Welcome to Dental Unscripted

Welcome to Dental Unscripted, a podcast brand that meets doctors wherever they are at in their professional journey. We talk about starting a practice, buying a practice, and running a practice. We cover a lot of ground on this channel!

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Dental Unscripted

Why Your Google Ads Aren't Working And What to Do About It

Google Ads can generate real, trackable new patients for a dental practice, but only if the campaigns are structured correctly. Most dental practices either spend too little to see results, hand the automation over directly to Google, or overlook the tracking tools that reveal what's actually working. 

The outcome is the same in every one of those cases: wasted marketing money and a dentist who concludes that digital advertising doesn't work.  The problem isn't Google. The problem is the gap between how Google's AI optimizes campaigns and what a dental practice actually needs from a new patient lead. We discussed this on Dental Unscripted with Cisco Adler founder of Digital Rain Ad Management. 

Google Search Ads Are "Pull" Marketing, Not "Push" Marketing

Google search ads are what's called pull marketing: 
They show up specifically to people who are actively searching for what you offer. Unlike a billboard or an Instagram ad interrupting someone's scroll. A search ad appears because someone typed "dentist near me" or "dental implants [city]."  That intent-based targeting is what makes search ads so effective, and also expensive when mismanaged.

The cost per click in dental is typically around $10 for general dentistry, and significantly higher for specialty services. Of the people who click your ad and land on your page, only about 5–10% will actually call. That puts your cost per phone call between $100 and $200. And it takes roughly 3–5 phone calls to convert one actual patient, putting your real cost per new patient in the $200–$500 range, minimum, depending on your market.

That's not a bad number if the calls coming in are the right ones and your team can get them scheduled for care! 

Why Google's Own AI Will Quietly Burn Your Budget

Here's the problem... and  most dentists don't see coming:
Google's algorithm optimizes for volume, not quality. It tracks which ads generate phone calls. It has no way of knowing if 80 of your last 100 calls were people looking for a dentist they already have, patients asking about Medicaid coverage, or someone looking for and insurance carrier you don't accept. Google has no clue if someone clicking on your ad is chasing a "free implant grant" they saw on social media.

Without an effective feedback loop, Google's AI will simply double down on whatever generated activity, even if that activity produced zero revenue for your practice. But It's getting you clicks! It just doesn't know those clicks aren't turning into patients.

This is exactly why talking to someone at Google directly to set up your own ads is a trap. Google will help you spend money. But it won't help you spend it on the right people.

Your Landing Page Is More Important Than Your Ad!

One of the most overlooked pieces of a Google Ads campaign is where the click actually lands. Most practices send ad traffic to their homepage. Cisco Adler says "That's a huge mistake."

Your website is built to appeal to everyone, it's optimized for search engine pages, it covers your full menu of services, and it's written for a general audience. 

An ad, by contrast, is a few lines of highly specific copy targeted at one intent. When someone clicks an ad about whitening, they expect to land on a webpage about whitening, not your website homepage, where they now have to go find click around themselves.

This principle is called message matching. The landing page should be a direct extension of the ad: same topic, same tone, same offer. Get that wrong and your conversion rate tanks, which means you're paying for clicks that go nowhere.

One more thing to keep in mind:
80% of your ad traffic is coming from mobile. Most of those people want to call,  not fill out a form. Design your landing pages for mobile-first, phone-call-first conversion.

Budget, Tracking, and the Metrics That Actually Tell You Something

A $500/month Google Ads budget will only generate roughly 2–5 phone calls per month. That's not a much. You'll never be able to tell if it's working because the volume and data sample is too small to measure. If you're serious about Google Ads, expect to spend $3,000/month minimum to generate a statistically meaningful volume of leads.

And whatever you spend, you need call tracking. Digital Rain uses tools like CallRail. CallRail can assign unique phone numbers to each campaign so you know exactly which ad drove which call. With AI transcription now built into most call tracking platforms, you can review transcripts of every call and quickly identify whether you're getting quality leads or junk traffic, without having to listen to hundreds of recordings.

Without call tracking, you're flying blind. Knowing you got "20 calls from Google" tells you nothing. Knowing that 15 of those 20 calls came from people asking about Medicaid coverage tells you everything.

The One Structural Move That Separates Good Campaigns To Great Ones

Smart Google Ads management involves continuously split-testing landing pages. Run two versions of a page simultaneously displaying; different headlines, different offers, different photos, split traffic 50/50, and measure which one drives more phone calls. When one wins, create a new challenger. This compounding optimization is what separates a practitioner who understands the platform from someone who set it up once and walked away.

One counterintuitive tactic worth noting: don't lead your ad with the promotional offer. Lead with authority, years in practice, number of procedures completed, credentials. Then surprise them with the offer on the landing page. You've already paid for the click by then. Use authority to attract the right patients, then use the offer to close them.

The Bottom Line for Dental Practices Considering Google Ads

Google Ads works for dental practices. But it requires real budget, proper tracking infrastructure, purpose-built landing pages, and ongoing optimization, not a set-it-and-forget-it approach, and definitely not a call to Google's own support team. The practices that see results treat their ad campaigns the way they treat their clinical work: with consistent attention, measurement, and refinement.

If your front desk isn't trained to convert new patient calls, fix that first. The best-run Google campaign in the world can't survive an undertrained phone team. Get the fundamentals right, then spend the money.

Listen to the full episode on the Dental Unscripted podcast.

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