Dental Marketing Direct

Digital Marketing for Dental Offices

Google Adwords

Best days and hours to advertise on Google for a Dentist?

by Leave a Comment

I just ran some analysis on last years call data in our system and came up with some interesting insights. The data-set is for around 20 dental office locations that generated just under 10,000 calls from 1st January to 31st December 2019.

Calls by day

Monday is the clear winner. Most offices do not run campaign on Saturday and Sunday.

Appointments by day

Again Monday takes the lead but notice how Thursday is the worst excluding weekends. Many dentists are closed Fridays and open on Thursdays but our data shows it should be opposite!

 Calls by time

The phone is consistently busy from 11 am to 3 pm.

Appointments by time

Morning (9-10 am), noon (12 to 1pm) and late afternoon (3-4 pm) are peak hours for appointments. Do NOT leave the phone unattended during these hours!

Missed Calls by day

Lowering missed calls remains the easiest opportunity to grow revenue for many offices with 1 in 8 calls being missed on average in 2019.

5 Google Adwords Ad Extensions Every Dentist Should Try

by Leave a Comment

Google Adwords text ads are limited to just 25 characters in the headline and 2 lines of 35 characters for the description. It is impossible for a dental practice to convey all the important information in such a short character limit. This is where ad extensions come in and help extend your ad with more useful information. These ad extensions are absolutely free and help improve your ad’s visibility in search results because an extended ad covers a larger area. Ad extensions can also improve your ad’s CTR, leading to higher quality score, lower cost per click and thus a better ROI on your ppc advertising spend.

Screenshot of Adwords Ad Extension

Google has introduced many ad extensions to help business enhance their ads with more information. In this post we look at 5 adwords ad extensions that you can use to improve your dental adwords campaign performance.

Location Extension

Location Extension

This extension ads your dental office address below your ad so patients can quickly see where your office is located without having to click your ad to find out. This helps to save you money as only people near your office will click your ad for further information and somebody who is to far away from your office will ignore your ad. You can use this extension by connecting your Google My Business account with your Google Adwords account. Location extensions are very useful and every dentist must take advantage of this feature.

Sitelink Extension

sitelink extension Sitelink extension expand your ad with links to different pages of your website specified by you. These site-links only appear under your ad, if your ad shows above or below the organic listings. Site-links do not show on ads appearing on the side even if you have added them through your account. These extensions have to be manually added as you must specify the links you want to show under your ad and the anchor text for each link. You can also specify 2 description lines of 25 characters each for every sitelink.

Site-links extension helps you direct patients quickly to the most important pages of your website, such as the about page, contact or request appointment page, testimonials page, discount offers page, before and after photos page etc. This allows a person to click on the contact page directly from your ad and request an appointment.

Call Extension

call extensionCall extensions extend your ad with a phone number allowing patients to dial your number without clicking your ad if they are on a desktop or clicking the ad to dial your number if they see your ad on a mobile device. In most cases calls are more valuable than clicks and therefore, your dental ppc campaign is incomplete without call extensions. Call extensions will continue to become more important as more and more people use mobile devices and smartphones to look for local dentists. Google also provides free tracking numbers to track the performance of your call extensions.

Callout Extension

callout extensionCallout extensions help expand your ad with more information about your dental office and treatment procedures. You can use callout extensions to add unique information that distinguishes your dental practice from the competitors in the area. Note that callout extensions only appear if your ad shows above or below the organic listings and do not appear for right side ads.

Structured Snippets

structured snippet extensionStructured snippets are similar callout extensions except that you can only use structured snippets within a category or header. Google will only show snippets of one category at a time. Again, structured snippets only appear on ads showing above or below organic listings and do not appear on right side ads. Here’s a list of available headers:

  • Amenities
  • Brands
  • Courses
  • Degree programs
  • Destinations
  • Featured hotels
  • Insurance coverage
  • Neighborhoods
  • Service catalog
  • Shows
  • Styles
  • Types

Immediately you can see that amenities and insurance coverage are relevant to any dental adwords campaign.

