Eight Reasons Why Your Dental Practice's Google Ads Are Not Working

In this episode, Benjamin Suggs discusses eight reasons dental practices' Google Ads may not work effectively. The first reason is budget, as setting a low budget may result in limited clicks and missed opportunities. The second reason is not having a compelling offer or special promotion, which can attract more clicks and conversions. The third reason is not utilizing location assets or ad extensions, which can help dominate the search results page. Other reasons include not leveraging assets like site links and call-outs, targeting the wrong geographic area, not using negative keywords effectively, not converting leads effectively, and relying on Google's AI instead of managing the campaign hands-on.

Keywords:

Google Ads, dental practices, budget, compelling offers, special promotion, location assets, ad extensions, site links, callouts, geographic targeting, negative keywords, lead conversion, Google's AI

Takeaways:

• Setting an appropriate budget is crucial for the success of Google Ads campaigns.
• Having a compelling offer or special promotion can attract more clicks and conversions.
• Utilizing location assets and ad extensions can help dominate the search results page.
• Leveraging assets like site links and callouts can make ads more appealing and increase click-through rates.
• Targeting the right geographic area is important to avoid wasting ad spend.
• Using negative keywords effectively can prevent irrelevant clicks and save money.
• Converting leads effectively requires proper training and prompt follow-up.
• Managing the campaign hands-on is essential to ensure ads are aligned with the practice's goals and offerings.

Chapters

00:00

Introduction: Eight Reasons Why Your Dental Practice's Google Ads Are Not Working

03:23

Reason 2: The Importance of Compelling Offers and Special Promotions

06:11

Reason 3: Dominating the Search Results Page with Location Assets and Ad Extensions

08:34

Reason 5: Targeting the Right Geographic Area for Effective Ad Campaigns

10:30

Reason 6: Using Negative Keywords to Prevent Irrelevant Clicks

12:51

Reason 7: Converting Leads Effectively for Better ROI

17:39

Reason 8: The Pitfalls of Relying on Google's AI for Ad Campaigns

This episode's client spotlight:
Coastal Kids Dentistry: https://coastalkidspediatricdentist.com | https://g.co/kgs/yU7xTYy
Dentistry of Sandy Springs:  https://dentistryofsandysprings.com | https://g.co/kgs/EQezDLR
Shore Endodontics: 

For 12+ years, Flow New Patient Marketing has had a simple mission… to bring you as many quality new patients as possible. We believe in ensuring that when a potential patient needs a provider, you are the one they find, choose, and set an appointment with. We Get You More *Profitable* New Patients!

• No long-term contracts.
• Our clients average an 8X return on investment.
• Personalized, non-corporate approach.
• 5-star reviewed.

Find us:

Website: https://newpatientsflow.com

Google: https://g.co/kgs/zqWTc5a

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/newpatientsflow

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/newpatientsflow/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/newpatientsflow

Transcript

Ben (00:02.6)

Hello, hello everybody. Welcome back to the Dental Flow Podcast. As always, I am your host, Benjamin Suggs. Today I'm going to be flying solo, but talking about a topic that I think is very important and it should be very important for any dentist that is running Google Ads today. Today we're going to talk about eight reasons why your dental practices Google Ads are not working. So if you're a dentist out there and either yourself or through an agency, you're running Google Ads, you're not getting results.

Here's eight things you can look at as potentially the culprit on why those Google ads aren't working. So we're going to dive right in. The first one, of course, is always as budget. So with Google ads, when you run campaigns, they require you to enter a daily budget. So let's say your budget is $2 ,000 for the month. Then you want to take that $2 ,000 and divide it by 30 .4, which is the average number of days in a month. And that'll give you your

daily budget that you set. So let's say that your daily budget is $30 and the average cost for a click in your area is $11. So unfortunately, once you get a few clicks, you're going to be shut down for the rest of the day. So you're only going to be averaging about two clicks per day. Now $11 is pretty high. I throw that number out there, but really that's the type of number we see for things like Invisalign.

some types of implants and depending what kind of targeting you're using, they could, you could be that high cost per click, but it's something to keep in mind is that if your budget gets shut off for the day at noon, then you're missing out on all those clicks that are coming in that afternoon from people looking for a dentist just like you. So budget is something that is very important to look at. And when you look at it, you really have to factor in a few things. One is competition. So if you're in a town,

where you've got 20 other dentists who are running ads and competing for all the same search terms and clicks that you are, your cost per click is getting much higher than a dentist who's in a small rural town where they only have two or three competitors competing. So competition's gonna drive up your cost per click. So if you set your budget too low, you're not gonna be able to win in that space. You're gonna have to kind of compare and compete with your competition.

