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PPC for dentists
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Paid search works for a dental practice when it buys the treatments you want more of and have room for. Everything else about it, from the landing page to the tracking, follows from that.
Most dental ad accounts are set up to get the phone ringing, and that is the wrong goal. A phone that rings with calls you cannot book, or with enquiries for treatments you do not want more of, costs money twice: once for the click and again in reception time. Good PPC for dentists starts from the diary, not the keyword list.
What paid search is for in a private practice
Paid search earns its place on high-value treatments where the practice has capacity: implants, Invisalign and other clear aligners, whitening, emergency appointments, and new private patients. Each of those has a patient value that can carry the cost of a click, and each is searched by somebody who has already decided to have something done.
What it is not for is demand you cannot serve. If the practice is not taking new NHS patients, paying to be found by people looking for an NHS dentist fills the phone with calls that end in an apology. The same goes for a treatment whose clinician is booked for months. Google Ads for dentists works best as a set of small campaigns, one per treatment, each of which can be turned up or down as capacity changes.
The ads should follow the diary. When the book is full for a treatment, the campaign for it should already be paused.
One landing page for each treatment
Somebody who searches for implants in your town and clicks your ad wants to read about implants at your practice. Sending them to the homepage makes them look for it again, and many will simply go back to the results. Each treatment you advertise needs its own page, written for that one decision.
That page should say what the treatment is, who carries it out and what they are qualified to do, a price from, and whether finance is available. Finance is a regulated credit promotion, so the representative example has to come from your provider exactly as they word it. Then it needs one clear next step: book a consultation, online or by phone, without having to hunt for either.
Before and after photographs help on cosmetic work, provided consent is recorded, the images are not retouched in a way that misleads, and nothing implies a guaranteed result.
Judge spend per consultation booked, not per click
The cost of a click tells you almost nothing. What matters is what each booked consultation costs, and how many of those consultations go on to start treatment. To know that, the account has to see the booking, not just the visit.
Track calls from the ads and from the landing pages with call tracking numbers, so you can see which campaign and which search led to each call. Track online bookings and consultation requests as conversions in their own right. Then record the source against each new patient in your booking system or CRM, so that months later you can still say which ad produced which patient.
Once that is in place, Google's bidding can be pointed at booked consultations rather than clicks, and budget can move towards the treatments that actually fill the chair.
Catchment, negative keywords and reception hours
Target the area patients realistically travel from, not the whole county. For routine and emergency work that is a short distance; for implants or aligners people will often travel further, so those campaigns can reach wider than the rest.
Negative keywords stop the account paying for searches that will never book. The usual list for a private practice includes free, NHS if you are not taking NHS patients, jobs and vacancies, courses and training, and anything that signals a student or a dental professional rather than a patient. Read the search terms report every week at first; it will show you words nobody thought to exclude.
Schedule call ads around reception hours. An ad that invites somebody to ring at eight in the evening, when nobody will answer, spends money and leaves a poor first impression. Outside those hours, send people to online booking instead.
Facebook and Instagram for considered treatments
Search catches people at the moment of need. Facebook ads for dentists, and Instagram with them, do something different: they reach people who might want straighter or whiter teeth but have not started looking yet, and they remind people who read a treatment page and did not book.
That suits considered cosmetic treatments that people weigh up over weeks, such as aligners and whitening, and it suits retargeting. It suits emergency work badly. Meta has its own advertising policies for health-related ads, including limits on copy that implies you know something about the viewer's own health or appearance, so write to the treatment rather than to the person's flaws.
The rules on dental advertising
Dental advertising in the UK has to follow the GDC's guidance on advertising and the CAP Code. In practice that means no misleading claims, nothing that pushes a patient into a decision, such as false deadlines, and qualifications and titles stated accurately. Have every ad and landing page checked by whoever is responsible for compliance in the practice before it goes live, and again when offers change.
Google also applies healthcare ad policies to some treatments, which can limit where or whether an ad shows. Check each campaign's approval status rather than assuming an ad is running because it was published.
What we would do first
A practice owner asking for help with ads usually wants five things, in their own words: the chair filled with the treatments they want, ads that pause when the book is full, a page that turns an ad click into a booked consultation, a site that patients trust on a phone, and knowing which ad produced each patient. PPC is only one of those, and it works better with the other four.
So the order is tracking first, so every call and booking arrives with its source. Then one treatment page, for the treatment with the most value and the most free capacity. Then a tightly targeted search campaign for that treatment, with the negatives and the schedule in place from day one, and social retargeting once there is traffic to retarget. How we run the whole funnel for a practice, organic search included, is on our page for dental practices.
