“Do dentists really need pay-per-click advertising?” “We get most of our patients from referrals.” These are two phrases we hear a lot. If you’re looking for an opinion from dental marketing experts, here’s our view.
- Yes, dentists really do need pay-per-click advertising.
- It’s wonderful that you get many patients from referrals. We hope you are tracking where your patients come from so you can be sure on that point. Even so, dental PPC is still important. We’ll tell you why.
First, some terminology. PPC stands for pay-per-click. Usually, it’s in the form of Google Ads. You’re constantly exposed to pay-per-click advertising when you are searching the internet. It’s the text-based ads you see at the top of the search engine results page and the photo-based ads you see on the side of websites. These are called search ads and display ads, respectively.
In a nutshell, dentists need PPC advertising to get more new patients of the right kind faster.
Targeted to Specific Audiences
One of the complaints about marketing is that you don’t know if your messages reach the right people. How do you know if the people seeing your television ads are people who can afford your services? How do you know if those who read your local magazine need the service you’re writing about?
Dental PPC advertising lets you target people that would most likely need your services by setting demographic restrictions. Are your best patients females between 35 and 60? Do they make above a certain income and live in a specific area? You can target those people by setting up your Google Ads to reflect those characteristics.
Reaches the Most People
PPC advertising using Google Ads will reach a broad audience because Google is the most used search engine. When advertising your services, you want to get the biggest pool of people that meet your demographic characteristics. Google allows you to do that. There are 8.5 billion Google searches per day. That’s a lot of opportunity for your target audience to see your ads.
Cost-Effective
Dental PPC advertising is cost-effective. Have you been wondering what the catch is in “pay-per-click”? Well, there is no catch. You truly only pay for people who click on your ad.
You can set an ad budget with Google, and it’ll display your ad to your target audience. If it so happens that someone doesn’t need your services right now and they don’t click on your ad, you won’t pay for that exposure. This is a massive advantage over a magazine, where you pay for everything.
Results are Measurable
If you’ve learned anything about dental marketing from Pro Impressions Marketing’s blog, it’s that measuring your marketing results is essential. How do you know if what you’re spending your money on is giving you a return? By measuring your successes and failures.
Dental PPC marketing makes it very easy to track your return on investment. Google tracks your ad clicks, conversions (people who click to call or make an appointment online), and impressions (people who see your ad), and all you have to do is take a look at the data to determine if you’re getting a good return on your investment.
Let’s say you have an all-on-4 dental implant pay-per-click campaign. How much did you spend that month on your ads? How many conversions did you get? How much did those people pay for their service? Those questions should help you answer if you’re receiving a good return on investment. You’ll often get your best return with dental PPC advertising.
Results are Fast
Another reason why dental PPC is important is that you get fast results. Sure, it takes a few months for your campaign to really take off, but it’s much quicker than the long game of SEO.
Improves SEO Performance
Speaking of SEO (search engine optimization), dental PPC advertising boosts those efforts. For our purposes, think of SEO as your organic search results. This is your position on the list of websites Google generates from a search. You don’t pay for these results; they’re entirely based on if Google thinks your webpage can help the searcher find what they’re looking for. Pay-per-click helps SEO performance in a few ways.
- Google sees that you’re actively looking for viewers and will give your webpage higher consideration.
- You occupy more space on the search results page because you have an ad and an organic link.
- PPC helps you determine high-value keywords to target in your SEO faster.
- PPC helps bring brand awareness, so people are more likely to click on your organic listing when they see it because they’re already familiar with you’re business name.
Pro Impressions Marketing Offers Dental PPC Advertising Management with the Pro Membership
It’s easy to see why dentists should use pay-per-click advertising and how it can help dentists get more new patients. Pro Impressions Marketing is a dental PPC agency offering a Pro Membership that can include ad management. If you’d like to learn more, set up a free strategy call online or call (970) 672-1212.
