From Clicks to Chairs: How Google Ads Can Fill Your Dental Practice with New Patients

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 a properly run Google Ads campaign. 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 ‘a bleeding neck’.

Google has multiple paid advertising products; today, we are going to talk about traditional 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 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 Google Ads, and generally increase your budget.

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 Google Ads can help you reach a wider audience and attract new patients to your dental 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 Right Audience

Reaching the Right Audience

The most important part of your 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 allows you to get directly in front of the audience that is searching FOR YOU through location targeting, targeting specific demographics, and search intent.  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 (you’ll want to do 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 target those areas and perhaps a mile or two beyond that. No matter how good of a general dentist you are, it is going to be difficult to pull from a wide area for general dental services. You’ll generally keep this campaign to a smaller radius to avoid wasting money.

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

So, you’ll create a separate Google Ads campaign for dental implants; you can make the radius much bigger than the general new patient campaign you have. 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. You need to test these things, and you must make sure that your Ads and landing page are set up for conversions and that you are using lead tracking to track the effectiveness of the campaign.

WhatConverts makes it easy to track performance on a campaign level. You can easily see which campaign a lead came from, sort your Lead Manager to only show leads from a certain campaign, and much more.

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 Ads

To get the most from Google Ads, your ads need to be eye-catching. If using traditional Google Ads, then 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 X 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 answers all the pain points they may have.

How long should your 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:

Here’s what I like about the ad. 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 their options. They don’t need too much of an explanation (though it is often good to highlight certain lesser-known features or qualities).

• It has a URL that ends in /Invisalign (which tells me that I’m going to a relevant page)
• Price 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 ads are informative, persuasive, compelling, and unique, and you are speaking to your ideal patient, you exponentially increase your odds of them 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. You can’t necessarily say with SEO:

$XXXX was spent on SEO in this timeframe, so my estimated return should be $XXXX within XX days.

The SEO work that is done today may not show dividends for months down the road. It just isn’t as clear-cut and dried.

With Google Ads, it is much more clear. Dental offices have more control over adjusting their budget and having their budget quickly, which directly impacts their 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 the device and location targeting to ensure that your ads are being shown to the most relevant audience, and the bidding strategies can help optimize your bids to get the most value for your money.

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- getting seen by the targeted audience.

Step 4: Track and Analyze the Success of Your 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 regarding 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 performing well and what isn’t. 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 (LP). 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 LP will have the following features:

• Strong Call to Action
• Simple/Clean, easy to navigate
• Compelling Headline that matches your ad
• Social proof (reviews/awards, etc)

Check out the link below for a great example of a landing page from a Hollywood Orthodontist, Clover Orthodontic Studio:

Landing Page: https://tinyurl.com/2bmhpxo9

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’ but 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.

Please Note: 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 Google Ads to Grow Your Dental Practice's Online Presence

As you target the right audience for your Google Ads campaign, speak their language in the Ads, track and analyze your performance, and optimize landing pages for improved performance, 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!