Online Advertising

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.

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.

The growing use of internet as a medium for marketing has lead to many innovations in online advertising. One of these great innovations from early 2000’s is Google Adwords. What started as a search advertising program is now a full blow advertising network reaching almost 85% of all web users on most popular websites like Google.com and Youtube.com. With Google Adwords PPC advertising you are charged only when somebody click on your ad rather than CPM model, where you are charged for every 1000 impressions your ad receives irrespective of how many people actually interact with your ad. Below are 7 reasons why all dentists should try Google Adwords PPC Advertising.

Speed-to-market

Google Adwords is very quick to setup and get started. It can deliver results very quickly. This is a huge advantage in situations where you need new patients fast or you have a great service/offer that you want to push out before your competitors. Most other alternatives require development of creatives which can can time consuming.

Location and language targeting

Do you wish to target hispanic dental patients only? With google adwords language targeting you can do that very easily. Google Adwords also has very comprehensive location targeting features. You can target residents of certain zip codes, cities and towns or better yet a 10-mile radius around your dental office. Remember the closer a prospective patient is to your office, the more likelier they are to visit. You can also exclude languages and locations that you want to avoid.

Pay for Qualified Clicks Only

Using the Google Adwords Search network, you can advertise to people who are looking for a dentist in your city. These people are highly interested in professional dental treatment and you can offer your service to them by advertising on google for relevant keywords. What is even more impressive is that you can exclude keywords to avoid showing your ad for irrelevant keywords. For e.g. if you do not treat children you can add keywords like children, kids, paediatric etc. as negatives to ensure that anyone who is searching for paediatric dentists does not see your ad. This way you will attract clicks only from qualified visitors who are interested in your service.

Granular Control Over Advertising Spend

A Google Adwords can be started for as little as $5/day. While that may not get you much clicks, it just goes to show that you can control your advertising cost depending on your marketing budget for the month/week. You can also control how much you want to pay per click for each keyword you want your ad to appear on. This granular control allows you to run the campaign, stop the campaign, adjust bids up or down, adjust budget up or down and activate/pause the campaign whenever you want. e.g. If you have plenty of appointments next week, you can keep the campaign paused. If you want to fill up your schedule for the subsequent week, you can re-activate the campaign again before the preceding week begins.

Visitor Retargeting

Another amazing feature Google Adwords offers is the ability to tag and then re-target people who visited your website. This feature works for both search and display network and is very useful in reaching visitors who abandoned your website. For e.g. You can use re-marketing ads to target visitors who left appointment form or contact form uncompleted with a discount offer to convince them to make an appointment.

Performance Tracking and Reports

Google Adwords has the most comprehensive tracking and reporting features of any popular advertising platform. You can track click to calls, calls from websites, calls from ads, form completions, app installs, downloads and even import your google analytics conversion goals into your adwords account. These conversion actions are then backed by in-depth reports of all aspects of campaign performance that allow you to evaluate the success of each campaign. All these conversion tracking and reporting are free for all advertisers irrespective of their ad spend.

Campaign Optimization Capabilities

Google Adwords comes built in with free campaign optimization tools that allow you to maximize the performance of your campaigns to deliver your desired conversions. For e.g. your goal is to generate a maximum number of online appointments, you can create a conversion in adwords to track the number of appointment form completions. Then once your campaign has had over 15 conversions over the last 30 days, you can enable conversion optimizer and define your target maximum or target patient acquisition cost. You can then sit back and let Google Adwords Conversion Optimizer run your campaign on auto pilot. It will adjust your CPC on keywords automatically to generate the highest number of conversions (appointments in this example) possible in your budget.