Dentist
The ads weren’t broken. The targeting was.
$265.78 a lead. Three leads a month. One rebuild later: $63.28 and ten — on twenty percent less spend.
Industry
Healthcare — general & cosmetic dentistry
Channel
Google Ads (Search)
The account
A general and cosmetic dental practice running Google Search for new-patient calls and appointment requests. One clinic, one catchment, one diary to fill.
The diagnosis
Picture a practice paying $797 a month to be shown to everyone within driving distance of the wrong postcode. Seven and a half thousand impressions, 181 clicks, three conversions. A 1.66% conversion rate.
The obvious read is that the ads need rewriting, or the budget needs raising. Neither was true — the account was buying strangers. Broad terms, a radius drawn wider than the practice’s real catchment, and no filter between someone researching implant prices in another state and someone ready to book.
At $265 a lead, Google Ads wasn’t a channel. It was a subscription to being ignored.
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The treatment
We didn’t touch the budget. We changed what it was allowed to buy.
Keywords were cut back to the terms people use when they’ve already decided — emergency dentist, dental implants, cosmetic dentist — and the rest were paused. Negatives went in to block the researchers. The radius was redrawn around the catchment the practice actually serves, not the one Google suggested.
Then the ads themselves. Experience, same-day appointments, insurance accepted — the three things a nervous patient checks before they call — with call, location and sitelink extensions to take more of the page. Bids were weighted toward the hours when someone is actually at the desk to pick up.
Six changes, none of them clever. All of them pointed at the same thing: stop paying for people who were never going to book.
The results
- Cost per lead: $265.78 → $63.28 — a 76% cut
- Leads: 3 → 10 a month
- Conversion rate: 1.66% → 9.09%
- Click-through rate: 2.39% → 3.91%
- Spend down ~20% across the same period
Impressions fell from 7,575 to 2,811. Clicks fell from 181 to 110. The practice got three times the patients.
Fewer people saw the ads. The right ones did.
