get from Google Ads, your landing page software, Google Analytics, your lead tracking system, and any other software tools you are using.

For example, you can use MSClarify, free heat mapping software that will show you how far down a page people are scrolling, where they are clicking, if they are "rage clicking" (expecting something to be clickable when it isn’t), and more.

By analyzing all this information and applying what you’ve learned, you are able to improve the performance of future campaigns.

Note that this can get very complicated and confusing fast when you are analyzing this data. It isn’t for everyone. If you haven’t decided yet to hire somebody to manage your ads, now may be the time to consider it. A Google Ads professional that understands your industry, understands what converts, and what doesn’t is worth their weight in gold!

Turning Ad Traffic into New Patients

In this brief blog post, we've discussed several ways that Google Ads can help dentists grow their practice. We mentioned:

• Targeting the right audience
• Create compelling ads
• How to maximize your budget
• Tracking & Analyzing the success of your ads
• Turning clicks into appointments

This post isn’t meant to be an exhaustive or comprehensive guide on everything you need to do to get your Google Ads account set up and running efficiently.

However, we hope that by providing the five steps above, we’ve given you the information you need to make informed decisions about your Google Ads and future marketing efforts.

Summary: Leveraging Dental Google Ads to Grow Your Practice's Online Presence

As you target the right audience for your Google Ads campaign, make sure your ads speak their language, track and analyze your performance, and optimize landing pages for improved results, you’ll see that your ads convert much better than when you weren’t following these best practices.

That doesn’t mean that your work is done. This is a never-ending journey. Google Ads makes changes, new competition comes into play, budgets have to be adjusted, etc.

With the right strategy and execution, Google Ads can be a game-changer for dental practices looking to fill their chairs with new patients and thrive in an increasingly competitive market.

Optimize your marketing and keep clients happy with a free 14-day trial of WhatConverts!