PPC for Dentists: 7 Tips for Exceptional Campaign Management

PPC advertising is helping dentists to effectively target people who are searching on Google for their services. Using a host of tools and features in Google Ads, this has become one of the best advertising channels for dentists.

Promoting your dental clinic through Google Ads pay per click advertising will help you reach people as they look for a dentist in your location. And after setting up your campaign, you will have many tools to manage it effectively.

I’ve included here PPC tips that help dentists to manage their campaigns and get exceptional results.

 

1. Setup conversion tracking

It’s important to track your leads and enquiries so you know how your ads and keywords are performing. Whether you’re looking for people to call from your ads or website or to fill out a booking form on your website or use the contact form, setting up tracking for this is important.

So, you should setup conversion tracking in Google Ads to track this. Or you can setup goals in your Google Analytics account and then import these into your Google Ads account for conversion tracking.

 

2. Add negative keywords

As a PPC expert helping many dentists, one of the common mistakes I see when taking over new campaigns is that no negative keyword list has been created, or that it has few in them. And the search terms report then reveals that many of the searches are not relevant and are wasting the budget.

It’s important to have a good negative keyword list to block searches that are not relevant to help ensure that the ads are targeted.

You should add these during campaign setup and throughout the campaign management. This will make your campaign more targeted and you’ll see an improvement in conversion rates.

 

3. Find new keywords

As you look for negative keywords, also use this opportunity to look for more keywords to add to your campaign. The Keyword Planner tool in your account will help you with this.

This is a free tool and you will find it in Tools & Settings in your account.

Using this tool you will find more keywords and you will be able to see what the average cost per click is for each of them. And you can use the forecasting tool to see what you’re likely to spend for your keywords each month.

 

4. Update bid strategy

Google Ads has automated and manual bidding strategy types. When you first launch your campaign, it’s best to use an automated strategy which will set bids automatically and help you achieve your goals faster. And Maximise Clicks is a good bid strategy to start with.

Later, you can change to Manual CPC bidding when you want greater control over your bids. This helps when you know which are your best performing keywords and how they rank, and you want to bid higher for them.

However, using manual bidding takes up more time because you have to keep a close eye on how the bidding is working and where you’re ranking.

 

5. Check Recommendations

The Recommendations page includes a list of opportunities that you can add to your campaigns to improve them. These recommendations are automatically created by the machine learning system when it finds opportunities to improve the campaign.

Adding or dismissing any recommendations improves the account optimisation score and improves the campaigns’ performance overall.

Next to each recommendation you’ll see how many points are added to your optimisation score when you add or dismiss it.

It’s important that you do this regularly because the system then starts to learn what is more important for your campaigns and sends more relevant recommendations.

 

6. Do competitor analysis

As a dental clinic it’s important to know who your competitors are, how much they are spending and where they rank. There are tools and reports that help you with this information and some are in Google Ads and others are third-party tools that help you with your PPC marketing.

In Google Ads, the Auction Insights report shows how often you rank in top or absolute top positions relative to other dental clinics.

If you find that you’re ranking lower than you would like, then you should look to update your bid strategies and work on your Quality Scores and other performance factors.

Also, check out tools like SERanking that provide tools that help you see what keywords other dental clicks are bidding on and how much they spend each month.

 

7. Consider broad match type keywords

After running your ads for a while with phrase and exact match keywords, you may want to add broad match keywords too. This will help to increase click volume and should hopefully lead to more enquiries for your dental practice.

However, it’s important to be aware that broad match keywords drive a wide range of searches and many of them may not be relevant.

So, you should ensure you have built a good negative keyword list to block some that are not relevant.

But the benefits of broad match keywords are many and you will get some search queries that you may not have found during your keyword research exercise. In fact, Google stats reveal that 15% of all search queries each day are totally new to them and have never been seen before. So there is a lot of opportunity there.

 

Get in Touch

I work as a PPC consultant for dentists and have helped many dental clinics setup and manage effective campaigns. Use the contact form below to discuss your requirements.