Morgul Marketing

    Buying dental clicks in a metro where twelve miles can take fifty minutes

    Paid search for a dental practice in Atlanta fails in a predictable way. The account gets built on a mileage radius, the radius crosses I-285, and the practice pays for clicks from people who would need an hour in traffic to reach the chair. The argument here is that geography and timing carry more weight than keywords in this metro, and that the account should be priced against booked appointments rather than form fills. Get the targeting, the ad schedule and the exclusion lists right, and a modest budget can hold its own against a group practice spending several times more.

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    The fifteen mile ring around Dunwoody includes towns nobody drives from at 5pm

    Radius targeting measures the wrong thing in a metro where the interstate decides who can get to you.

    Draw a fifteen mile circle around most northern suburb addresses and it will swallow parts of three counties. Some of those areas feed you patients weekly. Others sit on the far side of a Perimeter interchange that nobody crosses voluntarily at the end of the workday.

    Build the target list from named places instead: the towns and ZIP codes your patients actually come from, plus a short list of adjacent ones you want to test. Exclude the rest outright rather than letting the ring decide.

    Watch the direction of travel too. A practice in Sandy Springs may draw easily from Dunwoody and Brookhaven and almost never from the other side of Cobb County, even though the map shows similar distances.

    Check the location report every month and prune it. Areas that generate clicks and no booked visits are telling you something about the drive, and the fix is an exclusion, not a better ad.

    Ad schedules should follow the evening crawl, not your office hours

    The hours a patient searches and the hours they can realistically come in are two different schedules, and both belong in the account.

    Pull the hour-of-day report from your own account and set it beside the front desk call log before you touch the ad schedule. In practice the peaks often sit at the edges of the workday. Someone with a broken molar looks at nine at night. A parent books a child's checkup after dinner. Those clicks are worth having even when the office is closed, provided something answers.

    If nothing answers, the click is wasted. Either staff the phone during your heaviest search hours, add a texting option, or reduce bids during the windows where inquiries reliably go unanswered.

    Then look at it from the patient's side. Offering a 5:30 slot to someone who has to get across the Perimeter at rush hour produces cancellations, so the appointment types you promote in the ad copy should match the times people can actually make.

    If the Perimeter makes a 5:30 slot risky, the 7:30 appointment before the commute is the one time worth its own ad group and its own landing content. Look at what the competing ads on your main terms are offering before you lean on it, because early hours only differentiate you while the practice down the road is not advertising them too.

    Implant and aligner searches carry the account; recall searches do not

    Not every dental keyword can pay for itself, and the account should be structured around that fact.

    High value procedures justify a real cost per click because a single accepted case covers a lot of spend. Routine hygiene searches do not, and running them at the same bids as implant terms drains the budget in a week.

    Separate them. Give the procedures you want more of their own campaigns, their own budgets and their own landing pages, and either run routine terms at low bids or leave them to organic search and your recall system.

    Emergency terms sit awkwardly in between. They convert quickly and they can be worth buying, but only if someone answers the phone within a ring or two and you can offer a same day slot. Buying emergency clicks you cannot serve is expensive.

    Brand terms are usually cheap and usually worth defending, because competitors in the same suburb will happily bid on your name. Keep the spend small and keep an eye on it.

    Job seekers and hygiene students click dental ads all day

    The exclusion list decides whether a dental account is profitable, and it is never finished.

    Searches for dental assistant jobs, hygiene programs, free clinics, and how to become a dentist all look like dental intent to a broad match algorithm. They cost the same as a patient click and they book nothing.

    Build the negative list before launch, then read the search terms report every week for the first two months and keep cutting. The list will keep growing for the life of the account.

    Be careful with plan names. Bidding on a plan you accept is sensible. Appearing for plans you do not accept produces phone calls that end in an apology, and those calls cost staff time as well as ad money.

    Broad match will find you searches from Gwinnett County whether you wanted them or not. Use it deliberately, with tight geography and a serious negative list, or not at all.

    December deadlines and January resets should move your daily budgets

    Dental demand is not flat across the year, and a budget divided into twelve equal parts ignores the calendar patients are working from.

    Benefit years drive a lot of dental behavior. Patients with remaining benefits move in the last weeks of the year, and new deductibles change what people are willing to start in January. Your spend should acknowledge both.

    Family scheduling follows the school calendar too. Summer and the weeks before school starts behave differently from October, and the ad copy that works in one window is flat in the other.

    Pacing is not only about the calendar. It is about chair capacity. Spending hard in a month when the hygiene schedule is already full converts new patients into a three week wait, and a three week wait is where new patients go elsewhere.

    Set the budget against what the schedule can absorb, and be willing to pull back. Underspending a month is cheaper than buying appointments you cannot honor.

    What a Buckhead click costs and what a Buckhead patient is worth are different questions

    Cost per click and cost per lead both flatter the account; the number that matters is what you paid for a patient who sat in the chair.

    Clicks in dense intown submarkets like Buckhead and Midtown are typically contested by more practices than clicks in outlying areas, so the click price and the eventual patient value can move in opposite directions. Reading one without the other leads to bad cuts.

    Connect the account to what happens after the click. Call tracking, a booking record and a simple monthly reconciliation between inquiries and new patients will tell you which campaigns produced chairs and which produced noise.

    Report it by area, not as one metro number. A single blended cost per patient across Fulton, Cobb and Gwinnett hides the fact that one of them is carrying the other two.

    Then act on it. Move budget toward the geography and the procedures that produce booked, kept appointments, and stop defending a campaign because its click cost looks tidy.

    Questions we get

    How should we set the geographic target for one office?
    Start from the towns your current patients drive from, add a small number of adjacent areas as a test, and exclude everything else. Then review the location report monthly. Areas producing clicks without booked appointments are usually telling you that the commute is the obstacle, and the answer is to exclude them rather than to write better ads.
    Is it worth bidding on our own practice name?
    In most cases yes, at a small budget. Competing practices in the same suburb often bid on brand names, and defending yours is usually inexpensive. Keep the spend contained and watch whether it is incremental rather than catching people who would have found you anyway.
    Should we advertise routine cleanings?
    Rarely at full bids. Hygiene visits do not carry the cost per click that competitive dental auctions produce. Put paid budget behind the procedures with real case value, and fill the hygiene schedule through recall, organic search and the patients those procedures bring in.
    What should we measure instead of cost per lead?
    Cost per booked appointment, and then cost per appointment that was actually kept, broken out by area and by campaign. That requires call tracking and a short monthly reconciliation with the schedule. It is more work than reading a dashboard, and it is the only version of the number that reflects your business.
    Can you tell us what a dental click costs in Atlanta?
    Not honestly, and be skeptical of anyone who quotes a figure before looking at your account. Prices vary by procedure, by submarket and by who else is bidding that month. We would rather build a small structured test, measure what it actually costs to book a patient, and size the budget from real data.

    Rules that affect your marketing

    Patient information is protected, which constrains ordinary marketing mechanics: analytics, call recording, remarketing audiences and reviews all touch it. Advertising is also governed by the state dental board, and before-and-after imagery and specialty descriptions carry specific requirements. Anything published here should have a compliance read from the practice's own counsel.

    Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing. Updated .

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