How much should a dentist spend on Google Ads? Work it out from targets and demand

Why a daily figure is the wrong question

The question I'm asked most is some version of "is £20 a day enough?". It can't be answered as asked, because a daily figure says nothing about what it buys.

Start with what the figure actually means. In Google Ads you set an average daily budget. On a given day a campaign might spend up to twice that, to catch busy traffic, but over a month you won't be charged more than 30.4 times the daily amount.¹ So £20 a day is really a monthly ceiling of about £608.

Whether £608 a month is enough depends on things the figure leaves out:

• What a click costs for your keywords in your area. An implant click and a check-up click are priced very differently, and prices vary by town.
• How many clicks it takes to get a booked consultation. That depends on your landing page, your intake and your offer.
• How many treatments it's split across. The same budget spread over five treatments means none of them gets enough data to learn from.
• Whether searches exist to spend it on. In a small catchment the budget may not be the limit at all.

The better question is: how many implant, full-arch or aligner starts do you want each month, and what does it cost to buy the searches that produce them? That can be worked out.

Demand in your catchment

Before setting a budget, find out how much demand there is to buy. There are two sources, and I use both.

Keyword Planner, before launch. Keyword Planner, inside Google Ads, shows estimates of monthly searches for a keyword, the average cost for your ad to show on those searches, and a forecast of clicks or conversions for a given spend.² Set the location to your actual catchment, not the whole UK, and enter the searches a patient makes when they're close to booking. The output gives you a rough ceiling on clicks and a working cost per click for your own area. Treat it as an estimate, and replace it with real data as soon as the campaign runs.

Impression share, once live. Impression share is the impressions your ads received divided by the total they were eligible for.³ Two related figures tell you why you missed the rest. Search lost IS (budget) is the share of the time your ads didn't show because the budget ran out. Search lost IS (rank) is the share lost because your ad rank wasn't high enough.⁴

That third row surprises owners. In a tight catchment, a campaign can be showing on most of the searches that exist. More money then buys nothing, and the growth has to come from another channel, a wider radius, or converting more of the enquiries you already get.

From target to budget

This is the calculation I run for each treatment. It works backwards from the number of treatment starts you want to the spend that should produce them. Each rate comes from your own practice data where it exists.

Here it is with round numbers. Illustrative figures, not benchmarks. None of these rates comes from a real practice, and yours will differ.

Then check the result against three limits before spending anything:

1. Demand. Does Keyword Planner show enough searches in your catchment to produce that many clicks? If not, search alone can't hit the target.
2. Economics. Divide the monthly budget by the treatment starts. Is that cost per start acceptable against the margin on the treatment? If not, the rates need improving before the spend goes up.
3. Capacity. Can the clinician see the extra consultations inside a sensible wait? Paying for patients you can't book is waste.

The rates matter more than the budget. A practice that books one enquiry in three rather than one in six needs half the clicks for the same result. That's why intake and landing pages come before budget increases. Once the campaign runs, I replace every assumed rate with the real one, measured per treatment from the practice management system (PMS), and redo the sum. The budget follows the evidence, and changes are made in steps, one campaign at a time.

If you want this worked through for your own practice, see dental Google Ads for how I run accounts, or email [email protected] with the treatment you want more of and your current numbers. The first look costs nothing: I review what your ads and landing pages show from the outside and tell you what I find.