Dentist Google Ads: how a dental search campaign works and what you pay for

Marketing for Dental is an independent referral service, not a marketing agency. When you send the form, your details go to an independent marketing agency that prepares any proposal and does any work.

How Google decides which dental ad shows

Google calls the decision Ad Rank: a set of values used to decide whether your ad is eligible to show and, if it is, where on the page it appears. Google runs a separate auction for each ad location, and Ad Rank looks at several factors, including your competition, the context of the person’s search and your ad quality at that moment. A higher bid alone does not settle it.

The quality side is summed up in Quality Score, which Google builds from three parts, each compared with other advertisers over the last 90 days.

Part	Google’s meaning	What it asks of a practice
Expected clickthrough rate	How likely people are to click your ad	Ad words that match what the patient typed, such as the treatment and the area
Ad relevance	How closely your ad matches the intent behind the search	Separate ad groups for separate treatments, not one ad for everything
Landing page experience	How relevant and useful your landing page is to people who click	A page about that treatment, fast on a phone, with a clear way to book

That third part is why google ads for dentists so often fail on a weak website. Sending every click to the homepage asks a person who searched for clear aligners to hunt for the answer. A page built for that treatment serves the patient and the score. See dental website design for what those pages hold.

What you pay for, and how the budget works

With search ads you pay per click. Google says the actual cost per click is the final amount you are charged for a click, and that it is often less, sometimes much less, than the most you said you would pay. You set an average daily budget and can change it at any time. If you think in months, Google divides a monthly budget by 30.4 to find the daily figure.

This page gives no figures for what a dental click costs, because costs move with the area, the treatment and the competition, and a figure from somewhere else tells you little about your own office. A useful proposal for dental ppc estimates costs from your own market, and says plainly that results vary.

Choosing the area

For routine care the area setting matters. Google’s location targeting includes an option for people who are in, or regularly in, the area you choose, and a broader option for people showing interest in that area. Most practices want the first: people near the office. A practice that sees out-of-town patients for larger treatments may want both, set up as separate campaigns so the budgets stay clear.

Google’s healthcare rules for dental ads

Google says its ads and their destinations are expected to follow the laws and industry standards for healthcare and medicine. Some healthcare content cannot be advertised at all, and some only in certain places by advertisers Google has approved. The restricted list covers things such as prescription drug services, online pharmacies, addiction services, speculative and experimental treatments and clinical trial recruitment. Ordinary dental practice ads are not named as restricted.

The limit most practices run into is audience targeting. Google lists health among its sensitive interest categories, which carry restrictions in personalized advertising such as remarketing and audience lists. In practice, health-related ads face extra limits on audience targeting. A dental campaign leans on search terms, area, schedule and good landing pages instead.

Ad words that follow the ADA Code

The ADA Code, binding on ADA members, says no dentist shall advertise in a way that is false or misleading in any material respect. It warns against statements likely to create an unjustified expectation about results, and against claims of superior quality that cannot be reasonably backed up. It lets a dentist announce a specialty only in recognized specialties and only where the dentist meets the educational requirements. State dental boards set their own advertising rules too.

Short ad text makes this easy to get wrong. Words that describe the treatment, the office and the booking options work well and stay truthful: the treatment’s name, the neighborhood, evening or weekend hours if you have them, new patients welcome, the insurance plans you accept. Words that promise how a smile will look, or that call the office superior, are the ones to drop.

Search ads or Local Services Ads?

Google also sells Local Services Ads, which have a Dentist category under health care. They charge per lead rather than per click, and leads arrive as calls and messages. Before the Google Verified badge shows, Google screens the provider and practice and checks state licenses, with NPI verification for some advertisers. Google says booking leads are not available for health care categories, and that regularly missing calls or messages can affect an ad’s ranking.

The two do different jobs. Search ads let you choose treatments, words and landing pages in detail. Local Services Ads give a simpler, per-lead listing tied to Google’s screening. Many practices run both and compare. Either way, the map listings themselves are not for sale; see local SEO for dentists for that side, and dental advertising for how search fits with social, video and mail.

How search ads and SEO work together

Ads stop when the budget stops. Pages built through dental SEO keep working. The two help each other: the search terms that bring bookings through ads show which treatment pages are worth writing, and good treatment pages lift landing page experience for the ads. A plan that treats them as one budget, with ads filling gaps while pages grow, is usually easier to manage than two separate contracts.

What to ask a dentist PPC agency

• Will the Google Ads account be in the practice’s name, with your agency added as a user?
• Is your management fee separate from the ad spend, and can we see the spend in the account itself?
• How will you split campaigns by treatment and by office?
• Which pages will the ads lead to, and will you build treatment pages if we lack them?
• Which tags and call tracking will you add, so our compliance advisor can review them?
• Who checks the ad words against the ADA Code and our state board’s rules?
• How often will you report, and what will the report show?
• Do you charge per new patient? (The answer should be no: the ADA Code generally does not let a dentist pay for the referral of a patient.)

Be wary of a dentist ppc agency that keeps the ad account in its own name, will not show the spend, or promises a set number of new patients. Paid search can be measured closely; the account should let you see exactly what you bought.

Asking is free and you never have to hire anyone.

Questions practices ask