Dentist PPC Agency

What is Paid Ads Management for Dental Offices?

Dentist PPC management consists of creating and optimizing paid advertisement campaigns for dental offices. Despite that simple explanation, let's explore it further.

To provide premium PPC ads management, a paid advertising firm for dentists should get to know you and your goals. You can use this information to determine the next steps, since paid advertising for a nearby dental office differs from paid advertising for an ecommerce-focused dental office.

For example, local dental offices are often only interested in contact form submissions or phone calls. Through paid ads, traffic can be driven to an optimized landing page or sales funnel. We recommend Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms if those pages/funnels don't exist or need to be reworked.

Alternatively, ecommerce-minded dental offices tend to be interested in online sales. Using paid advertising, you can build traffic to a page optimized for products or categories. You might even want to include Google Shopping Campaigns in some cases. Our sales funnels have also helped us to sell subscriptions, products, and services.

The next step in dentist PPC ads management is understanding the metrics that will be used to optimize and scale. For some dental offices, that means looking to platforms like Google Analytics. However, there are other options out there too, like Wicked Reports, Triple Whale, or Northbeam.

To be successful with paid advertising, your dental office needs to use multiple plans and marketing tools. Pay-per-click campaigns for dentists should include strategies like:

• Promote your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc.) via search engines, social channels, and third parties.
• Make money online or through qualified leads for your dental office.
• Better understand ad attribution through the integration of third-party attribution software.
• Provide social proof with case studies, white papers, video testimonials, etc.
• Engage users in story creation, email collection, and user generated content.
• Test the effectiveness of different ad creatives across different media and ad placements.

Tips for Managing PPC for Dentists

Our team of paid ads experts is knowledgeable in the latest paid ads trends for dentists and other industries.

Here are some of our best tips to follow for keyword research, audience research, landing page / sales funnel optimization, conversion rate optimization, and ad creation.

1.) Keyword Research Tips

Keyword research for dentists is mostly used for Google Ads and Bing Ads search network campaigns. After all, search ads only show up based on what your dental office targets on Google or Bing.

If you are searching for a dental office in your city, you might search "nearby dentist" on Google. It wouldn't be necessary to conduct extensive keyword research to target that exact phrase.

What if, however, that exact match keyword wasn't producing enough search volume and the dental office wanted to increase their traffic and conversions? To solve the problem, keyword research would be required.

After discussing options, the next step might involve the paid advertising manager talking with the dental office about what products / services they want to target more often and where. A broader keyword targeting strategy than exact matches might also be necessary.

For instance, the PPC manager might discover high search volume for "nearby dental offices" or even "dentist services." The first phrase is targeting a type of business or organization in the area. In the second phrase, a service is being targeted, which might result in a more lucrative conversion opportunity.

When building negative keyword lists, keyword research can also be beneficial. You can use negative keywords to prevent your PPC advertising from showing up in search queries that you know are not likely to result in more patients.

For example, an individual searching for "free services from dental offices" or "when to advertise to dentists" is unlikely to convert. Your paid ads may appear if you use broad keyword targeting without negative keywords such as "free" or "advertise".

As you can see, no matter how obvious your keyword research needs might be at the start of building out your campaign, they become more complicated as you begin to scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend.

2.) Audience Research Tips

Audience research is often mentioned as part of scaling social media ads on Facebook and Instagram for dentist paid advertising campaigns. However, Bing Ads and Google Ads also allow audience targeting.

We'll review some audience research and targeting history within Facebook Ads.

Dental office PPC advertising managers used Facebook's custom audiences extensively in the past. In fact, one of Facebook Ads' most appealing features was the ability to collect data on users, which advertisers for dental offices eagerly took advantage of.

As time went on, data privacy and machine learning both had an impact on custom audiences.

Apple's iOS 14.5 update included a pop-up message that lets users opt out of personalized ad tracking. The change negatively affected Facebook's ability to track user behavior. Even ad attribution reporting was affected.

For most dentist-focused advertising firms, machine learning algorithms greatly reduced the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences. With such sophisticated algorithms, it's often more harmful to choose your own interests compared to letting Facebook figure it out for you.

