Google Ads for dentists

What do you need before you turn the ads on?

Google Ads for dental practices is expensive per click, so the gap between a practice that is ready for those clicks and one that is not shows up faster here than almost anywhere else. Four of these five are front desk problems, not advertising problems.

• Somebody who answers the phone. New dental patients call. If the click lands during lunch cover and rings out, you paid full price for a patient who is now booking with the practice down the road. Before you touch a bid, work out who picks up between 12 and 2, and who picks up at 5.30.
• The insurances you take, written on the page. Insurance is the first filter a new patient applies, ahead of location and ahead of price. A page that does not name the plans you accept collects clicks from people who then call to ask, or more often just leave.
• A new patient offer you are happy to publish. An exam and x-ray package at a stated price does more qualifying than any keyword setting, and it gives the ad something concrete to say.
• Online booking, or at least a short form. A meaningful share of dental searches happen in the evening, when nobody is at the desk. If the only way to become a patient is a phone call at 10pm, those clicks are wasted.
• Conversion tracking that counts appointments. Google decides who to show your ads to based on what you tell it a good outcome is. If you tell it nothing it optimizes for cheap clicks, which in dental means the cheapest clicks are the worst ones. Count calls over sixty seconds and completed bookings, not page views or form loads.

That list is yours, and nobody can do it for you. The Google Ads half is the part myAgency does.

How do you set up a dental campaign?

Five ad groups, organised by what the case is worth and how fast the patient decides. Those two things vary more in dentistry than in any trade we work with, and structure is how you stop the cheap work hiding the expensive work.

The reason to separate them is that a cleaning and an implant consult cannot share a budget sensibly. An implant click can cost several times a general dentistry click and still be the best money you spend all month, and you can only see that if the two are not averaged together. Splitting them also lets you run a different radius for each, which matters more in dentistry than people expect.

The settings that matter, and the ones that do not

• Search only. Turn off the Display Network and Search Partners at the start. At dental click prices they will spend real money on traffic that behaves nothing like search, and they make your early numbers unreadable.
• Location: presence only. Google's default also targets people who have merely shown interest in your area. Change it to people in or regularly in your targeted locations. A practice draws from a commute, not from a search history.
• Bidding. Start on Maximize clicks with a cost-per-click cap while you have no conversion history, then move to Maximize conversions once booked appointments are coming through the tracking. Switching too early starves the campaign, because the system has nothing to learn from.
• Ad schedule. Emergency searches peak in the evening and at weekends. Either run those hours with somewhere for the call to go, or do not run them.
• Skip the bid adjustments. Device, time and audience adjustments feel like control, but once smart bidding is running most are ignored or overridden. That hour is better spent on negatives.

Which dental keywords actually book appointments?

Dentistry breaks the usual rule about search intent, and it is worth understanding why before you build a keyword list.

In most trades a symptom search is research. Somebody typing "why does my tooth hurt" would be a blog reader in any other industry. In dentistry that person is frequently in pain at 11pm and will book with whoever answers in the morning. Symptom searches are emergency intent, not research intent, and treating them as waste is one of the most expensive mistakes a dental account can make.

What is genuinely research is the education layer underneath: what a root canal is, how long implants last, the stages of gum disease. Those are worth blog posts and worth blocking as keywords.

A word on match types

Phrase and exact, and it is not a close call. Dental has some of the highest click prices on Google, and broad match spends that money exploring. It is the right tool eventually, once your tracking counts booked appointments and your negative list has months behind it, but a new dental Google Ads account testing with broad match is paying premium rates for an education. Add it later, one keyword at a time, in its own ad group.

What wastes dental ad budget?

Dentistry has an unusually large population of people searching your exact words with no intention of becoming a patient: students, job seekers, product shoppers, and people trying to avoid you entirely.

Six categories are worth blocking on day one. Add them as campaign-level negatives so they cover every ad group.

The mistake almost everyone makes with dental negatives

Blocking the word "cost". It reads like a researcher and it is one of the most valuable words in the account. "Dental implant cost" is usually somebody comparing two practices before booking a consult, and implants are the largest case you advertise for. If price searches are genuinely not converting for you, block the specific long tail that is failing, something like "root canal cost without insurance", rather than cost on its own.

The same applies to "no insurance". It sounds like somebody who cannot pay, and often it is a cash patient looking for a practice that will quote them a straight price. Look at what those searches actually did in your account before you block them.

One technical note that saves confusion: a broad negative blocks any search containing all of those words in any order, which is what you want for single words like jobs or dog. A phrase negative only blocks searches where the words appear together in that order, which is what you want for a specific long tail. Negatives are one of the few places where broad is the sensible default.

What does dental PPC cost?

PPC for dental practices carries two separate costs, and they get confused constantly: what you pay Google for a click, and what you pay somebody to manage it.

The click

Dental is one of the most expensive categories on Google Search, which is a direct consequence of what a patient is worth. WordStream's 2026 Google Ads benchmarks report puts "Dentists & Dental Services" at a median $8.00 cost per click and $72.97 cost per lead, with a 10.67% conversion rate, drawn from 13,474 US search campaigns over April 2025 to March 2026.

Source: WordStream, Google Ads Benchmarks 2026. Those are national medians across every kind of dental practice, so treat them as a range check rather than a target. Implant and clear aligner keywords run well above that median in most metros, and general dentistry terms in a small market run below it.

We are not going to print a figure and call it your cost per click, because it is not knowable from here. It moves with your metro, your service mix and how many practices are bidding against you this quarter. Your real number arrives in your own account after about thirty days.