Ben (02:27.896)

The other thing to look at is the number of services you're trying to market for. So if you're trying to market for general dentistry, emergency dentistry, Invisalign, cosmetic, implant, obviously you're going to need a much bigger budget to compete for all of those services that you're trying to market for. And when you look at things like cosmetic dentistry, veneers, or full mouth dental implants, unfortunately we have to spend more money.

those ads because there's people all over the sales funnel who are searching for those. There's people who are kicking the tires to learn a little bit more about full mouth dental implants. And then there's people all the other side of the funnel who are actively looking for a dentist who could complete the surgery for them. So because of that, there's so many people across that spectrum and there's so many searches happening every day. You've got to spend more money to lend fewer people in the chair.

versus say general dentistry, checkups, cleanings, things like that, where you don't have to spend as much to get a lot of people into the chair. So budget is probably always the number one thing. I get calls from dentists all the time who say, all right, I want to run ads and I want my budget to be $500 a month. And we have to tell them like, that's not even a good starting point. Unfortunately, you know, we could do that for you and we'll take our fee, but it's not going to deliver results for you because you're going to get shut off each day.

too early and you're not going to get a number of clicks you need to turn those into the patients in your chairs. So budget's always the number one thing to look at in a campaign that's not really functioning. Number two, the second thing you need to look at if your ads are not performing is what your offer is. You know, a lot of dentists I understand don't really like to do special offers for new patients, but we think it's pretty critical if you're going to run ads and I'll tell you

If you look at a normal search that happens on a computer, someone sits down on a phone or a desktop and they type in Dennis near me. So they're going to see at least a minimum of four results popping up at the top for that Google Ads results page. And out of those four results, they're going to choose which one to click on. So if three of those results have a special offer included and one does

Ben (04:45.51)

That's the one that's most likely not going to click, get clicked on in that scenario. So having a special promoting a special is very, very helpful to get more people to click on your advertisement. Now, the interesting thing that we see is even though we run the special, a lot of times we'll get more calls, but we still will get people who aren't even asking for the special. So it's like the special gets them to click to your website, to read about your practice and call

and then they forget about the special they initially saw anyway. So I'm a big believer in using specials of some sort. If you're running an emergency campaign, you probably want to have a special for people without insurance. You know, even a general campaign, you want to have a special for people without insurance. Even if you have an in -house plan, we like to add a special on top of that because, you know, an in -house plan is asking someone for a 12 month commitment where they're not ready to do that if they haven't set foot in your practice yet.

So highly recommend a special. The good thing about those non -insured patients is they tend to have more work that needs to be done. So it's worth it to offer them something. Fantastic. Okay. Number three, the third reason why your Google ads are probably not performing well is the location asset or ad extension. So what I mean by that is that we have the ability to not only show your ads where the ads show up on the top of the page,

but we can connect it to your Google business profile so that your ad will also show up in that map pack on the page. That is what you really want to do. We call it omnipresence. You want to dominate the space on that page. You want people to see you here, see you here, and see you here. So if you connect that location extension, you can actually start showing up on the map with your ad, as well as showing up in the Google ads results.

The key with that is, that if your local optimization is not where it needs to be, and you're not showing up for whatever reason in that map pack, the ad will pop in there for you. This is incredibly valuable. If you're a dentist in a small town and you're trying to market yourself in your town and you're running ads in the town next door, the likelihood of you showing up at the town next door's map pack is almost zero. Is Google saying you're not even in this town? Why would we show you

Ben (07:04.552)

But you can definitely show up through the ad, which is incredibly important. So even if it's a 15 minute drive for those folks, they still may want to come to your practice because they see your offer. They see what you do. They see your reviews and they see your great and they want to come to your practice. All right. What are we on? Reason number four assets in general. So in addition to that location asset, there are other assets that you can use on your ads, things like site links, service extensions.

call outs, phone number. These are all things that you should be, they have image extensions now, all things that you should be leveraging in your ads. The reason we use these things is because, whereas if again, think about you showing up with three other ad results. If you're showing up and they have more links to click than you do, they're going to draw people's attention more so than you are. The other cool thing about those assets, especially the site links is that it makes your ad result look more like an

organic results. So for those people who say, I never ever click on ads ever know you're tricking them into clicking on ads by having that stuff there. They're going to look at it and say, look, here's an organic search result. Let me click on that and see, check out what this dentist is all about. Number five, geographic targeting. So there's some services where we feel, yes, you can target far and wide, meaning that, you know, geographically, you could say, I want my ads to show 30 miles away from my practice.

