Skip to content 
As a dental clinic owner, maximizing your dental PPC return on investment is crucial for attracting new patients and growing your family dentistry practice. This is meant to be comprehensive PPC for dentists guide will help you optimize your dental Google Ads campaigns through proven strategies designed to boost conversions while controlling costs.
What is Pay-Per-Click Dental Marketing?
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a powerful form of digital marketing that allows dentists to promote their services at the top of search engine results pages. With PPC, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, unlike SEO where the clicks are free. This makes it a cost-effective way to attract potential patients searching for procedures like dental implants online and drive them to your website. By implementing PPC ads in a strategic, targeted manner, dental practices can gain visibility and grow their patient base. This guide will explore how to optimize PPC campaigns using Google Ads to maximize your marketing return on investment.
Set Up Your Dental PPC Account for a Successful PPC Campaign
Before creating your first campaign, take the time to thoughtfully structure your Google Ads account for organization and ease of management down the road.
- Separate campaigns by location if you have multiple clinic sites to allow for location-specific optimization.
- Use one campaign per main service area offered at your practice for more specific targeting and budgeting. For example, have distinct campaigns for general dentistry, implants, orthodontics, pediatric dentistry etc.
- Divide campaigns into tightly themed ad groups around specific procedures, treatments and conditions. For example, “dental crowns”, “root canals”, “tooth extractions”, etc.
- Name campaigns and ad groups clearly so their purpose is easily identifiable. For example, “[City Name] Pediatric Dentistry Keyword Campaign”.
Taking the time to organize your account structure pays dividends through more intuitive campaign management and insights.
Conduct Thorough Keyword Research
The foundation of any effective Google Ads strategy is in-depth keyword research. Identify high-value search queries indicative of intent from potential patients actively looking for dentists. Focus on uncovering long-tail variations too (e.g “pediatric dentist accepting medicaid in [city]”).
Leverage keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner and SEMrush to discover new relevant keywords and keyphrases with strong search volume in your location as well as minimal competition from other advertisers. Analyze keywords to look for monthly fluctuations and seasonality trends you can capitalize on.
Organize keywords in tightly themed ad groups around specific conditions and treatments. Include closely related long-tail variations as well. Continuously expand your campaigns’ reach with new keywords over time.
Keyword Match Types
Google Ads allows you to use different match types for your keywords, which impacts how closely a search query needs to match your term to trigger your ad. The main match types are:
Exact Match
The query must match your keyword exactly word-for-word for your ad to show. For example, if your keyword is “dental crowns” the searcher must type the exact phrase “dental crowns”. This eliminates irrelevant traffic but can limit visibility.
Phrase Match
The query must contain your keyword phrase in the exact same order somewhere in the search term. For example, “dental crowns” would match searches like “best dental crowns” and “affordable dental crowns near me”.
Broad Match
Your ad can show for any query containing one or more of your keywords, in any order. For example, “dental crowns” would also match searches like “crowns for your teeth” and “cheap crowns dentist”. This allows maximum visibility but opens your ads to less targeted traffic.
Craft Compelling Ads Focused on Dental Benefits
With highly limited ad text, every character counts. Start by writing attention-grabbing headlines for your ppc ad that highlight your most sought-after or unique dental services. For example “Same-Day Emergency Dentist in [City]” or “Clear Braces for Teens”.
Emphasize benefits in your ppc descriptions like years of experience, cutting-edge technologies used at your practice, your kid-friendly atmosphere, or affordable payment plans.
Briefly explain how you can quickly solve patients’ dental problems to provide relief. Add your exact location city or neighborhood to attract nearby searchers. Use call extensions with a clear CTA like “Call (555) 555-1234 for Appointments” to enable clicks-to-call.
Evaluate your ad copy performance frequently and experiment with new versions using A/B split testing for your ppc ads.
Design Trust-Building Landing Pages
Your landing pages should extend your ad messaging seamlessly while quickly building patient trust. Feature a bold headline and paragraph briefly explaining how your practice’s expertise can help alleviate the prospect’s dental pain points or issues.
Showcase what makes your clinic stand out from competitors. Tout years in business, doctor credentials, and use of the latest techniques and equipment.
Include social proof elements like video testimonials, customer ratings and reviews, before/after photos, and local awards or recognitions. Answer frequently asked questions to demonstrate your credibility.
Keep contact forms ultra short with only essential fields to reduce friction. Minimize distractions and avoid overly promotional language. Check mobile optimization using Google’s Mobile Friendly Test.
Set Up Precise Geo-Targeting for PPC Ads
Since you want to attract local patients able to conveniently visit your office, precise geo-targeting is essential. Set a tight location radius (e.g. 8-10 miles) around your clinic address as the geographic target for your campaign.
