A circle drawn on the I-35 corridor buys empty Hill Country
Radius targeting assumes people are distributed evenly around you, and in Central Texas they are not.
Population here strings out along a north to south line. Round Rock, Pflugerville and Georgetown sit above the city, Kyle, Buda and San Marcos below it. Head west and density drops away quickly through Bee Cave and Dripping Springs into the Hill Country.
Any circle wide enough to reach the towns you want will also cover a large area of land where nobody is searching for a dentist and a wedge where people are searching but would never make the drive. You pay full price for both.
Target by named city, county or ZIP code instead. Build the list from the places your patients actually come from, then add the ones you genuinely want more of, and leave the rest out until the account has data to argue otherwise.
Set the location option to people in your targeted places rather than people showing interest in them. Without that setting you buy clicks from anyone reading about the city, which in a place people visit constantly is a real and invisible cost.
Three campaigns: the toothache, the treatment plan and the transfer
Separate the account by what the searcher has already decided, because those three people need different budgets, different pages and different bids.
The toothache is urgent and price insensitive within reason. Short ad copy, the phone number in front, a page that shows today's availability, and no attempt to sell anything else.
The treatment plan is implants, ortho or veneers. Long consideration, several visits to the site, and a page that explains the process and financing rather than pushing a form. Measure it in consultations booked, not clicks.
The transfer is the family that just moved for a job and needs a practice. Insurance language does most of the work here, and the landing page should answer network questions before it asks for anything.
Give each one its own budget that cannot borrow from the others. Left in one campaign, the cheap urgent clicks will quietly consume the money meant for the cases that pay for the operatory. If any offer appears in the ads, keep the wording conservative, since dental advertising is generally constrained by state rules worth confirming with your own counsel.
Let organic keep the price research and buy the appointment instead
A large share of dental search volume is people learning what something costs, and paid is the worst possible way to serve them.
Somebody typing how much does an implant cost is months from a decision and will read six pages before contacting anyone. Pay for that click and you fund a research session. Rank for it organically and the cost is fixed.
Build the negative list before launch, not after the first invoice. Salary and school queries, do it yourself and mail order aligner queries, plan names you do not accept, and any procedure you refer out rather than perform.
Start on phrase and exact match. Broad match in dentistry finds an enormous adjacent world of hygiene programs, insurance shopping and unrelated medical terms, and it should only be introduced once there is enough conversion history to steer it.
Read the search terms report weekly for the first month, then monthly. The list is never finished, and the account is largely won there.
A 9pm toothache click that rings into voicemail is a donation
Buying urgent demand you cannot answer is the most expensive habit in dental advertising.
Emergency searches do not wait. Someone in pain at nine on a Tuesday will call three practices and book with whoever picks up. Reaching voicemail costs you the click and the patient.
Either restrict the urgent campaign to hours somebody actually answers, or put real coverage behind it. An answering service with a booking script, or a text back on every missed call, changes what those clicks are worth.
Weekend and evening coverage is worth testing deliberately rather than assuming. Run the urgent campaign on a Saturday morning for a month with someone assigned to answer, and compare booked appointments against a matched period.
Keep the phone number consistent with your listings when you use call tracking, so the account measurement does not create a second problem in local search.
Automated bidding starves on one practice's monthly conversion count
Smart bidding needs a steady diet of conversions, and a single office often cannot supply enough for the strategy to learn anything.
Target cost per acquisition strategies work by finding patterns across many conversions. Feed one a thin, irregular trickle and it will swing between overspending and stalling.
Fix the input first. Count calls over a sensible duration threshold, form submissions and completed bookings as conversions, and stop counting page views and clicks to call that lasted four seconds.
Then close the loop. Once the front desk is recording which inquiries became appointments, import those booked appointments back into the account as offline conversions. The account then optimizes toward patients who sat in a chair rather than toward people who filled in a box.
Until that data exists, keep it simple. Tight geography, manual or maximize clicks with a firm cap, and a human reading the search terms. Cost per booked new patient is the number to watch, and cost per lead is the number that flatters everybody.
If hygiene is booked six weeks out, more clicks make it worse
Advertising into a full schedule buys cancellations, so pace the account against open chair time rather than against a flat monthly figure.
A new patient who is offered an appointment six weeks away is a new patient who keeps searching. You paid for the click, the front desk spent ten minutes, and somebody else books them.
Look at the schedule board before setting budgets. Which blocks are empty next month, and for what. Push spend toward the procedures with open time and pull it back from the ones with a waiting list.
A hygienist vacancy is a budget decision as much as a staffing one. Running the full new patient campaign through a month you cannot staff produces bad reviews as well as wasted spend.
Watch pacing inside the month too. An account that spends its budget by the middle of every day is missing the entire afternoon, and afternoon is when a lot of dental calls get made.
Questions we actually get
- What should we bid on first if the budget is modest?
- Usually the urgent and the transfer intent, because both convert close to the click. Implants and ortho are worth buying, but they need a longer window and a page that does real work before anyone calls. Fund one campaign properly and let it gather conversion history rather than splitting a small budget four ways.
- How do we know an ad actually produced a patient?
- Match names. Use a tracking number for paid, record the source on the chart at booking rather than relying on a how did you hear question, and reconcile the inquiry list against the appointment book weekly. Once that habit exists, booked appointments can be imported back into the ad account so bidding optimizes toward patients instead of form fills.
- Should we advertise a new patient special?
- Offers do move response, but dental advertising is generally governed by state rules on wording, disclaimers and what must be disclosed. Keep the language conservative, publish the conditions plainly, and confirm the specific wording with your own counsel or the state board before it runs. An offer that creates a complaint costs far more than it earns.
- How long before we can judge the account?
- Give it enough time to accumulate real conversions and a cleaned search terms list, then judge on cost per booked appointment rather than on clicks or impressions. Nobody can responsibly promise a lead volume or a timeline. What can be promised is a structure, a negative list, and a report that ties spend to appointments.
- Should we bid on our own practice name?
- Generally yes, and cheaply, because competitors and directories often appear above your own listing on a branded search. The clicks are inexpensive and the searcher is already looking for you. Keep the brand campaign separate so its low cost per conversion does not disguise the performance of everything else.
