#265 Should You Be Doing LSA Ads as a Practice Owner?

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Most dentists think Local Service Ads are a shortcut to cheap new patients but the leads often fall apart fast. In this episode, Gary Bird breaks down why LSAs can go from 20 leads to 2, how Google double dips, and why cost per lead is misleading. You’ll learn how to audit lead quality, understand pay per lead vs pay per click, and spot when your dental marketing is wasting money. Backed by data from 1,195 practices at SMC, this is what most dentists miss about new patient growth.

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Dental Marketing Goat, the go-to podcast for dentists who want to grow faster, market smarter and build practices that thrive in today’s competitive landscape.
Hosted by Gary Bird, the Dental Marketing Goat himself and founder of SMC National - recently named Best Dental Marketing Agency by over 60,000 dental professionals. Each episode unpacks the real strategies, marketing frameworks and operational shifts that high-performing practices use to attract more patients and increase production. Whether you're a solo practitioner or scaling a DSO, you’ll learn how to align your marketing, team and systems to drive predictable growth.

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Transcript

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All right, today we are going to be talking about local service ads. We recently had a doctor in our group that asked this question Has anyone used Google local service ads for their practice? We recently signed up, but it's all spam calls, and when we call back, it's people who never called us in the first place. So I want to talk to you today about local service ads. First, we're going to talk about what they are, should you be running them, and the things you need to watch for as you participate with them. So, first of all, local service ads are not new, they're just new to Dental. So Google has different kinds of ads that they let you run. They have the regular ads that you see up above, but they also have local service ads, which actually go above those. So these are some of the most attractive ads that you can get your hands on as far as real estate. The real estate of um ads being the highest, right? Think about like a beachfront property. You want the stuff closest to the water, it's going to be the most valuable. For ads, you want the things that are highest to the top because those are going to perform the best just from exposure. Okay. So local service ads are awesome because they kind of jump the line. And again, they're not new. They do exactly what you think they would do by their name. They're service ads. So a lot of home services. So uh home painters, roofers, electricians, all of these things, these services, home, home cleaning, office cleaning, all these services that you do, local service ads have been running forever. And how they work is anybody can get on and do an ad. Anybody. I could go right now and run ads for frozen pickles and sell frozen pickles, right? But with local service ads, you can't just get on and do that. You have to be a particular kind of business, and then your business has to be verified. So to set them up, it's actually a lot of work. You for the dentist, you need to make sure you have to prove uh you are who you say you are. That your name on your license actually has to match your uh the name on your business and other things. I've actually seen a lot of people who are first generation immigrants who come over here and their name gets modified one way or the other, have a lot of trouble getting local service ads up because their documents don't always align perfectly. And so a lot of times Google won't verify them. Um, you also have to prove your degree, and there's other things that they they prove. Now, on the consumer side, Google says, hey, these are people that we've already verified. We guarantee their work, and I think they give some kind of like credit guarantee or some kind of refund guarantee, something like that. They basically say, hey, we're vouching for these people. People who run other ads, Google's not vouching for them. So these are you get an extra level of accreditation, if you will, from Google, which is kind of cool, I guess. Now, in Dental, they don't let you run these until other people are ready to run them. So, what they do is they say, okay, we're gonna start letting you run uh local service ads in this market for dental. So they open up that category and then they allow the dentist to come and start applying. And there might only be one person who applies. Well, if there's only one person doing it, they won't let those go. They want multiple people running these. And then, and then so the second dentist comes, third dentist comes, fourth dentist comes, fifth dentist, and then they go, okay, now we're gonna start running local service ads, and they start running them. And then how Google gets paid, it's not by people clicking on them, it's by leads coming into you. And you don't necessarily really get to control them. You're more just like, hey, I'm a general dentist, or I'm orthodontist, or I'm a pedophrace. You don't get to control the keywords quite as much. So sometimes we'll run these and we see great results. Like the the cost per lead is low, cost per acquisition is low. But then over time, we start to see, okay, this is we're good. Google's sending us a bunch of spam. Because what Google can do is they can double dip on these, so they can allow people to fill out multiple of these forms and say, hey, we're a local service ad, or they can even get a couple clicks out of it. So they're keep keep in mind Google's business model is how do we get the best information to the searcher, but how do we also optimize for the most amount of clicks? Because when you pay$20 for a click, that patient might have clicked on three, four ads. Google's getting paid on all of those. So Google is truly selling shovels to the gold miners, right? And so what this is why Google has so much money is because they're selling something that doesn't cost them anything and they're double, triple, quadruple dipping. Okay. So local service ads, we've we've had a mixed bag. We have a couple people that do success, they're successful with them short term, but over the long term, it usually is not great. And then what we found is when we put really scrutinize the leads that have come in, we find that okay, maybe this performed well from a metric standpoint. So it was a lower cost to drive this patient through the door. But as we work through one patient after another, we start to realize uh this is Google just double dipping. Now that's not to say they can't work. I know someone's gonna pop into my comments and be like, they work great for me. I I know it's it's an active, dynamic situation. It's very similar to postcards. So postcards, when you send postcards out, they will sometimes perform really well. And then the next month or two months later, they don't perform at all. And you go, what happened? What's going on? Well, you there's a lot of dynamics that you have, market dynamics going on. And so if you have 10,000 people you're trying to target and you're the only person marketing to them via postcards, more than likely you're gonna get really good results. However, if 10 other dentists get involved and they all start mailing as well, you're not gonna get the same results. In fact, you're gonna get a tenth of the results. So if you got 20 the first time, you might only get two the second time, and you're just you're scratching your head going, what's going on? These think of these as very similar to postcards that you don't have as much control over, and you have to do your due diligence and really dive into the leads and make sure that you understand what they're actually doing, how they're performing, um, or work with a marketing company that does that. We do this automatically. We we submit these, we test them, and we do it regularly across the country. So, anyways, hopefully this was helpful. Let me know down in the comments down below if this was helpful to you or if you have any questions about local service ads, we're happy to help you. Whether you work with us or not, we're happy to answer any questions. So, hope you have a great week. Keep crushing, my friend, and we'll see you soon.