Google Ads for dental practices: what to bid on and what to stop paying for
Budgets, campaign structure, realistic cost per booked consult for implants and Invisalign, and the dental keyword patterns that quietly drain an ad account.
Google Ads works for dental practices, but not the way it is usually sold. The pitch is "we will get you on page one for dentist in your city." That phrase is the single most expensive way to buy a dental patient, and it is where most practice ad budgets die.
The money in dental search is not in generic demand. It is in the four or five procedures where one case pays for the month.
Start with the arithmetic
Set your ceiling before you set a budget.
A new patient in a general practice produces $800 to $1,500 in the first year. An implant case starts around $3,500 for a single tooth and runs to $25,000 or more for full arch. Clear aligner cases run $3,500 to $6,500. If your gross margin on an implant case is 40%, a $4,000 case carries $1,600 of margin, and you can spend $400 to acquire it and still be well ahead.
Now work backward. If 30% of implant consults close, you can pay up to $120 per consult booked. If 25% of clicks become a form fill or call and 40% of those book, you pay for ten clicks to get one consult. At $18 a click on implant terms, that is $180 per consult. Tight but workable, and it improves fast once the landing page and the phone handling are fixed.
Run that same math on "dentist near me" and it falls apart. Clicks are cheaper, $4 to $9, but the intent is a cleaning, the value is a first-year patient, and you are bidding against every DSO office in the county with a corporate ad budget.
The campaigns that work
Implants. Separate campaign, exact and phrase match. "dental implants [city]", "tooth implant cost", "full arch implants", "all on 4 [city]", "missing tooth replacement". Budget $1,500 to $4,000 a month in a mid-sized metro. This is where the return lives.
Clear aligners and Invisalign. Its own campaign. "invisalign [city]", "clear aligners near me", "invisalign cost", "crooked teeth straightening adults". Cost per click $8 to $20. Note that these searchers comparison shop hard and compare you to mail-order aligners, so the landing page has to answer "why not the $2,000 online one" directly.
Emergency dental. Small budget, high intent, best conversion rate in the account. "emergency dentist", "tooth pain [city]", "broken tooth", "walk in dentist near me". Only run this during hours somebody answers the phone. An emergency ad running at 9pm into voicemail is a donation.
Cosmetic. Veneers, smile makeover, teeth whitening. Higher ticket, longer decision, better as a Meta campaign than a search campaign for most practices, but worth $500 a month in search if you actually do the work well.
Branded. Your practice name, $100 to $200 a month. Cheap, and it stops competitors and aggregator directories from buying clicks on people already looking for you.
Where money leaks
Broad match on generic terms. Broad match on "dentist" will show your ad for "dentist salary," "dental assistant jobs," and "dentist near me open now" three states over. Start exact and phrase. Add broad only on terms you have already proven, and only with a tight negative list.
No negative keyword list. Build it on day one: free, jobs, salary, school, assistant, hygienist, insurance, medicaid if you do not take it, denture repair if you do not do it, and the names of every competitor you do not want to pay to be compared against. Then read the search terms report every Friday for the first month and add what you find.
Running 24 hours. Schedule ads to your answering hours plus 30 minutes on each end. If you use missed-call text-back, you can extend later, but do not start there.
No call tracking. If you cannot hear the calls your ads produced, you cannot tell whether the problem is the ad or the front desk. Use a Google forwarding number or a call tracking service, record calls where your state law permits, and listen to ten a week. Most practices discover the ads are working and the phone is not. That is covered in the front desk guide.
Performance Max as the whole account. PMax will spend a dental budget on display placements and brand traffic and report a beautiful conversion number made mostly of people who already knew you. Prove out search first. If you add PMax, add it as a supplement with brand terms excluded.
Ad copy that works in dentistry
Three things get the click: the specific procedure, a price or financing anchor, and a friction remover.
"Dental Implants in Boise. Free 3D scan and consult. Financing from $189/mo." beats "Trusted Family Dentistry. Gentle Care. Call Today." every time, because the second one is what all eleven other ads say.
Two constraints. Never write an ad that implies a guaranteed clinical outcome. And if you name a price, honor it exactly; a bait price that turns into "well, that depends" on the phone produces a one-star review and a chargeback argument.
The landing page
Never send paid traffic to the home page. Build one page per campaign.
The implant page needs: what the procedure is in plain language, the price range with what is included, financing options with a monthly figure, the doctor's training and case count, two or three photos of your actual operatory, and a form that asks for name, phone and "what is going on" and nothing else. Tap-to-call in a sticky bar on mobile, because two-thirds of this traffic is on a phone.
Do not put patient before-and-after photos on it unless you hold signed, specific written authorization for marketing use. And do not use testimonials that describe a patient's treatment, because you cannot publish that without authorization either. Use case-count numbers and doctor credentials instead; they convert about as well and carry no exposure.
A realistic first 90 days
Month one: implants and emergency only, $2,000 total, exact and phrase match, one landing page each, call tracking on from day one. Expect cost per lead to look terrible for two weeks.
Month two: prune the search terms report, add negatives, kill the bottom third of keywords, add the aligner campaign if month one is producing.
Month three: you should have a stable cost per booked consult. In most metros that is $150 to $400 for implants, $90 to $250 for aligners, and $40 to $120 for emergency. If you are outside those, the problem is usually the landing page or the phone, not the bid.
Frequently asked
How much should we spend? Enough for one campaign to get 30 clicks a day, which in dental search is usually $1,500 a month minimum. Under that, the data comes in too slowly to optimize and you will quit before it works.
Should we run ads before we have reviews? You can, but you are paying full price for a click that lands on a profile with 39 reviews or fewer, which is where half of all practices sit according to the benchmark report. Fix reviews in parallel, not after.
Google Ads or Local Services Ads? LSA is not available for dentistry in most markets. Where it is, treat it as a supplement to search, not a replacement.
If you want the account built and run in your own Google Ads profile, ad management is one of the services in the free 14-day trial. Nothing is charged for the management; the ad spend is yours and stays in your account. Text or call (385) 832-6175.