Now that you know what ad extensions to use, why not try them out on your dental adwords campaigns. You can learn more about all the Google Adwords ad extensions here. If you need any help with Adwords ad extensions or anything to do with PPC advertising, please request a free. consultation.

Google Adwords Express for Dentists – A Good Idea Gone Bad

by Leave a Comment

Google Adwords Express is a simplified version of their advertising platform Google Adwords, aimed at local business and service professionals like dentists and orthodontists. The main benefit of Adwords Express for dentists is the automation and simplicity it offers over the default adwords campaigns. You can get started quickly and do not need professional to setup a Google Adwords Express campaign. Once you have specified a budget, bid, business category and created an ad, Google handles the rest. However, as we look a little deeper, we find that by removing the granular control over keywords and bids, Google has taken away the primary factors that make PPC advertising so effective.

Adwords Express for Dentists

If you are just testing the waters with ppc advertising and what to assess its performance quickly, Adwords Express may be right for you. However, if you are serious about PPC advertising and are willing to allocate a substantial amount of your marketing budget towards it then you must use the full Google Adwords account. Perhaps that is what Adwords Express is meant for – a stepping stone to Google’s full-fledged advertising program.

My main gripe is that Adwords Express will not produce the best ROI. Since most dentist who opt for this program do not have a big budget, they need a high ROI to justify increasing their spend. But if they do not hit right numbers, they may in fact be turned off by PPC advertising altogether. Then as a dental marketing company it becomes difficult for us to convince a dentist, who has had a bad experience with Adwords Express, that PPC advertising is worth doing.

The main reason why search advertising is so effective is because you can show your ad to qualified searchers only by bidding on selected keywords and excluding irrelevant searchers with negative keywords. This means at that a lot of wasted spend is saved and the campaign can be optimized over time as you gain a better understanding of your audience and expand your keyword list. However, in Adwords Express, you are at the mercy of Google’s algoritms as they decide which searcher is qualified to see your ad. You can only choose your service category eg. dentist. and then try to differentiate yourself with your ad. This can often result in a lot of wasted spend.

But, the worst part of Adwords Express is that you cannot do anything to optimize the campaign and to stop wasting money on unqualified clicks. This means that you will be continue to waste money on irrelevant clicks for as long as you are advertising as there is no negative keyword feature to stop your ad from appearing on irrelevant searches. This is where you lose the main advantage of PPC advertising and then it becomes a bit hit and miss like all other forms of advertising.

If you are considering Google Adwords Express, by all means do it but don’t be surprised if the results are ordinary. In that case do not blame search advertising because PPC advertising on Adwords Express is like a bird without wings.

5 Proven Ways to Improve Dental PPC Campaign ROI

by Leave a Comment

PPC advertising is a great way to generate new dental patients online. However, if done wrong, your ppc campaign can become a nightmare and burn through your marketing budget quickly. Therefore, it is important to achieve a good ROI for your PPC campaign before scaling it further. In this post we have identified 5 proven tactics to improve the ROI of your PPC advertising campaigns.

Dental PPC ROI

Add Negative Keywords

Negative keywords help prevent clicks from irrelevant and low quality searches. If your dental office is open from Monday – Friday, you don’t want your ad to appear for searches like “dentists open on Saturday” or “dentists open on Sunday”. In this case adding negative keywords like saturday, sunday and weekend will prevent your ad from showing up on such irrelevant searches.

A/B Split Test Ads to Improve CTR

CTR (click-through rate) is the most important component of quality score. A higher CTR means a higher quality score. Ads with a high quality score will have a lower cost per click and a better ad position than other ads bidding on the same keywords. Therefore, improving CTR will directly reduce the cost of your PPC campaign and thus improve its ROI. The easiest way to improve CTR is to create multiple (2 to 4) ads in the same adgroup and rotate them evenly. Then every week revise ads with the lowest CTR with new verbiage and offers until you can beat the highest CTR ad (called the control).  When that happens, you revise the previous comtrol until you can beat the new control. This procedure of testing one ad against the other is called split-testing. Using split tests, you can  improve the average CTR of your campaign over time.

