Kissimmee and Dr. Phillips should not share a budget or a bid strategy
Different submarkets carry different plan mixes, different competitive pressure and different case values, so blending them hides all three.
Split the account by geography first and by procedure second. Most dental PPC advice reverses that order, which works in a compact market and breaks in one that spreads across two counties along an interstate.
Separate campaigns give you separate levers: budget, bid, ad copy, landing page and hours. If inquiries from one area book at a materially lower rate, you can cut it without also cutting the area that is working. Inside one campaign, you cannot.
Watch what the automation does with a blended budget. Smart bidding will chase whatever produces the cheapest recorded conversion, and that is usually the densest, most price-shopped part of the map, not the part where the case value sits.
Pacing follows the same logic. Benefit years reset in January and unused annual maximums expire, so the closing weeks of the year behave differently from the spring. Set that pacing per campaign rather than pushing one metro-wide budget curve.
Draw your targeting by drive time across the I-4 corridor, not by radius
A circle on a map ignores the one variable that decides whether a patient shows up twice.
Radius targeting is the default because it takes ten seconds to set. It also buys clicks from people who would have to cross the I-4 corridor at five in the afternoon to reach you for a cleaning, and those people either do not book or do not come back.
Use location lists or drawn polygons that follow how people actually move: the communities on your side of the interstate, the ones with a direct road to your plaza, the ones your existing patients already come from. Your patient address export is better targeting data than any platform estimate.
Set the target to people regularly in the area rather than people showing interest in it, unless you have specifically decided to sell to visitors. That single setting quietly buys a lot of out of state traffic in this metro.
Distance tolerance is not uniform across services. A full arch consultation may pull from further out; a hygiene recall will not. If you are bidding on both, that is another reason they do not belong in the same campaign.
Emergency searches around International Drive come from people who are not going to become patients
Convention and visitor traffic produces genuine same-day demand, and you need to decide on purpose whether you want it.
The International Drive corridor and the Orange County Convention Center support a large hospitality and visitor economy, and some of that population needs a dentist urgently, in a city where they know nobody. Those searches exist and they convert quickly.
Understand what you are buying. This is one visit, usually urgent, frequently self-pay, with no recall value and a real chance of a same-day schedule disruption. For some practices that is good revenue. For others it is a distraction that pushes established patients out of the book.
If you want it, build it properly: its own campaign, its own landing page written for someone who is not from here, plain instructions on parking and entry, and a phone answered by someone authorized to say yes to a same-day slot. Anything less wastes the click.
If you do not want it, exclude it deliberately. That means negative keywords around walk-in and tourist phrasing, tighter location settings, and no assumption that a generic emergency dentist campaign will filter it out for you.
Bid on the plan name, and negative out the plans you do not accept
Insurance phrasing drives a meaningful share of dental search, and it cuts both ways.
People search for dentists using the name of their plan far more than most practices expect, particularly households that arrived recently and are working through a new employer's benefits for the first time. Those are high-intent phrases and they are frequently underbid.
The mirror image matters more. Traffic for plans you are out of network with produces calls that end in twenty seconds and still cost full price. Build the negative list from the plans you do not take, then keep adding to it from the search terms report every month.
Landing pages have to match the phrase. Sending someone who searched a specific plan name to a generic contact page throws away the whole advantage. State plainly which plans you are in network with, and keep it current.
Out of network does not mean unwinnable, but it needs different copy. If you can file as a courtesy or offer a membership plan, that belongs in the ad, not buried three clicks in.
New arrivals are a targeting layer, not a keyword you can buy
Search only catches people already looking, and in fast-growing communities a lot of the demand has not started looking yet.
Households settling in Lake Nona, Winter Garden or Celebration reach the point of needing a dentist on their own schedule. Search picks them up at that moment and not before, which is why a search-only account in a growth market feels like it plateaus.
Paid social and video can carry practice awareness into those communities cheaply, targeted by geography rather than by anything sensitive. Keep the creative concrete: the actual office, the actual team, hours, and whether you are accepting new patients.
Be careful with audience targeting here. Platforms generally restrict personalized advertising around health-related categories, and dental sits close to that line. Treat any life-event or interest segment as subject to policy review, and confirm the current rules with the platform before building the campaign around it.
Measure this differently from search. Awareness spend in a new subdivision will not produce a same-week booked case, and holding it to the same cost per booked case as branded search will get it canceled for the wrong reason.
Report cost per booked case by area, because the metro average lies
Cost per lead is a number the platform can calculate and a number that consistently misleads a practice with a fixed number of chairs.
Get the appointment outcome back into the platform. That means call tracking that identifies the campaign, a front desk that records whether the caller booked, and offline conversion import so bidding optimizes toward booked appointments rather than ringing phones.
Handle patient data carefully at every step of that chain. Call recording, tracking parameters and any data passed to an advertising platform touch health information rules, and Florida is generally a two party consent state for recorded calls. Get the setup reviewed by your own counsel before switching it on.
Then read it by campaign, which after the first section means by area. A blended cost per booked case across the whole metro can look fine while one submarket is subsidizing another that has not produced a kept appointment in six weeks.
Kept and accepted matter more than booked. A campaign that books people who never arrive is worse than one that books fewer people who do, and only your practice software knows the difference.
Questions we actually get
- How much should a practice spend per month on Google Ads here?
- We will not quote you a figure without seeing the auction you are actually in, and any agency that quotes one on a first call is guessing. What we can say is that spreading a small budget across the whole metro is the most common way to waste it. A budget concentrated on one or two submarkets and the procedures you want more of will teach you something; the same amount spread thin will not.
- Should we run Local Services Ads as well as search ads?
- Where they are available for your category they change what sits at the top of the page and are worth testing, since the pricing model and the screening requirements are different from standard search. Availability and eligibility rules for professional categories change, so it is worth confirming your current status directly with Google rather than assuming.
- Do we need to bid on our own practice name?
- Usually yes, at low cost, because competitors and directory aggregators will bid on it whether you do or not. The argument against it is that you would have captured those people organically anyway. The honest position is that it is cheap insurance in a market with a lot of group-backed practices advertising aggressively, and it is easy to test by pausing it and watching what happens.
- Is paid social worth it for a dental practice?
- For elective and high-value work it can be, and for building awareness in newly built communities where people have not started searching yet. It is a poor fit for hygiene recall, which is bought at the moment of need. Treat it as a different job with a different measurement window rather than as a cheaper version of search.
- What happens if our front desk cannot answer during peak ad hours?
- Then pause the ads for those hours. Paying to make a phone ring into voicemail is the most expensive thing in a dental account, and it is completely avoidable with an hours schedule. If you want coverage instead of restriction, an answering service that can see the schedule, or a text-back on missed calls, is worth setting up before the budget increases.