Those tend to be the higher tickets more scarce type of services like sleep dentistry sedation dentistry implants Invisalign things like that things that people will likely travel farther for If you can position yourself as the dentist who's much better at it has better technology has better sedation options all that stuff But when it comes to like cleanings exams x -rays General dentistry people typically don't want to travel that far if they have options right around

Unless they're up in some rural area where they don't have a dentist, of course they'll travel to you. But in most cases these days, every town is going to have some sort of a dentist there. So they can go locally to get those general basic services. So we see a lot where I'll have clients who are like, no, no, no, I want to run my ads 20 miles away for general dentistry. And we're able to show them by looking at the data after doing it a few months that the people that are looking at the ads up there are calling.

Ben (09:33.128)

and saying, hey, where is your practice located? And then they hear the answer, they hang up or they're calling and actually booking appointment. And then the day the appointment is due, they're thinking, I'm not driving 25 miles to get to that practice. So I'm going to not show up for my, for my, appointment, which of course the worst thing that we want is for someone to schedule and not show up. So make sure you look at where you're targeting your ads and make sure you know if

you know, it's a higher ticket service than sure you could target further away, but you could be losing a lot of money by having people click on your ads, but not actually take an action because they see, this person's way too far away from me. So check your geographic targeting, see how far away you are targeting your practice. Number six, believe that we are on. Yes. Number six, you're not effectively using negative keywords.

Negative keywords are a great tool that Google gives us. And I hope they keep it around forever because it is the best tool that we have to try and get a situation where you're not having people click on your ads who are not ideal patients for you. So what I mean by that is, you know, negative keywords should be things like Medicaid. If you don't take Medicaid, negative keywords that we like to use are things like the cheapest, cheaper, cheap. Anyone who types in cheap.

low cost, things like that. They're not looking for premier services at dentistry. They're looking for the absolute cheapest thing they can find, which is maybe your practice, probably not. So make sure you're using those negative keywords effectively and judiciously. I mean, you need to go in very often and make sure that if people are searching for you, if you can look at the search terms and see that people are looking, typing in things and finding your ads that you don't want them to find your ads.

You want to put those things as a negative keywords to keep those people from seeing your ads because somebody clicking costs you money. They click on your ad that costs you money. They call your practice. They talk to your front desk. That's costing you time and money because they're taking up your time of your front desk person who's answering that call when they're never going to schedule an appointment because you're not offering what they're looking for. So make sure you use negative keywords correctly because Google is

Ben (11:53.544)

pretty all over the place with those things. Even if you say, I only want my ad to show up when someone types in the word dentist, you're going to see all kinds of weird variations that they are showing your ads for. So it's up to you to go in there and put in those negative keywords to minimize that as much as possible. And it even could be another dentist's name. If you don't want to show up, if someone types in dentist in your town, Dr. Joe Smith, they're looking for Dr. Joe Smith, not necessarily looking for you. So you probably want a negative keyword, Dr. Joe Smith as

All right, number seven. This is a big one. Your team is not converting the leads effectively. So as a dental marketer myself, we know that there's only so much control we have over this process. Like we can get qualified leads to pick up the phone and call your practice, but we have little control over what happens once that phone call is made. Yes, we can do training. We have training options for people.

we can record calls and play them back for the dentist and say, Hey, look, you know, we're not doing a good job converting these calls, but at end of the day, it's still not something we necessarily can control apart from setting up our own, you know, phone bank and taking all the calls for all of our clients, which we don't want to do. We want you guys to set up and build a relationship with these potential new patients. So there'll be patients for a long time. So, make sure you are putting some money into training your front desk.

on how to effectively convert new patients. So there's a few things that you need to look at in there. One, make sure they're answering the calls. I cannot tell you how often this is an issue. When we run phone tracking for a client and we even see that calls happening during business hours are not being answered, that's always a real problem that needs to be fixed. As long as people are sitting there, those phone calls should be answered. Now it may not even be your front desk fault.

if it's happening that they're not answering calls. could be they're too busy making outbound calls to patients to confirm appointments or whatever they're doing. Or they're calling the insurance company all day to try and sort out people's insurance and they can't answer the phone because they're on the other line. So first and foremost, make sure you're answering the phones. When we hear the calls, very rarely do people leave messages anymore. So if people are getting your voicemail, good chance they're

Ben (14:20.028)

going to leave a message. Very important to know that. Secondly, when your people do answer the call, they need to be trained in these sales tactics to get that person to a point. Just answering questions is not enough. You can't just pick up the phone, hi, this is XYZ Dental, thanks for calling, and then let the person ask questions and let it just go on. But you've got to put that person in a sales position.

