Pay-per-click (PPC) ads can be a powerful, exciting tool for dental services looking to draw in potential patients—if they’re used correctly. On the flipside, they can become unnecessarily expensive quite quickly if they aren’t. To help you save your time and money, we put together this blog outlining the effectiveness of PPC ads for dentists, and how to successfully plan and execute your own PPC campaigns.
How Do You Advertise With PPC?
There are many types of PPC advertising: search, display, remarketing, video, social media, shopping. You can also get Gmail sponsored and Amazon advertising, but search is the most common type and the best to start off with experimenting.
As the name pay-per-click suggests, once your ad appears, you pay when someone clicks on it. It’s also possible to still get visibility and even engagements without the cost if you structure your PPC ads carefully.
However, keyword bidding happens constantly, and you can’t predict how many potential patients will click on your ad. The good news is that you can set limits to your spending, and because of this, advertisers don’t need to unnecessarily keep spending their budget. By fixating on a particular niche or patient base, you can get the most return on your investment. This brings us to our next point.
Keyword Research Is Essential
Before putting together a PPC campaign, it’s important to know what keywords potential patients are looking up when searching for dental services online. This could include terms like convenient scheduling, open appointments, new patients, or the name of a given insurance provider. Also, consider using a few, longer targeted keywords in your PPC campaign, as they tend to be less expensive.
Conversely, another digital marketing tool you should know about are negative keywords. Whereas targeted keywords are used to put your ads in front of potential patients, negative keywords prevent your ads from being shown to anyone searching for a certain word or phrase.
By using negative keywords, you’re ensuring that your PPC ads aren’t being seen by people you aren’t targeting, and ultimately costing you money with each click. For example, if you’re going after “dental services” as a keyword, you should add the name of an insurance provider you don’t accept. This way, when a client searches for a dental provider that accepts United Healthcare, or another insurance provider that you do not accept they will not see your ad show up.
While you may naturally discover some negative keywords over time—from analyzing search term reports and learning which search terms people in your targeted area use—it doesn’t hurt to be proactive, which is why it’s essential to do your keyword research frequently.
Target Your Local Audience
Building off of targeted areas, it’s also important that PPC ads for dentists prioritize local areas. You can choose to run ads in specific zip codes to help draw in local patients and avoid unnecessary spending.
By targeting a local audience, you’re increasing your chances of getting more patients, which also means more profit. Include your location in your PPC ads to let visitors know where you’re located and give you a competitive advantage over competitors who don’t make this information quickly available. This will reduce the likelihood that people will click on your ads, but those who do click on them will be much more likely to call or complete a form because they know the area in which your business is located.
Implement Ad Extensions
Since the space provided for your PPC ads is limited, you should look into ad extensions. Ad extensions are free add-ons that allow you to give potential patients more detailed information about your office. They are beneficial to display your address and phone number, and this strategy can boost your call inquiries and foot traffic. Dental practices can use ad extensions to promote specific pages and ongoing promotions, display offered services, highlight selling points, or mention location info.
Roll Out Call-only PPC Ads
A call-only ad will only show up in searches for people who are using a device capable of making phone calls. In this scenario, there are fewer steps to securing a lead: a potential patient sees your ad, then taps it to call you directly.
If you can get people to call and inquire about your dental services easily from their mobile devices, you can maximize your potential return on investment.
Differentiate Your Dental Services
To really utilize the limited space PPC ads offer, you should prioritize what makes your practice unique. Positive testimonials are particularly valuable to potential patients, so highlighting any you may have can go a long way. Other propositions worth mentioning are readily available appointments as most people searching for dental services are doing so with the intention of booking soon.
Do you speak Spanish or any other common languages? Are you offering any specials or discounts for new patients? What about insurance or income requirements? These are a few points you could emphasize in your PPC campaigns to draw people in.
Use Landing Pages
Another self-explanatory term, landing pages are where you direct potential patients after they click on your ads. These can be existing website pages, or custom-built, conversion-driven landing pages specifically for ads, either is fine as long they emphasize the same services as the ad that your visitors engaged with.
For instance, if a potential patient clicks on an ad promoting dental implants, your landing page should highlight the same dental implants service. Your landing pages should also include a clear call-to-action (CTA) that encourages some type of action or engagement on the visitor’s part.
Track and Study Trends
As mentioned earlier, keyword bidding happens constantly. To counter this, you will need to consistently monitor the performance of your PPC ads. As time goes on, some search terms may be pulling more leads than others, and you may want to focus on those to maximize your budget. You can make changes to your budget to support campaigns that are producing better results.
There are many tools available for you to analyze and evaluate your PPC campaigns, so you can always know what’s working, and what isn’t. Google Analytics and Yahoo Web Analytics are two free tools available to you, however, there are many more on the market.
Some metrics that you should always be tracking are number of clicks, click-through rate (the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page, email, or advertisement), cost per click, form submissions, and phone calls.
Versa Creative: Your Dental PPC Marketing Partners
All of the information presented here can help your practice grow faster than ever before, but it does take a fair amount of time and testing to implement correctly. This is where a full-service digital marketing agency like Versa Creative can help.
We have a team of PPC ad experts, as well as writers, designers, and videographers who can come together and help your office find new customers and reach new heights. Reach out to us today to get started!
