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Pay-per-click advertising can be one of the easiest ways of helping you to grow your dental practice. Of course, there’s no doubt it will take some time and work to get things running right, but once you do eventually get your campaigns dialed in, a good PPC campaign will get the right patients to your door in no time. The standard dental practice, however, doesn’t always have the time or resources to figure out how to run a proper PPC. After all, at the end of the day, their job focuses on providing people with health care, not worrying about the trivialities of PPC marketing.
If you’re hoping to use PPC as a facilitator for some patients at your dental practice, but find yourself struggling to do so, here are a few factors to consider:
Designate Niche Keywords into Categories
The objective of every PPC campaign lies in targeting prospects using the keywords they typically search. Still, most account owners struggle with understanding how to organize multiple keywords. To efficiently arrange your keywords, start by bundling them into different ad groups. So, as an example, consider your target users are searching for phrases like “dental cleaning,” “professional teeth whitening”, or “porcelain veneers.” If you wanted to target these three phrases specifically, your best bet in making them efficient would begin with designating the first keyword to a broader ad group or category. The last two would go into a category related to cosmetic dentistry.
Grouping these niche keywords into ads that are more targeted will grant you more click-thru rates. What’s more, they’ll also significantly influence the quality score assigned to your site by Google. The ad score delegated to you is typically calculated by the relevance of the ads you serve to users, the ones with a higher quality score receive better positioning in the result pages.
Generate Phone Leads Through Google Ads
If you’re setting your focus exclusively on clicks, then you’re also neglecting a critical aspect of the PPC strategy, phone responses. Getting your user to call your dental practice without ever clicking on your PPC ad should ultimately be the ideal situation for ad creators because it allows them to dodge having to pay for the actual clicks on an ad. To avoid running up your PPC bill as you try to capture leads, optimize your ad for phone responses. Start by ensuring that your business’s phone number is present in all of your ads and be sure to customize it so that it only displays during hours of operation. This allows your potential customers to get in touch with someone in your office while you’re actually around and gives you a greater chance of retainment.
Use Ad Extensions
To increase visibility and maximize your short character limit on PPC ads, make sure you’re always taking advantage of ad extensions. Ad extensions are a perfect way of enticing users to click your ad, which ultimately equates to a better return on investment. There’s no cost for adding these extensions to your campaign, but you will be billed the regular rate for clicks. You’ll be charged for clicks on features such as download buttons (such as app extensions), call buttons (call extensions), or direction icons (location extensions).
Implement a Testing Strategy
The trial and error process is an innate component of creating an effective PPC ad. As you work to find the best keywords for your practice, you’re bound to discover that certain keywords outperform others. Just like professional marketers, dentists who manage their PPCs must always be on a hunt for what works and what doesn’t by testing. Make sure you have the ability to run effective tests by creating campaigns with 3 ad groups and 3 ads in each (8 keywords in each group). This combination will allow you to check and monitor individual components such as headlines, descriptions, and keywords so that you’ll be able to see what words need slight tweaks and which ones are successful in their run.
Optimize Your Ads with Geo-Targeting
You wouldn’t put a billboard up for your practice in New York City all across the country because it would be a huge waste of money, so why would you do it for your PPC? Google’s Ad interface allows you to specify a location for PPC ads to show users. You can customize your ads and distinguish the location of your dental practice by including zip codes, cities, or proximities of location. In doing so, you give your ads are more narrow-focused on users that will actually visit your practice. Location targeting gives you an opportunity to restrict where your ads appear, which in turn allows you to reach likely customers and increase your return on investment.
