AdWords For Dentists | The Top 3 Most Costly Mistakes

If you’re a dentist using AdWords to get new patients, one of the most frustrating things any business owner can experience is poring cash into a promising marketing campaign, only to have your heart ripped from your chest (like that dude from Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom), when you get ZERO response from that investment.

You know the feeling…

But hey…It’s not your fault! They don’t teach this stuff in dental school.

I have managed countless dental client’s marketing campaigns and over time I’ve seen some common mistakes made by dentists when it comes to their advertising using AdWords. Here are three of the most COSTLY mistakes nearly every dentist seems to make:

#1 Sending Patients To Your Website Homepage

If all of your advertising is driving traffic to your website’s home page – this is one of the biggest “NO’s” with AdWords.

People who search for a term like “dental implants” for example, click on an ad that says “dental implants” and then they expect to land on a page about “dental implants”. However you’re dropping them onto your main website…

When people land on this page they don’t get what they thought they were going to get and are presented with additional menus and info on your site to navigate.

They end up getting ticked off that they have to keep searching for the info they were looking for and they end up hitting the back button to go to the next offer which will be a different practice.

This will cost you a boat load of money and you really need to change this quick if your making this mistake.

I build custom pages for every single procedure that my clients want to advertise for. They’re called “landing pages” and if someone clicks our client’s ad for emergency dentistry, they are going to land on a page that is focused on emergency dentistry alone…NOTHING ELSE!

And here is a tip that will save you thousands of dollars on your AdWords.

Whatever page you are directing web-traffic to from your ads on Google…the visitor should only be presented with TWO CHOICES…

Call your office, AND/OR click a button to schedule an appointment – THAT’S IT!

You give them more options than that, and your conversion rates plummet because they start browsing, looking for info that they would have otherwise called to inquire about. And you lose an opportunity to convert that phone call into a new patient.

If you need help creating your landing pages for your AdWords campaign, go ahead and schedule a call with me and we can discuss a solid strategy for your practice.

#2 Don’t Be Afraid To Put a Price On It!

The simple act of adding a ballpark price to your services can save you some serious cash when you’re running an AdWords campaign for your dental practice.

Think about the amount of information that people have access to nowadays right on their phones 24/7. Our society has been conditioned to look for the best deal, and in dentistry, it’s no different. I know it seems counter intuitive because you can never beat out the corporate clinic down the street on price…you’d lose all your margin!

But think about this…Lets say you post a ballpark figure on your ad for a root canal. By doing so, you just weeded out a majority of people who would have clicked your ad to see if you had prices posted on your website. And when clicks are running you between $8.00 and $12.00 per click…those savings can add up quick!

Now don’t be afraid to post pricing on your ads or on your landing pages. You’re not locked into any pricing if you are clear that the “average cost” or “typical price” of said procedure is $X.XX.

Plus, if you want to get rid of the price shoppers or prevent them from seeing your ads altogether, you can prevent your ads from appearing when people include these types of keywords in their search criteria: “price” “quote” “affordable” “cheap” “cost” etc. Google AdWords refers to these as negative keywords.

Most people online are not going to be impressed with your 30+ years experience, so if you want to run an effective AdWords campaign for your dental practice, why not communicate in a language that your audience understands…Price!

#3 Your Budget Isn’t Following The Data

One of the major mistakes I see when dentists set up their own AdWords campaign is grouping all of their ads into a single ad-group. Another, as discussed in #1, is the lack of landing pages that allow you to track conversion ratios.

You want to allocate your budget to the ad-groups and landing pages that are performing the best – meaning producing the best ROI. It only makes sense that if your “local dentist” ad-group that includes all of your keywords like: “dentist near me”, “local dentist”, “[your city] dentist”, is producing calls and new patients at a better rate than your “emergency dentist” ad-group…Then you’ll want your money to follow the results!

This is why you want to ensure that you are tracking all the right metrics in order to make the best decisions with your ad-budget.

Here is an example:

I have a client who was running a campaign and wanted me to target multiple procedures. His dental implant ad-group was taking up a majority of the clicks and would blow through our daily budget pretty quickly, but those clicks were not resulting in phone calls. His general dentistry ad-group using local search terms was producing 2-3 phone calls a day.

We decided together that there were too many people price shopping that were clicking our dental implant ads (he was not willing to post pricing on our ads), but they were not calling his office. People searching for a local dentist on the other hand, were clicking and CALLING!

Unless you are tracking this data though, you cant make informed campaign decisions.

Here are three factors that you’ll want to keep a close eye on:

1. CTR (Click Through Rate): The percentage of people who saw your ad vs. clicked your ad. If you have a low CTR, its likely that your ad is not relevant to the people its being shown to. You’ll want to look at your audience targeting and the messaging on your ads.
2. Conversions: A defined result from your ads. This is usually going to be phone calls and optin forms where people request an appointment. If you have a low conversion ratio, you’ll want to start testing out different versions of landing pages to bump up those numbers.
3. Call Conversions: You should be tracking the phone calls coming in to the office by using a call tracking number. Also beneficial is to integrate call recording so you can use it for phone call training purposes. Software like CallTracker from Scheduling Institute can even break down that data further so you can see how many calls were new patient opportunities vs. existing patients, and it can also display how many of those people scheduled an appointment.

Conclusion

Creating an AdWords account is crazy simple and literally anyone can do it. However, actually getting meaningful value in the way of new patients and an ROI out of your AdWords campaign can be much more difficult than most dentists realize.

There are a slew of other mistakes that a dentist can make with their AdWords campaign, but these three have had the largest overall impact for our clients

By the way, if you’d like me to take a gander at your AdWords campaign and give you some detailed suggestions you can use to get better results, let me know here or in the comments! I’d be happy to help.

Did you have to learn the hard way with your dental AdWords campaign in the past? What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made?