Use conversion optimizer or CPA bidding

In adwords, if you get more than 15 conversions in past 30 days, you can enable conversion optimizer. Doing so will help you optimize the campaign for a target or max CPA (cost per acquisition of a new patient lead). For e.g. if you need 50 leads at $70 each to meet your ROI target and your campaign has an average CPA of $80 with more than 15 conversions in past 30 days, you can enable conversion optimizer with a target CPA of $70. Google Adwords will then automatically adjust your CPC bids on each keyword taking into account the expected conversion rate for a click from each keyword. Thus achieving a maximum number of conversions at your target CPA of $70.

A/B Split Test Landing Pages to Improve Conversion Rate

Landing pages are a vital component of any successful PPC campaign. Once a searcher clicks your ad, all the work you did in optimizing the campaign is over and the conversion now depends on your landing page. A lot of dentists do not use dedicated landing pages for PPC advertising which can kill their campaign ROI and they end up shutting down the campaign. One of the quickest ways to improve the ROI of your PPC campaign is to improve your landing page conversion rate. This can be done through A/B testing of landing pages similar to ad split tests described above. However, with landing page split tests our goal is to improve conversion rate of clicks into leads (form submissions or calls).

Improve Call Handling Performance

The purpose of any PPC campaign is to generate leads in the form of calls and appointment request form submissions. However, you need to convert these leads into confirmed appointments and office visits to earn a profit from the PPC campaign. This is where call handling skills of your front desk come in. Often ignored by most dentists your staff’s call handling performance can make or break your PPC campaign ROI. Therefore you need to ensure that your receptionist is giving due attention each inquiry generated by the PPC campaign. The more leads they can close, the higher will be the ROI of your PPC campaigns.

In order to improve call answering performance, you need to record all inbound and outbound calls so that you or a sales expert can listen to these recordings and identify any shortcomings. These issues can then be addressed with some training sessions so that the a better closing rate can be achieved in the future.

As you can see from the discussion above, you must optimize a PPC marketing campaign through all stages of dental patient sales cycle – from the ad impressions to clicks, from clicks to leads (calls or form submission) and from leads to confirmed appointments. This will give you a high ROI after which you can increase your PPC campaign budget to generate even more dental patients for your dental office.

PPC or SEO: An Effective Dental Marketing Plan Uses Both

by Leave a Comment

When it comes to marketing your dental practice with search engines, you have two options to choose from – SEO or PPC advertising. Both these search engine marketing strategies have their pros and cons. In an earlier post I have discussed the benefits of PPC advertising with Google Adwords. In this post we will go over the benefits of SEO for dentists and then discuss how both SEO and PPC can complement each other to create a solid dental marketing plan.

SEO vs PPC Advertising

Advantages of SEO

The main benefit of SEO is it’s long term residual value in that the work you perform today will continue to deliver results for several months and years into the future. In that sense, SEO is like investing money into the future search traffic of your website. However, like any investment, SEO has a payout period and in case of most local dental websites it would be around 3-6 months before you start seeing significant search traffic resulting from your SEO campaigns.

When compared to PPC advertising, the main benefit of SEO is that it has no per click/visitor fee unlike PPC where you are charged for every click. A PPC campaign is more like a current expense where the money you spend on clicks is gone forever. The moment you stop spending, all the traffic and patients you were getting form the PPC campaign will also stop. Whereas, with SEO, once you obtain good rankings, you can hold them for some time without any spending anything on SEO during that period. Therefore, in the long run say in 12 months period, SEO will have a better ROI than PPC advertising (and most other forms of advertising).

Dental SEO vs PPC ROI
The cost per patient acquisition from PPC advertising remains constant over time while for SEO it reduces with time.