The management

A dental PPC agency generally charges a monthly retainer, sometimes with a percentage of ad spend on top and often with a minimum contract term. That is on top of what you pay Google. It is worth asking any agency two questions before you sign: how often somebody actually opens your account, and whether you keep the account if you leave. You can see how that compares to running it automatically if you want the honest version side by side.

That second cost is the one you can change. An agency retainer runs around $1,500 a month, and myAgency is $150 a month with no contract.

How much should you budget, and how far should you advertise?

Work backwards from what a patient is worth to the practice, and do not stop counting at the first appointment.

This is where most practices misjudge dental advertising. If you measure a $8 click against a new patient exam, the maths looks bad. If you measure it against what that patient is worth across their first year of hygiene visits, restorative work and the family members who follow them in, it usually looks completely different. Run that number for your own practice before you set a budget, because it is the number the budget should come from.

Then set a daily budget you can hold for a full month. A month is roughly what it takes to learn anything, and a campaign switched off in week two teaches you nothing. Run one campaign at a time until it works, because splitting a small budget across five gives you five sets of numbers too thin to read.

How far to advertise

Dental radius is tighter than owners expect, and it is not one radius. General dentistry is a convenience purchase: people pick a practice near home, work or their child's school, and a patient will not drive across a city for a cleaning. Implants, aligners and cosmetic work are different, because patients will travel for a specific clinician and a specific result.

• Run a tight radius on general and emergency. Roughly the drive somebody would make on a weekday morning without thinking about it.
• Run a wider one on implants, aligners and cosmetic. This is the practical reason to split those into their own campaigns rather than just their own ad groups.
• Use presence-only targeting on all of them, so you are reaching people who are in your area rather than people interested in it.
• Exclude explicitly. If a neighbourhood inside your circle never produces patients, exclude it by name rather than trusting the edge of a radius.
• Watch for the practices next door. In a dense market your radius will overlap several competitors, which raises your click price. Sometimes the better move is a smaller circle and a bigger bid inside it.

What should the ad and the landing page say?

The ad has one job: repeat the search, then answer the two questions every new dental patient has before they call.

Those questions are "will you take my insurance" and "how soon can I be seen". Answer both in the ad and your click quality improves before you change a single keyword.

• The service and the city, so the ad matches the search exactly.
• The insurance line: most major plans accepted, or the specific ones if the list is short.
• Availability: same day emergency appointments, new patients welcome, evening and Saturday hours.
• The new patient offer, stated as a price rather than as a percentage off.
• One trust line: years in the community, the clinician's name, or however many reviews you genuinely have.

On the page, match the promise. An implant ad should land on an implant page with implant answers, not on a homepage carousel. The page needs the insurance list, the offer, a tap-to-call number, online booking, where to park, and real photographs of the actual practice and the actual team. Stock photography of somebody else's teeth is the fastest way to lose a patient who was ready to book.

What does month one actually look like?

Mostly it looks like patience and one useful hour a week. Here is the honest version, so the normal parts do not scare you into switching it off.

One caution specific to dentistry. Implant and aligner cases often close weeks after the click that started them, so a thirty day report will understate those ad groups, sometimes badly. Do not pause an implant keyword on month one data. Give the long-consideration groups a longer window, and judge them on cases accepted rather than on anything the interface shows you.

That is one useful hour a week, and somebody has to spend it. If you would rather it was not you, myAgency spends it for you and tells you what changed.

What does Google Ads management for dentists cost?

Everything above is genuinely how to do it well. It is also an evening of setup and an hour a week forever, and you are chairside.

That is what we built myAgency for. You connect your Google Ads account and it creates the campaign for you: the ad groups, the keywords, the negative list, the radius, the ads. Creating, optimizing and managing it all takes under five minutes. After that it runs on its own, twice a day, every day. It reads the search terms you would have read on a Sunday night, blocks the job seekers and the home remedies, tunes the keywords that are booking appointments, and writes down every change in plain English so you can see exactly what happened and why.

No agency. Google Ads management for dentists has always meant a monthly retainer for somebody to open your account a couple of times, usually on a contract, and you can compare that side by side if you want the honest version. myAgency is $150 a month, no contract, no setup fee.

And no dashboard to learn. Google Ads has hundreds of settings and no instructions, which is the real reason most practices either overpay an agency or leave a half-built campaign running quietly at $8 a click. You do not need to learn any of it. You need the phone to ring with patients who want an appointment.

Your dental campaign, built in five minutes

Connect your Google Ads account and myAgency creates, optimizes and manages the whole thing for you. Then you go back to your patients.

Build my dental campaign

$150 a month, and after that you only open Google Ads if you want to. Already running ads? start with what your account is doing now.

Other trades we cover

The same guide, written for a different job. Each one covers the campaign structure, the keywords, the negative list and what month one looks like for that trade. The full set is on the industries hub.

• Google Ads for plumbers. Emergency work and DIY research share almost the same words, so a lot of the budget goes to people who are about to fix it themselves.
• Google Ads for roofers. Storm season pulls in out-of-area crews who bid the market up for a few weeks, and a lot of roofing traffic is homeowners pricing a job they are not ready to book.
• Google Ads for HVAC. Demand inverts twice a year, so cooling and heating belong in separate campaigns from day one. Budget is a campaign setting, not an account one.
• Google Ads for pest control. The season decides the search, so the calendar runs the campaign. A recurring contract and a one-time callout look identical in the keyword list.
• Google Ads for junk removal. The word junk covers six unrelated jobs, and this is the one trade where the cost of doing the work changes with the search term, so a cheap lead can still lose money.
• Google Ads for electricians. Apprenticeship and licensing searches are heavier here than in any other trade, and panel, EV and generator work closes weeks after the click.
• Google Ads for mobile detailing. Most detailing searches are people learning to detail their own car, or heading for a cheap drive-through wash.