What Is PPC for Dentists?
PPC for dentists is an effective digital marketing strategy for dental practices. In this strategy, dental clinics pay a fee only when someone clicks on their ads. With this strategy, dentists can display ads on search engines, where they appear when someone enters specific dental-related keywords or queries.
Apart from putting display ads on search engines, PPC for dentists also allows you to put ads on several other channels. If you run a dental clinic, you can use different types of PPC ads to increase your profitability and grow your practice. Some of the major kinds of PPC ads include the following:
Search Ads
These are the paid ads that appear in a user’s search results on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
Display Ads
These ads appear (in digital media) in front of people who have previously shown interest in dental services.
Remarketing Ads
These types of PPC ads appear in front of people who have visited your website in the recent past or searched for your specific dental office.
Video Ads
These are the ads that appear at the beginning or in the middle of videos or TV shows. They use a mix of mediums to get the point across.
Social Media Ads
These kinds of PPC ads appear on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X (Twitter), and LinkedIn.
While PPC ads can occur on different platforms, some of the most popular ones are Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Google Display Network.
Top Benefits of Running PPC Ads for Dentists
Running PPC ads has several advantages for your dental practice. While you should consider all the major strategies for your digital marketing plan, PPC ads for dentists can offer some exceptional benefits that other advertising strategies do not.
Here are some of the most significant advantages of using PPC in your digital marketing campaign:
Provides Instant Online Visibility
With PPC ads, you get immediate visibility on search engines and social media platforms. This gives your dental clinic immediate exposure to potential patients who are actively looking for dental services or those interested in maintaining dental hygiene. Your PPC ads can appear in search engine results, website pages, social media feeds, and other relevant locations where potential patients will notice them.
Helps Reach a Targeted Audience
PPC ads also enable you to target your desired audience with precision. If you want, you can reach out to people based on a specific location with PPC ads. This ensures that your message reaches local residents. Demographic targeting can also focus on specific age groups or interests, like older adults for dental implants or families for pediatric dentistry.
Allows Easy Measuring
One of the major advantages of a PPC marketing campaign is that all its aspects are measurable. From the number of clicks and impressions to the rate of conversion, you can measure everything. The data-driven approach gives you a clear picture of which ads are working and which are not, allowing you to make necessary adjustments to boost the effectiveness of your campaign.
Makes Budgeting Simple to Control
While planning a PPC campaign, you get the liberty to set a predefined budget for it. This is particularly useful for smaller clinics that have a limited budget for marketing campaigns. With this strategy, you are not committed to making a large upfront investment. You can simply adjust your spending based on the campaign’s performance. With the right strategy, you can fine-tune your spending in real-time to maximize your marketing return on investment (ROI). At the same time, you can have tight control over dental advertising costs.
Gives You a Competitive Advantage
If you do a market survey, you will find a dental clinic in almost every block. PPC ads help your dental clinic stand out in a crowded market. By appearing in targeted search results and individualized social media feeds, your clinic gains more visibility among potential patients. This gives new and smaller practices a fair playing field to compete with established practices. Apart from giving you increased exposure, these ads also connect you directly with the ones seeking dental services.
8 Tips for More Successful Campaigns
You will be surprised to know that a significant number of local clinics and practices use PPC advertising to improve their online visibility. In order to stand out in the competition, you need to use the following tips while working on your dental PPC campaign.
Focus on High-Intent Keywords
You need to target the right keywords that indicate an immediate requirement or strong interest, such as “urgent dental care” and “root canal treatment near me.” By focusing on these high-intent keywords, you can attract patients actively seeking specific dental services. Use PPC keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner to identify the high-intent keywords that are relevant to your services. You also need to pay attention to negative keywords and use them carefully to prevent your ads from appearing in irrelevant searches.
Target Local Audiences
While setting your PPC campaigns, you should target the specific geographic location around your clinic. This will ensure that potential patients in your area can see your ads. You can focus on keywords that target specific locations, such as “St. Louis dental clinic.” Alternatively, you can use settings in Google Ads to specify a radius around your clinic’s location. This activity increases the chance of attracting patients who are most likely to visit your clinic.