So they're selling that person, that potential patient on why they wanna come to your office and not just answering their questions. And another huge thing that we see, which is the most common reason where a patient doesn't convert, is that the rep who's answering the call is letting the call in without even offering an appointment time. You should never end a call without offering an appointment time. Even if that person said,

Are you in network by insurance? unfortunately, we're not in network with your insurance, but we do take it. And if everything has gone wrong up to that point, you still don't let that call in without saying, well, you know, we have an appointment Tuesday at 10 o 'clock if you'd like to come in, offer that time, make it real, make the person say no to you before that phone call ends. Don't let it just stop. And we hear that all the time where the person asks a few questions, the rep answers the questions, then there's an uncomfortable silence and.

person says, okay, I'll call you back. Let me tell you, they never call back. We can see in call tracking. can see if that number pops up again, rarely does it. They rarely ever called back. never let a phone call in without offering an appointment time. Very important. Another thing is what we call speed to lead. So we use a lot of different ways for people to contact your practice. They can fill out a form, they can book online, they can chat.

They can text, can do all kinds of things, including call. if you get a voicemail or if you get a form contact, speed to lead is incredibly important, meaning you need to get on the phone and call that person back immediately as fast as possible. So that means if someone calls your practice at 9 30 PM and leaves a voicemail on a Tuesday night, you need to call them first thing Wednesday morning. People have very, very short attention spans.

Ben (16:42.888)

extremely short attention spans and they're getting shorter. So we see it a lot where people will fill out a form that practice calls them back a day later. And they're like, I don't remember doing that. I don't remember filling out a form. So it's very important speed to lead. There's also the possibility, which is very real, that when somebody is looking for a dentist at 9 30 PM, they're probably reaching out to multiple practices, not just yours. So if the other practice is the one that gets on gets to them quicker,

you're going to lose that opportunity. Speed to lead, speed to lead. Make sure your front desk is very, very efficient in getting back to people who reach out to the practice. All right. Number eight, you're doing a do -it -yourself method and relying on Google's AI to run your ads. We do see this a lot where Google says, hey, we have this amazing smart campaign. It's all easy. You can do it yourself. Just log in, create an account, and start running ads.

So the challenge with that though is that having done this for 12 years, I've done dental marketing and Google ads for dentists. And we see that a lot of the time, as much as we love Google, they will not always be acting in your best interest as the advertiser. They are often acting in their best interest, which is just to get you to spend a lot more money that you may not necessarily need to spend. AI will say, well, we're going to show your ads

If you want to, if you're a general dentist, we're going to show your ads to people looking for pediatric dentistry and cosmetic dentistry and all these other things that maybe you don't offer. That AI doesn't know that. So it's important that you manage an ad campaign hands on relative to what your practice is looking to get in terms of patients and what you offer. Otherwise you could be throwing out ads for all kinds of stuff that you don't even do. and all you're just going to do is waste a lot of money. So we see this a lot.

do -it -yourself approach doesn't really work. It does not really work. So it is very important, I think, that if you don't know what you're doing in terms of running Google Ads, you hire somebody who does, someone who can actually effectively manage your campaign. And sometimes managing the campaign, all it is is auditing the campaign. It's not necessarily, you know, we have clients that we've run ads for a decade. You know, the campaign's just functioning, but we still have to audit it. We still have to go in and make sure.

Ben (19:07.09)

things are still working. And we have to make sure there's no weird negative keywords or weird searches popping up that we need to negative keyword. So a lot of it really is just auditing it to make sure it's still where it needs to be, not necessarily going in and making massive changes every month because we always believe if it ain't broke, don't fix it. So that's eight big reasons why your Google campaign might not be functioning. There are many more.

There's a lot more technical stuff we could discuss. There's other things we could talk about. But these to me were the big eight that we normally see when a doctor complains, hey, I've been running these ads, but it's not working. And we know, OK, let's look at the big ones and see if we can figure out what the problem is. So I hope that that was helpful. If you are looking to run Google Ads or if you're doing it and you're frustrated with what's happening right now, just a quick pitch. Give us a call. This is one of our specialties. We even get

Google ads referrals from other dental marketing agencies because we're very good at it. And we have a program where we can set up landing pages and set up ads and get you up and running in two weeks. So literally in two weeks from the time you reach out to us, you could have a functioning campaign that's bringing in phone calls on day one. So give us a call. We are at newpatientsflow .com. That's new patients with an S, f l o w dot com.

and we'll always be there to help you check the show notes. You can see more information about us as well. And thank you so much guys for your time. It was a pleasure and we'll talk to you next