Tips for doing Google Ads for dentists. I’ve been doing Google Ads for about 12 years. I’ve been running Google Ads campaigns for dentists since 2017, so as you can imagine, I’ve learned a thing or two. So let’s get into it.
While this article doesn’t cover absolutely everything that you need to know about doing Google Ads for your dental practice, it’s going to go over a lot of really important stuff.
10. Target Mobile
Most of the spam clicks that you’re going to get are going to be from bots that are running on desktop. It’s just a lot more involved to run bots on a mobile device. You’re going to really cut down on the amount of spam that ends up clicking on your ads if you only target mobile.
9. Improve Your Ad Score
You really need to work on that ad score. When you’re running a responsive search campaign, you’re going to see this ad strength number populate as you write all of your headlines. It’s going to cost you if you get anything here lower than “Good,” so don’t settle for “Average.”
8. Split Test Landing Pages vs. Websites
Split test sending traffic to a landing page versus your website. You’re likely to find that one is going to perform better than the other, and you’re never really going to tell which before you run the test.
7. Use CleanTalk to Reduce Spam
Install CleanTalk if you are sending traffic to your website. I’m sure that you get spam every day just from your contact form. If you start paying for ads that start getting spam submissions, that’s going to feed those spam submissions back to Google Ads as conversions, which is going to deliver your ads even more to bots, meaning more spam and more wasted money.
CleanTalk is the best WordPress plugin that I’ve found for cutting down on spam. We get very little through our contact form these days. We put this on all of our clients’ websites, and as you can see, it’s super cheap. It’ll also help reduce the spam on your website overall.
6. Use Call Tracking Tools
Make sure you have something like CallRail or some sort of other call tracking that will send conversion data back to Google Ads. Google Ads does have a forwarding number that you can use, but there are no recordings of the calls.
We’ve had plenty of cases where we were able to listen to a call, listen to the content of what the person was saying, and then tie it back to the dentist’s CallRail account where we were able to identify keywords that we really shouldn’t have been bidding on.
You lose all of those insights if you don’t have these recordings. On more than one occasion, we’ve also had cases where the front office wasn’t answering the phone, or they were being rude to people that were calling. This will give you some insights into what’s going on in your dental practice.
5. Set Ad Schedules in Blocks
Set your ad schedule into three-hour blocks. Very few Google Ads managers do this. The vast majority just use the ad schedule to tell Google, “These are the hours when I want to run ads.” That’s not the best way to use it.
Breaking your ad schedule up into blocks during the day allows you then to apply bid adjustments. As you can see here with this account, we’re bidding actually 25% more on Wednesdays between 9:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. This was because this campaign was just doing exceptionally well during that time, and I wanted to spend more of our budget during that time. This is not possible if you set one big massive block for the whole week.
4. Monitor Search Queries Aggressively
Monitor your search queries like a hawk. You are almost certainly paying for tons of branded searches or people that want to make an appointment with their existing dentist down the street, people that have just generic dentistry questions, and frankly, all kinds of other searches that you don’t want to pay for.
Monitoring your search queries will allow you to add negative keywords, which will prevent your ads from showing for these searches in the future, but you have to do so very aggressively. You can’t just do this once a month.
3. Implement Granular Geo-Targeting
Make sure you’ve set up some granular geo-targeting. You very well may have patients that come to your practice from a 10-mile radius, but I’m sure that there are zip codes within that 10-mile radius that are more attractive for you than others, and you should be focusing your ad spend there.
Or better yet, you should not be using your ad spend in the zip codes where your campaign doesn’t perform as well. Set up your geo-targeting by zip code. Monitor your conversions and your costs per conversion by zip code, and cut out the bottom 20%. That will free up your budget for the zip codes where your campaign performs better.
2. Use Smart Campaigns and Responsive Search Ads
Stick with smart campaigns and responsive search ads. In your Google Ads account, you’re likely to see the Performance Max campaigns. We’ve had luck with them in the past. On the surface, once we dug into those campaigns, we saw that there was a lot of spam, a lot of spam form submissions.
They came in from the retargeting ads on the Google Display Network, and when you started looking at the ad spend and the qualified leads that came in, they were actually nowhere nearly as profitable as they appeared in Google Ads reports.
I’d also add that it’s often advisable to run both smart campaigns and responsive search ads. There’s almost always going to be one that outperforms the other, and again, it seems like we never know which is going to do better in a market.
1. Demographic Targeting Insights
There are all kinds of ways that you can adjust your bids based on the age of the people that you’re trying to get in front of, their gender, their household income. You know, you can also target people based on whether they are a homeowner, if they’re luxury shoppers, if they’re into watches.
We found all kinds of interesting correlations between people that are interested in these things and seemingly unrelated services that we were selling. In this case, this happens to be an account that we’re running for a plastic surgeon. We found that luxury shoppers tend to convert better than non-luxury shoppers when it comes to plastic surgery leads.
Grow Your Dental Practice with Google Ads: Schedule A Call with Sagapixel Today
If you have any questions about your Google Ads account, make sure you leave them in the comments. I will be checking and responding.
And after you’ve done this video, make sure you check the description because there’s going to be a link to a playlist on digital marketing for dental practices that’s going to be sharing some really valuable information.
If you’re a dentist trying to grow your practice through digital marketing, that list will help you. And if you want to book a time to meet with me, head over to our website and let’s schedule a time.
