Google Ads for Dentists: How To Setup An Effective Campaign

Running a Google Ads campaign for dentists is an effective way to reach local people that are searching for dental services.

It allows you to target people that are actively searching for a dentist in your location and are ready to make contact. This is one of the most effective ways to promote your dental practice because it is highly measurable and means you only pay for performance.

And you save a lot of money too unlike other forms of digital and traditional advertising models that blast people with untargeted ads.

To find out more about how a Google Ads campaign for dentists works and can boost your dental practice, follow these tips to setup a campaign

Campaign objective

The campaign objective is what you want to achieve with your campaign. As a dental clinic your primary objective is to get enquiries, so you should choose the “Leads” objective. That then determines the features that are available to you, like the bid strategies to choose from.

 

 

And you can achieve your objective through website traffic that clicks through to your website and makes an enquiry, and through phone calls from the ads. You can also use the lead form that appears with your ads and people can make contact quickly without visiting your website.

 

Campaign type

To target people that are searching for a dental clinic, launching a Search campaign will help you to reach them at the point when they search. Your Search campaign can have multiple goals too, like driving website traffic, getting phone calls and driving leads from a lead from.

Budget

The budget you set depends on a number of factors such as keyword selection, affordability, competitiveness, locations, goals and so on. For many new advertisers, a small budget is the norm and this can range from as little as $300 or £300 per month to about 1000 per month.

However, it’s important to know that a very small budget will limit performance and will take you longer to realise the objective of your campaign. But you can start with a small budget to test and see what response you get.

And as you manage your campaign and performance improves, you can increase your budget to drive even more clicks and enquiries.

Bidding

The two bidding types in Google Ads are automated and manual bidding. With the automated strategies, the Google Ads system automatically sets bids to help you achieve your objectives. And with manual bidding, you set your own maximum cost per click (CPC) for your ads and keywords.

There are at least four automated strategies and one manual strategy with the option to add enhanced CPC bidding to help increase conversions.

 

 

As a dental practice running a new Search campaign, the Maximise Clicks bid strategy is one of the best to start with. This helps you to get as many clicks as possible within your budget.

Lastly, you can change to another strategy when you have acquired much traffic and conversion data and are clearer about what your average cost per acquisition is.

Also, regularly check your Recommendations page for opportunities on what bid strategy to set as you manage your campaign.

Keywords

Use the Keyword Planner tool to find keywords that will drive traffic to your website and more visitors to your dental clinic. The basic version of this tool is available in your keywords tab but you can access the main tool under the Tools & Settings link.

To start with, use phrase and exact match types like the examples below and then later you can add broad match keywords to increase volume

“Local dentist” – Phrase Match
[Local dentist] – Exact Match

Text ads

You can create expanded, responsive and call only ads in your campaign. But because expanded text ads are being phased out by Google, it’s best to stick to the other two. Also, responsive search ads give you much more text space with additional headlines and descriptions than expanded text ads.

And with call only ads, you only pay when someone calls your dental clinic directly from the ad. This is cost effective and means you can save a lot of money by eliminating wasted clicks.

Locations

Setting the right location targeting for your dental practice is important to running an effective campaign. This helps prevents your ads from being clicked by people outside your targeted locations.

You can target cities, towns, postcodes, counties, countries and territories in Google Ads. And you can also target a radius around your dentist clinic, for example, anyone that is within a 5 mile radius. This is an advanced targeting option and is easily customisable in the advanced settings

Also, update the location options to target “Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations.”

 

 

Ad schedule

Ad schedule is a feature in your campaign settings that you use to set the days and hours when you would like your ads to run. The default setting is for your ads to run all days and hours 24/7, but you can narrow this down to your specific requirements.

 

 

As a dental practice, you may only want to run your ads when you are available to receive calls from your ads. So, that could be Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm for example, or whenever is best. This means there will be no wasted budget and you are able to respond to all enquiries.

However, many dentists, clinics and professional service businesses have found that running ads on weekends and evenings has benefits too. Many people search during these times and will send an email enquiry which can be picked up when the practice is open.

So, it would be a good idea to run ads 24/7 and then narrow down as you assess the best days and hours for your dental practice.

Where your ads appear

With a Search campaign, your ads appear on the Google search engine. This will be either at the top of the page, in one of the top four positions or below the page, in one of the three available slots. Your actual position is determined at auction time and depends on your bids, competitiveness and many other factors.

Your ads will also appear on Google’s search partners websites if you have opted into ‘Search partners’. These are hundreds of platforms that have partnered with Google Ads to provide search results and some of these include their own properties like YouTube.

Get in Touch

Want to know more about setting up a Google Ads campaign for dentists? Please use the contact form below to reach me for information