Although many dental office paid advertising companies still rely on custom audiences, the trend is shifting toward broad targeting. You can see it in every update within Facebook Ads Manager as they slowly remove interest-based targeting options, or push for "Advantage Detailed Targeting."

This blog article from Social Media Examiner does a good job of talking about recent changes to audience targeting.

It's not to say audience research and targeting are going away. There will always be targeting options that can be manipulated within dentist ad campaigns to squeeze a little extra performance.

3.) Landing Page Optimization Tips

The quality of your landing page will be a big factor in the success of your dental office paid ads campaigns.

When we take on the management of a paid advertising campaign for dentists, we start by looking over the landing pages to see if they follow best practices. Here are some of the factors we look for in this review:

• Is there a benefit-focused headline?
• Are there any images above the fold?
• Is the content written in a compelling manner?
• Am I able to find a lead form right away?
• Are the call to actions easily noticeable?
• Does the page load quickly?
• Is there social proof?
• Am I able to load the page on a mobile device?

There are so many factors that come into the design and development of a quality landing page. Here is a great blog article about what makes a results-driven landing page.

Please, don't spend money on paid advertising until you have a landing page that follows best practices! Ideally, you should never consider your landing page to be finished. Try running A/B testing every few months to continue refining your sales pitch.

4.) Conversion Funnel Tips

As an alternative to a landing page, you might want to consider building out one or more sales funnels. We rely heavily on sales funnels for lead generation, email audience building, and even online purchases.

For example, we have a client that promotes an online fitness challenge that you could even join from your local area. While managing their website advertising we built multiple sales funnels within Click Funnels. Here are some of the funnels we made:

• We used squeeze pages to help capture email addresses while building awareness for the program.
• We used lead magnets to provide people with healthy eating tips, fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peaks in exchange for an email address.
• We used application funnels to push people toward the idea of wanting to apply to participate in exclusive programs.
• We used sales letter funnels to serve as the registration system for the online program.

There are many different types of funnels, so your dental office isn't limited to only these options. Just keep in mind these can be incredibly helpful for gauging interest in a product or service, building out an email subscriber base, and selling a product or service online.

5.) CRO Tips

Having a clear understanding of your conversion rate is critical to making informed advertising decisions. The average conversion rate is between 1-3%, but that varies greatly between industries, products, and services.

Let's run through a basic scenario to help illustrate the impact of conversion rates.

1. You sell a $100 product or service on your website.
2. You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 people who visit your website you sell 1 product or service.
3. You have a $1.00 average cost per click (CPC), meaning for each person who visits your site you spend $1.00.
4. To sell 1 product or service, you need 100 clicks from paid ads, which would cost you $100. This is known as your cost per acquisition (CPA).
5. Your return on ad spend (ROAS) would be 1x, meaning for every dollar spent in paid advertising you get one dollar in return.

For most dental offices, this return on ad spend wouldn't be acceptable. Sadly, we often see this type of ROAS when jumping into new client accounts.

To improve the situation, you hire a paid advertising agency to modify your campaign settings, ad creatives, and landing page experience.

Let's assume those improvements bring your conversion rate up from 1% to 2%. That means for every 100 visits to your website you now sell 2 products. This is twice the return on ad spend! You might be profitable now selling that product or service, if your margins are good.

Understanding your conversion rate, and knowing how to improve it, can be crucial to the management of your paid ads.

6.) Ad Creation Tips

This is potentially one of the most important aspects of a Facebook Ads account, but it also applies to Google Display Ads.

When you run Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads for dentists, you are mostly targeting a cold audience that is more interested in quickly scrolling by advertisements in favor of seeing what their friends and family are up to online.

You should develop an understanding of how to capture someone's attention in a split second.

To do this, you need to build out attractive ad creatives that make someone stop for a second and say to themselves, "wait a second, what...?"

This doesn't happen by running the same ad creative over and over and over again. Even if it is a good ad, it will eventually become stale. You should change things up frequently, even if you are just targeting people nearby.

If you don't change out your ad creatives and test new ideas, you'll suffer from what is called "ad fatigue." This is the state in which your target audience has already seen your ad so many times that they instinctively scroll by it without ever interacting with your brand.