Create Campaigns for Each Service
Instead of promoting all your services in a single campaign, consider segmenting your PPC ad campaigns based on the different services you offer. This strategy allows you to personalize your ad messaging and landing pages for maximum impact. As people looking for specific services discover your ads and land on relevant pages, they are more likely to convert.
H3 – Utilize Ad Assets Effectively
You should also start using ad assets (previously called extensions) to enhance Google search ads. These assets provide additional information and contact options. Ad assets can include direct links to pages like “Book an Appointment,” “Contact Us,” or specific services. If you are planning to set up mobile ads, you can use a phone call asset. This will allow your potential patients to contact your clinic directly from the ad. These assets can help make it easier for patients to take immediate action.
Optimize Ads for Mobile Devices
You must be aware that a majority of the people in the world now look for information on their smartphones. So, it is important that you personalize your PPC ads for mobile users. Many potential dental patients search for services like emergency dental care on the go. Including easy-to-use features like a click-to-call button in ads can improve your conversion rates. Also, you can drive more users to your landing pages when they are mobile-friendly and can load faster.
H3 – Feature Patient Testimonials
For your PPC ads to be more impactful, add patient testimonials to your ads. This will help you build trust and credibility among potential patients. You can add text quotes for search ads and use a combination of images or short video testimonials for social media campaigns. You can ask your existing patients to share their testimonials. You may also take screenshots of positive reviews people have left for your dental practice on GMB listings, Facebook, or Yelp.
Use Tools for Better Campaign Insights
You will need the right tools to fine-tune and scale your PPC campaigns from time to time. You will come across several good PPC analytics tools to manage and optimize your ad campaigns. It will be better to identify your requirements first and then shortlist the tools that meet those requirements. With the right tools, you will get access to actionable insights and can use them to build strategies that improve your PPC campaigns, as well as SEO and social media efforts.
Research Competitor Ads for Ideas
Lastly, you should keep a close eye on your competitors’ PPC ad campaigns. Assess their ad copies, designs, and offers to get a clear picture of what might work for them. Also, take note of when competitors highlight certain services, like pain-free treatments or cosmetic dentistry. Consider how you can uniquely promote your services while highlighting your strengths or offerings.
Setting up a Successful PPC Ad Campaign
Before you create a dental PPC ad campaign yourself, you need to research keywords and audience. The clarity of which keywords to target will ensure your ads appear for relevant queries. At the same time, understanding your target audience allows you to create compelling ad copy and landing pages that will convert better. While you can create PPC ad campaigns for different platforms, we’ll discuss how you can set up a PPC ad campaign on Google Ads.
- Open a Google Ads account and create a new campaign.
- Choose the campaign objective. You have the option to choose from “sales,” “leads,” “website traffic,” “product and brand consideration,” “brand awareness and reach,” “app promotion,” “local store visits and promotions,” and the option to “create a campaign without a goal’s guidance.” Dental practices typically choose “Leads.”
- Next, you need to choose your campaign type. You can choose from options like “search,” “performance max,” “display,” “shopping,” “video,” and “demand gen.” For your dental PPC campaign, select “search” as your campaign type.
- Select the ways you would like to achieve your goal. There are options like website visits, phone calls, store visits, app downloads, and lead form submissions. In this case, we’ll choose “website visits.”
- Now, name your campaign and click on the “Continue” button.
Next, you will have to configure the dental PPC advertising campaign as per your requirements. This includes the following:
- Set your budget.
- Choose your target audience based on factors like language, behaviour, location, and more.
- Add keywords. This is one of the crucial steps in the whole process. So, do your keyword research well.
- Create your ad by adding elements like headlines, descriptions, assets (ad extensions), and URL paths.
- Now, follow along and complete all the steps according to your campaign’s requirements and objectives.
- Lastly, review the campaign. You can look at the “campaign optimization score” and follow the given recommendations to enhance it.
- Once you have reviewed everything and feel that it is good to go, click “Publish Campaign” and go live.
How Much Does It Cost?
