How to Increase the ROI of Your Dental PPC Campaign

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is an awesome way for dentists to generate new business online. It can also deliver a very high return on investment (ROI) — provided you do it right. Organic search engine optimization is important, but it can only get you so far. If you want to grow your practice, you can’t neglect PPC for dentists, it is one of most effective dental marketing strategies you can do.

While you can use social media ads and other forms of paid advertising, today, we are going to talk about how a dentist can increase the return on investment for their Google Ads campaigns.

One study found that when people are searching for a product or service, PPC ads grab nearly two-thirds of all clicks on Google’s search engine results. That’s impressive, but there’s more to Google Ads than just increasing your clicks.

Listen to this blog post:

Why You Should Be Using Google Ads for Your Dental Practice

I always tell my clients that an effective marketing plan is a diverse marketing plan. That’s because your target audience is diverse. If you want to reach them, you need to be where they will most likely find you.

Therefore, I fully believe that every business owner should test Google Ads as part of their online dental marketing.

If you are completely new to online marketing, you may not know what Google Ads is. Google Ads is an advertising program from Google that allows a business owner to get on the first page of Google through ad buys. That can be very difficult to do through SEO, particularly if your website is new and doesn’t get much traffic.

Google Ads is focused on keywords. When someone searches for the keywords you bid on, your ad will appear at the top of the list of search results. You’ll benefit when somebody clicks on your ad, visits your website, and then calls you or makes an appointment online.

Google Ads cost money. As a result, many dental practice owners wonder whether Google Ads are effective and if the results they get will be good enough to justify the money they spend.

We believe that Google Ads when used in combination with other marketing and advertising strategies, can boost a dental practice’s revenues and help attract new patients, perhaps even better than any other dental marketing strategy. Here are the five most compelling reasons to make Google Ads part of your marketing mix.

Reason 1: Google Ads Can Be Measured

Google Ads is a great form of advertising because companies can measure their success in several ways. Google provides detailed analytics that includes:

Using these analytics, you’ll be able to see exactly what is driving increased traffic and engagement and what is having little to no impact. This makes assessing if your company's campaign generates revenue or drains cash much simpler and more convenient.

Reason 2: Google Ads Provides Results Much Quicker than Traditional SEO

If you have ever worked on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), then you know it can take time to see any type of results from your SEO campaign. This can be frustrating, especially for dental practice owners who want to immediately see results. It isn’t uncommon for it to take six months or longer to see measurable results from SEO.

Dental pay-per-click ads work quickly, and you won’t be waiting around for months to see results. Clicks on your Google Ad campaigns are immediate and will also allow you to see which keywords are working instantly. The data collected on your ad success is almost immediate.

As a bonus, measuring Google Ad results can help you improve your SEO. If your Google Ads are generating a lot of clicks, then it’s likely that using the same keyword(s) on your site will improve your organic search results, too.

Reason 3: You Can (Potentially) Remarket

Remarketing is beneficial to dental practices because it allows you to target people who have expressed interest in your product by showing them Google Ads related to their activity on your site. You can also use cookies to track these people.

Once the cookie is logged, your advertisement will follow them around and trigger Google Ads to show specific ads tailored to the potential patient’s interests. Remarketing ads remind people what they are interested in and increase brand recognition at the same time.

Please note that you will likely want to get an attorney's opinion on the legality of HIPAA and remarketing. Remarketing to website visitors- fine. Remarketing to existing patients? Not so fine. Speak to an attorney.

Reason 4: Google Ads are Highly Customizable

Dental ppc management is easy with Google because dental practice owners can customize Google Ads to make them more relevant to the keywords they want to target. This is crucial for targeting the specific keyword or mix of keywords that you can target uniquely.

You can set up any ad however you want, but Google Ad Customizers have taken customization to a new level. They include the following options:

You can also do all the typical things you’d expect with a Google ad, including using ad extensions, setting keyword matches, choosing your audience, and directing ads to different pages on your website.

Reason 5: Google Ads Is Engaging

The ad formats used for Google Ads are more engaging than those you might find elsewhere. Google has updated its ad layouts to attract more attention, be engaging, and get clicks. By buying into this high-quality content designed by Google, you know you are getting the best content for increasing click-through.

Google Ads has been proven as one of the top advertising platforms for a reason. Dental practices should use Google Ads to attract new patients and increase revenues. If you are interested in learning about businesses that have had success using Google Ads, read here.

How to Increase the ROI of Your Ads

Now that you know why Google Ads are ideal for dental practices, let’s talk about what you can do to maximize the ROI of your dental PPC ads. These techniques will help you minimize your PPC spend and increase the number of clicks and conversions your ad campaign generates.

Here are some ways to get the biggest ROI from your PPC ads.

Target the right keywords

Many dentists aren't using the right keywords in their PPC campaigns. Here are some tips to help you choose the right keywords for your PPC campaign.

When you use these tips to create PPC ads with highly targeted keyword groups, your ads will generate more clicks and get higher relevancy scores from Google (or Bing, or whatever search engine you’re using,) making them appear higher on the SERP (search engine results page). As a result, you’ll get more new patients and a lower cost per click!

Optimize your ads for phone calls

As of 2024, mobile devices account for over half of all organic searches. That trend is likely to increase.

What that means for PPC is that enabling phone calls through your ad is—and will continue to be—essential for ad success. For a dental office, a phone call means the patient you’ve reached with your ad is ready to book an appointment.

You can add your phone number to your Google Ad without it contributing to your character limit by using Google’s phone number extension. This extension allows mobile users to click on your number to call you. (You should also look into the other ad extensions offered by Google, including the location extension and seller rating extension).

Finally, to maximize your PPC ad’s call-generating potential, set up your phone number-optimized ads to display only during business hours when someone is available to pick up the phone.

The takeaway: Including your phone number, preferably a call tracking number in your ad to uncover additional data you may need to determine your ROI.

Additional Reading:

A Comparison of 15 Call Tracking Solutions for Dentists

Optimize your landing page

Sending your PPC ad traffic to your homepage or another unrelated page of your website is a conversion killer! It’s one of the most common mistakes we see.

If you want to get conversions, not just clicks, you need to link your ad to a targeted landing page.

Here are some elements to put on your optimized landing page:

You might also consider adding a video to your landing page, as video has been proven to increase conversion rates.

An optimized landing page for a dental pay-per-click ad contains these elements combined with a clean, simple design.

Track and test your campaign

We’ve already discussed how easy it is to track your results with Google Ads. Even so, PPC takes a bit of trial and error to perfect. Tracking your campaign metrics allows you to determine what works and what doesn’t.

By monitoring your click-through rates, conversions, and other campaign metrics, you will get a clearer picture of your PPC ads' ROI. This will allow you to identify what you need to tweak to improve it.

For example, you might want to experiment with different keywords, background colors, and CTAs. Once you develop some variables, you can use split testing to see which options give you the best possible ROI for your PPC ad campaigns.

When you test, test only one element at a time. Test headlines, and then, when you’re happy, try testing out different images or calls to action.

Dental PPC ads can be an affordable and effective way to jump to the top of the search engine results page and get more traffic to your website. When managed well, they add far more value than they cost. The key is understanding how to use Google Ads properly and optimizing all your PPC ads – regardless of which search engine you use – to maximize their effectiveness and increase your ROI.