Only enable your ads to be triggered by searches coming from IP addresses within that local radius. This prevents wasting budget showing ads to patients too far away to realistically convert into appointments.
Monitor location performance reports to see which nearby zip codes consistently deliver the most conversions to optimize geographic targeting further. Lower your radius as you gain sufficient impression share.
Add Negative Keywords Over Time
Analyze your search terms report weekly for irrelevant, unrelated, or otherwise low-value keywords that are triggering your ads. These warrant adding as negative keywords to save budget.
For example, add vague keywords like “dentist near me” as a negative to focus spend on more commercial keywords indicative of a treatment need. Identify keywords with particularly low conversion rates and exclude them.
Here’s a simple process for ongoing negative keyword management:
- Review your search terms report every 2 weeks for any new irrelevant keywords that have triggered your ads.
- For each low-value keyword identified, manually add it as a negative keyword using broad match type.
- Utilize the “add as negative keyword” button within Google Ads while reviewing terms to quickly exclude them.
- Check that your main competitors’ names are added as negatives to avoid wasted spend.
Avoid Other Dentist Names to Save Click Budget
One common finding from search term analysis is that competitor dental practice names may show up as queries triggering your ads. You may be tempted to keep your ads displaying for those branded terms. However, we’ve found conversion rates are extremely low for such searches.
You’re much better served spending your budget to attract patients proactively searching for solutions to their dental problems. Add your competitors’ practice names as negative keywords to prevent wasted ad spend targeting their existing patients.
Analyze Conversion Rates for New Patients
Do not merely monitor vanity metrics like clicks and impressions in assessing performance. Instead, focus closely on the conversion rate from your ads to phone calls and form submissions.
Dig into your analytics to identify which specific keywords, ad copy, landing pages, days/hours, and audience targeting are driving conversions. Look for patterns, trends, and anomalies.
If a particular ad group has a low conversion rate, pause it and make optimizations to layout, copy, landing page etc before relaunching. Test new CTAs.
Evaluate conversion rates on mobile vs. desktop to shift budget allocation if needed. Mobile now accounts for over 50% of searches so mobile optimization is vital.
Set Ad Schedules Based on Business Hours
An important optimization tactic is setting ad schedules in your Google Ads campaigns. You want your ads to only run during the hours your dental practice is open. There is no sense wasting budget showing ads at 3 AM when you won’t be able to answer the phone or book appointments.
Create a campaign-level ad schedule aligned with your clinic’s business hours. For example, if you’re open Monday-Friday 9am-5pm, set your ad schedule to only run ads during this window.
If you offer emergency dental services or 24/7 availability, you may choose to run ads 24 hours a day. But for most practices, aligning your ad schedule with operating hours ensures you only pay for ads when able to convert searchers into patients.
Adjust Bids Strategically to Maximize Your PPC Budget
Leverage flexible bid strategies to maximize conversions for your budget. Increase bids for branded commercial keywords around specific treatments and conditions to push your ads to the top of results when it matters most.
Lower bids for more informational, research-based keywords that have delivered lower conversion rates historically.
Use accelerated delivery bidding to spend your daily budget faster and serve ads more prominently when your campaigns are performing well and conversions are steady or rising.
Pause and lower bids for consistently poor performing keywords until you can make needed optimizations. Create tightly themed ad groups around topics to control bids at that level.
Refine Targeting Over Time
Build upon proven high-converting targeting while pruning away inefficient areas of spend. Tighten your geographic radius further once you have sufficient impression share.
Layer on additional demographic, placement, remarketing, and affinity/in-market audience targeting to focus your ads on those most likely to book appointments and bring in revenue.
Let search terms reporting guide you in an ongoing process of adding negative keywords for irrelevant queries and expanding positive keywords around profitable topics.
Leverage a Dental PPC Agency for Expert PPC Services
Managing pay-per-click campaigns requires specialized skills and constant optimization. Rather than trying to do it all in-house, partnering with a professional PPC agency can help dentists maximize their return on ad spend.
A seasoned dental PPC agency like Prime Dental Marketing has the expertise to set up and fine-tune Google Ads campaigns tailored specifically for dentists. Their team stays on top of the latest trends, technologies, and strategies in paid search marketing for the dental industry.
By leveraging a dedicated PPC agency, dental practices gain access to high-level PPC management, saving time while benefiting from optimized bids, targeted ad copy, and constantly improving campaign performance.
Optimizing your Google Ads campaigns through rigorous testing, tracking, and refinement is key. Follow the tips here to maximize your dental ad spend and grow your practice.