Don't be caught in this situation. You should understand when to pause an ad because it isn't performing as well as it once did. You should understand when to test new ideas, especially if you are emotionally attached to an ad that you spent a lot of time making.

Pricing for Dental Office PPC Management

If you want us to dedicate more time to your campaigns, the price of our paid ads management plans will be adjusted accordingly. Below is the starting cost for our PPC management services, but we are happy to have a conversation about adjusting the budget if your ad spend or service requirements exceed our initial estimate.

Types of Paid Ads for Dental Offices

For dental offices, there are many ways to run paid advertising. The following are some of the most common paid advertisements options for dentists.

1.) Local Ads

If you have a dental office, you can run local ads on almost any advertising platform. Depending on the nature of your nearby dental office, you may find better success in one platform versus another. You should try out every option available to see which suits you best. Now let's discuss some local advertising options.

From Google, you'll have two options.

As a first step, you can run traditional Google Adwords, possibly using their newer Performance Max campaign type. The Google algorithm finds the best combination of headlines, images, videos, and service locations to bring you local area customers using this type of dynamic ad campaign. Performance Max campaigns are used frequently by accounting, legal, dental, and medical professionals. Even local stores use this campaign type.

The second option from Google, if you are in a qualifying business industry, is to check out their Local Service Ads. As a pay-per-lead platform, Google Local Service Ads charges a flat fee per lead. Home service contractors, such as plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers, frequently use Google Local Service Ads.

You can also target people in your local area using Facebook Ads. The process is a little simpler since it just requires setting up a campaign with ad sets with geographic restrictions to ZIP codes in the target area. Localized Facebook Ads are often used by dental offices of all types.

2.) Social Media Advertising

Pretty much any online ad you see on a social network website is going to qualify as a social media ad.

It's important to keep the ad creatives fresh when running social ads. The performance of your campaign will gradually decline if you do not rotate your ad creatives every couple of weeks. A weekly change in ad creative is often recommended for higher-spend ad campaigns.

One of the best things about social media ads is that you can target audiences who aren't yet aware of your product or service. It's quite the opposite when you run search advertising since you only get to show them when someone searches for what your dental office offers.

However, this benefit can also be a curse, since conversion rates are typically lower when people aren't closer to making an immediate purchase.

3.) Search Engine Advertising

You should invest in search advertising if you know people are searching online for your products or services.

In some circles, this is referred to as dental office Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. There are different ways to explain search ads (not to be confused with SEO), which are advertisements displayed on search engines' search results pages.

If you have been running search ads on Google for a while and have been successful, consider copying your campaigns over to Bing Ads. In an October 2022 study from StatCounter, Bing was the primary search engine used by approximately 3.57% of online users.

4.) Display Ads

You'll find display ads on all kinds of message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (sometimes even local news stations), gossip websites, and more.

Google Ads and Bing Ads commonly offer these campaign types.

With display ads, all you need are a few different sizes of ad creatives. It also helps to have a general idea of your target audience, but both ad platforms have their own algorithms that help you produce results from your ad spend.

5.) Retargeting Ads

Not everyone is going to convert during their first experience with your dental office website, landing page, or sales funnel.

It is almost always recommended to set up retargeting ads to help bring people back to your website after they've had time to think through different options.

You can run retargeting ads on any ad platform, too.

6.) Shopping Ads

This type of search ad was popularized by Google Shopping Campaigns.

To get started with Google Shopping, you just need an ecommerce website, a product feed (CSV or TXT), a Google Merchant Center account, and a Google Ads account for your dental office.

With these tools in place, you'll be able to provide Google Ads an updated list of all your accurate product data, including the title, SKU, image, price, and availability. From there, they will be able to find the right types of search queries to display your products at the top of the search results page.

7.) Video Ads

You can run video ads on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and other social networking websites.

If you are interested in running YouTube Ads, you'll just need to set up a video ads campaign in Google Ads.

To run video ads in Facebook or Instagram, you'll need a working Facebook Ads account.

Both ad platforms offer excellent conversion opportunities with video ads. We frequently use video ads to showcase product launches, custom services, personal introductions, and more!

If you have the budget to support ad creatives in video format, look to implement them into your paid advertising campaigns.