A visitor in the French Quarter with a cracked molar is a choice, not an accident
This city brings in people who do not live here, some of them in pain, and whether you want their business is a decision to make deliberately rather than one to discover in the click report.
A visitor with a broken tooth is a real case: same day, usually self-pay, usually one visit. Some practices want that work and are set up to do it. Some cannot spare the chair time and lose money on it.
Decide first, then set the account to match. If you want it, run a separate emergency campaign with its own budget, its own ad copy about same day treatment, and hours that reflect who is actually at the desk to answer.
If you do not want it, the setting that matters is location targeting. Default settings can serve ads to people merely interested in a place rather than present in it, which quietly buys clicks from someone planning a trip. Set targeting to presence.
Either way, keep visitor traffic out of the campaign you use to judge new patient cost. Mixing a one visit emergency case into the same average as a family transferring in makes both numbers meaningless.
Implant searches, emergency searches and price searches are three different purchases
Three kinds of query show up in every dental account and each one buys a different thing at a different price, so pooling them into one campaign guarantees the wrong answer.
Procedure searches carry the account. Implants, full arch, aligners, crowns. High value, slow decisions, expensive clicks, and worth the money if your consult process holds up.
Emergency searches are immediate and shallow. The patient calls whoever answers. Ad copy should say when you can see them and the phone plan behind it has to be real.
Price and coverage searches look like tire kicking and often are not. Somebody typing what a crown costs is closer to booking than somebody reading about technology, provided your site actually answers instead of routing them to a form.
Exclusions are half the job. Coursework, hygiene programs, employment, at home aligner kits and dental school queries all click on dental ads at full price. Build that list in week one and add to it monthly from the search terms report.
Three miles across the river is farther than eight miles through Mid-City
Distance on a map is a poor proxy for whether somebody will show up, and this metro punishes anyone who targets by radius alone.
A radius drawn from an Uptown address covers Algiers and the West Bank, which are close by measurement and a different world in practice. It also covers water and pieces of Jefferson Parish you may not want.
Build targeting from parishes and neighborhoods instead. Orleans and Jefferson deserve their own campaigns because their competitors, their costs and their patient expectations differ. St. Tammany deserves a decision rather than an inclusion.
Send each campaign to the page that matches it. A Metairie click landing on an Uptown page makes the patient work out the drive on their own, and most of them will not.
Watch the geographic report monthly and cut what does not convert. Coverage you did not choose is the most common line item in a dental account nobody has audited.
When Entergy drops the block, pause the account before it buys unanswered calls
A dental practice without power is closed, and an account that keeps spending through a closed morning is buying calls that ring into nothing.
Dentistry runs on the compressor, the suction and the sterilizer. Lose power and the day stops, whatever the schedule says.
Give somebody at the practice the ability to pause campaigns from a phone, and write the two line procedure down before you need it. Nobody figures out an ads interface during an outage.
Do the same for a day when the streets will not drain and half the staff cannot get in. Paid clicks are perishable; an unanswered call at nine in the morning is gone by nine fifteen.
Turn it back on the same day service returns, and text the patients whose appointments moved before you spend anything on new ones. Rebooking is cheaper than buying.
Your practice software knows who booked, and the ad account will never guess
Until booked appointments get back into the ad platform, every optimization decision is being made on form fills, which is how accounts end up cheap and empty.
A form fill costs one number. A booked patient costs a much larger one, and a kept first visit larger still. The gap between them is where budget goes to die.
Close the loop with what you already have. Call tracking with a source on every call, a click identifier stored with the inquiry, and a weekly or monthly export of which of those actually sat in a chair. Fed back in, the platform starts buying patients instead of clicks.
Even without full automation, a monthly reconciliation between the schedule and the ad report changes decisions. Practices are routinely surprised by which campaign produced the cheapest leads and the fewest patients.
Report in the practice's own units. Cost per new patient booked, cost per kept first visit, and where possible production per new patient. Cost per lead is a vendor metric.
Spend against the hygiene schedule you actually have
Marketing cannot outrun capacity, and a practice down a hygienist should be spending differently from one with open columns every afternoon.
Look at the schedule board before you set a budget. If hygiene is booked three weeks out and the doctor's column has gaps, buy procedure demand and stop buying recall.
Pacing should follow the year the practice actually has, not a flat daily cap. Benefit resets, deductible seasons and the weeks when families are away all move volume, and the account should move with them.
Ramp new campaigns instead of launching them at full budget. An account learns on data, and a starved campaign never gets enough of it to be judged fairly.
Say the uncomfortable thing early: if the front desk cannot answer the phone reliably, more spend makes the leak bigger. Fix intake first and the same budget produces more patients.
Questions we actually get
- What should we expect to pay for a new dental patient here?
- We will not quote a number before looking at your account and your schedule, and anybody who quotes one cold is guessing. Cost varies enormously by procedure, by parish and by how quickly your front desk answers. What we can do is set the measurement up so you know the real figure within a couple of months and can decide with it.
- Should we run ads on the Northshore?
- Only if you have decided to serve it as a market. Ads across Lake Pontchartrain will produce clicks, but routine hygiene rarely crosses. If you want St. Tammany Parish patients, structure it as its own campaign with its own budget and its own landing page, and judge it separately rather than letting it hide inside a metro average.
- Is Performance Max worth running for a dental practice?
- It can work, and it spends outside the lines you drew unless it is watched closely. For a single location practice we would generally get search campaigns structured, negatives built and conversion tracking honest first. Automated campaigns amplify whatever signal you feed them, so the signal has to be booked patients rather than form fills.
- How much of the budget should go to brand terms?
- Enough to hold your own name, usually not much more. Brand clicks are cheap and competitors do bid on practice names. The mistake is counting those conversions as new demand when reporting, which flatters the account and hides what the non brand campaigns are really producing.
- Can we pause ads during a closure without hurting performance?
- Yes, and it is better than the alternative. Short pauses have a modest effect on campaign learning, while a day of unanswered calls costs the full click price and annoys patients. Set it up so someone at the practice can pause from a phone, and turn it back on as soon as you are open.