Dental clinics in the US spend anywhere between $500 and $5000 a month on their PPC campaigns. However, the numbers can be higher or lower, depending on the campaign goals and other factors. It is important to note that spending more money on PPC ads does not always get you better results. The key to success is to go after commercial-intent keywords that have higher chances of conversions.
The cost of PPC for dental clinics may vary depending on factors like the competitiveness of keywords, geographic segmentation, and the specific goals of the campaign. In the field of dental practices, targeting generic keywords like “emergency dentist” or “dental implants” costs more on Google ads due to intense competition. The cost may also vary based on the campaign’s scope. A national campaign will naturally need a larger budget than a targeted local PPC campaign.
Key Terms You Should Understand
Now that you know how to set up a PPC campaign for dental practice, let’s learn about the common PPC terms you may encounter while running the campaign.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
CPC is the amount of money you pay every time someone clicks on your PPC ad. Your goals should be to keep those clicks affordable while still attracting prospective patients.
Impressions
These represent the number of times your ad appears in search results. More impressions mean more people have seen your message. Usually, content with higher rankings in SERPs receives more impressions.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
This is the percentage of impressions that convert into actual clicks. If you have a high CTR, it means your ad is able to grab the attention and interest of your target audience.
Conversion Rate
This is the percentage rate of clicks that drive a desired action. Such actions can be scheduling an appointment, registering for a free consultation, downloading an e-book, etc.
Keyword Bidding
This is the process of bidding on particular keywords related to dental services. You need to bid for such keywords so that your ad shows up when someone searches those terms.
Quality Score
This is a score Google uses to find out the relevance and quality of an ad based on elements like chosen keywords, landing pages, and ad text.
Audience Targeting
This refers to the practice of choosing particular groups of audiences to show your ads. Here, the users are chosen based on criteria like interests, demographics, and behaviors.
Retargeting
As the name suggests, this method lets you target users who have previously visited your site.
Geotargeting
This practice lets you target potential patients based on their geographic location. It is particularly useful for local dental clinics.
FAQs
How Do I Make the Most out of My Budget?
There are several ways to make the most out of your budget with dental PPC. If you are on a tight budget, you can use the following tips:
- Identify high-intent keywords and target them throughout the campaign
- Create persuasive ad copy that can convert
- Constantly monitor the PPC metrics and optimize the campaign as per requirements
- Track the conversions to identify the customer journey and understand which touchpoints are more effective
- Continuously refine your audience targeting options based on demographics, interests, and behaviors
You can also consider hiring a reliable dental PPC agency for comprehensive support within your budget.
Should I Invest in PPC over SEO?
While PPC and SEO both help your dental practice get more online visibility, they serve different business goals. If you want to drive traffic to your site quickly, PPC is a great option to consider. The PPC ads can appear on your preferred location (search results, websites, social media platforms, etc.) within hours or days of launching a campaign. You also get to target specific demographics, locations, and interests.
SEO takes time to show results. It usually takes about 4-6 months to more than a year to display some noticeable changes in traffic and other metrics. However, it is a sustainable way to build a lasting online presence and brand authority. If you do not want to wait for months, you should choose PPC ad campaigns over SEO.
Can I Advertise on Both Search Engines and Social Media?
You can run dental PPC ads on both search engines and social media. You will have to bid separately for the channels and run your campaigns separately, but it is possible to advertise your dental practice on both search engines and social media with PPC.
Search engine ads are generally targeted based on user searches. Here, keywords are chosen, and the ads will display when a user searches those keywords. On the other hand, social media ads are generally targeted based on user interests and other pages they have followed or interacted with on social media.
Where Do Dental PPC Ads Appear?
Dental PPC ads can appear in several places if you want them to. They can appear in search engine results, social media feeds, website pages, and more.
Search Engine Results: If you choose to promote your practice on search engines, the ads can appear as the first or last few results on a search engine results page (SERP) for a relevant keyword query.
Social Media Feeds: If you invest in social media PPC ads, these ads can appear on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc.
Website Pages: You can also show your ads on numerous sites that agree to show Google Text, image, and video ads. These ads are shown within the site’s content and do not utilize traditional keyword-based targeting. Instead, they use audiences and demographics.