Google Ads can fill a quiet week or launch a new location. Run without tracking, it can also spend a year proving nothing at all.
Built for private practices, multi-location dental groups, and specialty clinics.
Visibility without waiting months
The only figure that matters
Google Ads places your practice above the organic results for searches you choose, and charges only when someone clicks. Unlike SEO it works immediately, which makes it the right tool when you have capacity to fill now rather than in six months.
For dentistry it is strongest on two fronts: urgent treatment where the patient acts within the hour, and high value elective treatment where a single case comfortably justifies the acquisition cost.
What separates a campaign that works from one that quietly drains money is rarely the ad copy. It is whether calls are tracked. Most dental enquiries arrive by phone, so a campaign measuring only web forms is judging itself on a minority of its own results.
It solves problems SEO cannot solve quickly, and it solves them well when measured properly.
A campaign can be live within days, which matters when a chair is empty or a new site has just opened.
Emergency searches produce calls within minutes. Top placement during that search is worth a great deal.
When one implant or full arch case is worth a substantial sum, a higher cost per acquisition is comfortably profitable.
You choose the radius, which is useful where map rankings are structurally difficult because of distance.
Paid data shows within weeks which treatments and phrases convert, which then informs where SEO effort belongs.
Unlike most marketing, you can throttle spend when capacity tightens and resume when it opens.
Active management judged on booked appointments rather than a monthly report full of impressions.
Campaigns organised by treatment and urgency, so budget and messaging match what the patient actually searched for.
Researching phrases separated from booking phrases, with match types controlled so broad matching does not quietly spend your budget elsewhere.
Regular review of the actual searches triggering your ads, excluding job seekers, students and treatments you do not offer.
Ads sent to the relevant treatment page rather than the homepage, because relevance lowers cost and raises conversion simultaneously.
Calls, forms and booking actions tracked back to campaigns from day one, so cost per enquiry is a real figure.
Plain monthly reporting on cost per enquiry and cost per patient by treatment, including what underperformed.
Instrument first, then spend. Never the other way round.
We audit any existing account and assess the competitive picture for the treatments you want.
Campaigns are structured properly and call tracking installed before spend begins.
Early search term data is used to eliminate irrelevant spend quickly through negatives and bid adjustments.
Budget shifts toward the treatments and phrases producing appointments, with monthly reporting.
Dental practices rarely fail at Google Ads because of poor ad copy. They fail because nobody could tell what the spending produced. A monthly report arrives full of impressions, clicks and an average position, and the only question that matters, how many patients did we get and at what cost, goes unanswered for months.
Fixing that is not complicated. It requires call tracking, because most dental enquiries arrive by phone, and it requires campaigns structured so that spend can be attributed to a treatment rather than pooled.
The default dental account has one campaign containing every treatment, which makes budget control impossible. Emergency searches, which convert within the hour, compete for the same budget as implant research, which converts in months.
Separating campaigns by treatment and urgency lets you fund each according to what it returns, and lets ad copy actually match the search. That structural decision usually affects results more than any bidding tactic.
Left on broad match with automated bidding and no negatives, a dental campaign will show for dental nurse vacancies, dentistry courses, treatments you do not provide and practices in other cities.
Reviewing the actual search terms triggering your ads, weekly at first, and excluding what does not fit is the most reliable way to lower cost per patient. It is maintenance rather than strategy, and it is where a great deal of wasted spend hides.
A frequent and expensive mistake is sending every ad to the homepage. Someone who clicked an implants ad now has to find implant information themselves, and a meaningful share will not bother.
Ads should land on the specific treatment page, loading quickly, with an obvious way to call. This lowers cost per click through improved relevance and raises conversion at the same time, which is why we usually improve landing pages before increasing budget.
Ads buy visibility now and stop when the budget stops. SEO builds visibility you keep. Most practices benefit from running ads on urgent and high value treatments while organic rankings mature, then rebalancing.
Paid data is also genuinely useful for SEO, since it reveals quickly which phrases produce appointments. Our dental PPC services page covers paid management more broadly, and dental SEO covers the organic side. To have your current account reviewed, get in touch.
We will review your campaigns, search terms and tracking, then show you exactly where the money is leaking.
Healthcare advertising carries obligations around accuracy and pressure that general ecommerce does not.
Campaigns are built by people who understand how differently urgent and elective dental treatment converts.
Ad claims about treatment are checked with your clinical team before running, because inaccuracy here is a compliance risk not just a marketing one.
We report against booked appointments so performance is judged on outcomes you recognise rather than platform metrics.
We avoid false urgency, unsubstantiated promises and pressure tactics aimed at anxious patients, and we will pause spend when you cannot serve the demand.
What practice owners ask about paid search.
Ask us anything about your campaigns or ad budget.
Cost per click varies enormously by treatment and area, with implants and cosmetic work among the most competitive in local advertising. Rather than quoting a monthly figure, we work backwards: what is a patient worth for the treatment you want, what conversion rate is realistic, and what cost per click still makes sense. That produces a defensible budget rather than an arbitrary one, and it makes it obvious when a campaign has stopped being profitable.
Usually one of three things. The landing page does not match the ad, so visitors arrive and leave. The searches triggering your ads are not genuine booking intent, which search term review reveals quickly. Or calls are happening and simply are not being tracked, which is more common than practices expect. We would check tracking first, because it is the cheapest possibility to eliminate.
Automated bidding works well once the account has enough conversion data to learn from, and poorly before that. It also requires accurate conversion tracking, otherwise it optimises toward the wrong outcome, often cheap clicks rather than patients. We generally start with more manual control, establish clean conversion data, then move to automation where it genuinely outperforms.
Not necessarily separate, but the ad must land on a page about that specific treatment rather than the homepage. Existing treatment pages usually work well provided they load quickly and make calling obvious. Dedicated landing pages are worth building where the treatment is high value and the message needs to differ substantially from the main site.
Clicks and enquiries can begin within days, which is the main advantage over SEO. Reaching efficient cost per patient takes longer, because early spend partly buys data about which terms convert. Expect the first month to be about eliminating waste, with performance improving as negatives, bids and copy are refined against real results rather than assumptions.
Yes, and for treatments where patients expect to speak to someone we usually recommend it. Paying for emergency clicks at midnight when nobody answers produces frustrated callers and occasionally poor reviews. Scheduling can also weight budget toward the times your team converts best, which is often mornings early in the week for dental practices.
It stays yours, with all its history intact. We set up accounts in your ownership with us added as managers rather than the reverse. Account history genuinely affects performance, so losing it because it sat inside an agency account is a real and entirely avoidable cost. You can revoke our access at any point without losing anything.
Sometimes, though they offer less control and less visibility into where spend goes, which is a genuine drawback for a practice trying to understand cost per patient. We would normally establish results with search campaigns first, where the search term data is visible, before testing broader automated formats. Starting with the least transparent format makes diagnosis difficult later.
Through systematic negative keyword work. Dental campaigns attract searches for nurse and hygienist vacancies, dentistry courses and academic research. We review the actual search terms triggering ads, frequently at first, and build an exclusion list. This is ongoing maintenance rather than a one off task, because new irrelevant terms appear continuously.
Yes, and we usually review rather than rebuild. Existing accounts carry performance history that has real value, and discarding it resets the learning. Where structure is sound we improve it, and where it is fundamentally misconfigured we rebuild carefully while preserving what works. We would show you what we found before making significant changes.
Send us your details and we will review your campaigns, search terms, tracking and landing pages, then come back with where the budget is leaking and what to change first.
Tell us about your practice and current campaigns.