Dentist PPC Company: How to Choose and Compare

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How to compare dental PPC companies

1. Insist that you own the ad account. Your Google Ads account should be created under your own billing and ownership, with the company granted manager access. If they will only run you inside their account, you lose every scrap of history the day you leave, which is exactly why some firms insist on it. Settle this before anything else.
2. Ask how the fee is structured and what it covers. Fees are usually a flat monthly amount, a share of ad spend, or a hybrid with a floor. Each is defensible. What is not defensible is a share-of-spend fee with no cap, because it rewards spending more rather than booking more. Ask what the fee covers: landing pages, call tracking, negative keyword work and reporting, or only campaign management.
3. Check they track booked appointments, not clicks. Dental campaigns live or die on call quality, so call tracking with recorded or scored calls should be part of the setup, along with form and booking tracking. Ask what a conversion is defined as in your account, and whether anyone reviews calls to separate real new-patient enquiries from wrong numbers and existing patients.
4. Ask for two dental clients and their treatment mix. Ask which practices they run now, in which markets, and which treatments those campaigns target. Implants, orthodontics, emergency and general dentistry behave very differently on cost and conversion. A company whose whole experience is emergency campaigns has not proved it can fill an implant schedule.

What good management actually looks like

The unglamorous work is where the money is saved. Negative keyword lists that stop you paying for dental assistant jobs, dental school queries and insurance lookups. Search term reports read weekly rather than quarterly. Location targeting tight enough that you are not buying clicks from an hour away. Ad schedules that match the hours somebody actually answers the phone, because a paid click that reaches voicemail is simply money set on fire.

Then the landing pages. A campaign pointed at a practice home page will convert poorly no matter how well the account is built, because the visitor arrived asking about one treatment and one price. The page they land on should answer that question, show the practice, and make booking a single obvious action. Ask any candidate whether landing pages are included and who writes them.

What it costs and how to judge the return

Dental and medical categories sit near the top of published cost-per-click benchmarks, and the highest-value treatments attract the highest bids. That is a fact of the auction, not a failure of your manager. What management can change is waste: how much of the spend reaches people who could plausibly book, and how many of those calls are answered well.

Judge the account on cost per booked new patient and on the treatment mix of those patients, then compare that against what a new patient is worth to your practice over a normal relationship. A campaign delivering cheap hygiene enquiries can look excellent on a dashboard and be barely break-even, while a costlier implant campaign quietly pays for the whole marketing budget. Insist on reporting that separates them.

Claims, reviews and the rules around them

Dental advertising carries obligations that generic PPC companies frequently miss. Before-and-after imagery, outcome claims and testimonials all need to be truthful and substantiated, and federal guidance on endorsements requires that material connections be disclosed and that testimonials reflect genuine typical experience rather than the best result the practice ever had.

State dental boards add their own advertising rules on top, including how specialties may be described. Ask a candidate company who reviews ad copy for compliance and what happens if your board objects. A firm that has run dental accounts for years will have a process. One that has not will look surprised by the question, which tells you what you needed to know.

Questions people actually ask

How much should a practice spend on dental PPC?

Start from capacity rather than from a budget figure. Work out how many new patients a month you can actually see, what one is worth over a normal relationship, and what proportion of that you are willing to pay to acquire one. That produces a defensible ceiling. Beginning with a round number and hoping is how practices end up spending steadily for enquiries they cannot service.

Is a share-of-spend fee a red flag?

Not by itself. It is common and it scales sensibly with workload. The problem is an uncapped share with no performance definition, because it pays the company more for spending more. If you use that model, agree a cap and agree what outcome justifies raising spend.

Should we run ads for implants or general dentistry first?

Usually the high-value treatment your practice can genuinely deliver and follow up well. High-ticket campaigns tolerate expensive clicks because one case pays for many of them, but they only work if the consultation process converts. If your front desk cannot yet handle consultation bookings reliably, fix that before raising bids.

How quickly should we see results?

Paid search produces calls in days, which is its main advantage over organic work. What takes longer is efficiency: expect the first six to eight weeks to be spent cutting waste as search term data accumulates. Judge the company on the trend in cost per booked patient over a quarter, not on week one.

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