Another benefit SEO enjoys over PPC is that dental patients trust organic results more than PPC ads. This fact has been confirmed through multiple surveys where consumers rate organic results as more credibile than the search ads. Therefore, if you want your practice to appear more trustworthy than another local dental office who ranks well in organic search results, then you need to invest in SEO to compete with them.

Given the above facts, we can safely conclude that SEO is not an option but almost a necessity if you want to consistently generate dental patients online. But what to do with the first 3-4 months of SEO when there is no search traffic. This is where PPC advertising campaign can help fill the gap.

Combining SEO and PPC

Combining PPC with SEO
Start with a PPC campaign and reduce advertising budget as SEO traffic grows

You plan your search marketing strategy to generate a minimum number of new patients per month – let’s assume this target is 30. In the beginning, SEO will not be generating any traffic. Therefore, you have to run a PPC advertising campaign to generate all 30 patients. As your SEO traffic grows over the subsequent months it will start generating new patients. That is when you can start cutting back on your PPC advertising spend since some of the targeted 30 patients/month is now being born by the SEO work. Eventually off course you want to be in a situation where all 30 patients are being generated by SEO alone and you do not need any PPC advertising to meet your external marketing target for new dental patients.

When you have achieved your initial SEO targets, you have two options

A) You stop the PPC campaign and continue investing in SEO. This is perfectly normal and if you are happy with the number of new patients you generate with SEO then so be it. Just remember that a competitor may take your advertising spot.

B) You revise your new patients per month target upwards and continue with the PPC advertising campaign. If you want to get even more new dental patients and cant wait for your website to gain rankings on additional keywords, then PPC advertising is the way to go.

PPC Advertising for Dentists: Maximise Profit NOT ROI

by 1 Comment

Before starting any advertising campaign for your dental practice, you need to specify some goals for the campaign. A lot of dentists who are not familiar with PPC advertising would choose a specific ROI like 300% or 400% for their campaigns without knowing that they might be losing money by setting up such a high ROI goal. As a dentist your ultimate goal is to maximize your profit after deducting advertising cost. So instead of giving your ppc manager a budget and asking him to maximize marketing ROI while staying within budget, you need to tell him to maximize your net profit while staying within budget.

why?

because PPC advertising has a diminishing marginal return beyond a maximum ROI, as the advertising spend increases. This means that as your advertising spend increases beyond a threshold, your ROI begins to decrease. Read that last sentence again and look at the graph below of a typical PPC campaign.

marketing-return-on-investment-graph

During the early phase of any PPC campaign you will find that ROI increases as you optimize the campaign. Then you increase your advertising budget and optimize some more. After that you keep increasing budget and optimize the campaign further until you hit a Peak ROI of the campaign. At this stag all the main avenues of optimization have been exhausted and the campaign is optimized for maximum ROI. Further optimization of ads, keywords, bids etc, will not result in improving ROI. However, the profit resulting from the campaign is not at it’s maximum at this stage. This is because in order to achieve maximum ROI, you have sacrificed some low ROI traffic that would earn you more net profit.

If your goal was to maximise your campaign ROI, then you would be right in maintaining the campaign in this state for as long as possible. However, doing so would mean that you are leaving a significant amount of profit on the table, since your PPC campaign is not optimized for maximum profit but for maximum ROI. Therefore, if you want to squeeze out last chunk of profit from your PPC campaign, you need to ignore your ROI goals and focus on increasing spend on less efficient but still profitable keywords/audiences. You have to continue increase spend until, the incremental profit resulting from an increase ad spend is equal to the incremental ad spend. At that stage, the campaign is optimized for maximum profit. Increasing ad spend of the campaign any further would result in a negative profit incremental profit and thus reduce total profit from the campaign.

One final point to note is that maximum revenue doesn’t occur until after maximum profit has been achieved. Therefore, you should revenue interchangeable with profit as it can mislead you into increase your advertising spend more than required.