Google Ads guide for dental practices: how to run an account built around treatment

How to run Google Ads for a dental practice: structure by treatment

A Google Ads account has three layers. The campaign holds the budget, the location settings and the bidding strategy. Inside it, ad groups hold a tight set of keywords and the ads written for them. Keywords are the words you give Google to match against what people search.

For a practice, the campaign should be the treatment. Implants, full-arch, Invisalign and cosmetic work have different fees, different decision times and different patients. If they share a campaign, they share a budget, and the busiest, cheapest searches take the money. That's usually general dentistry, which is the work you least need to buy.

Why a brand campaign. Owners often ask why they should pay for people searching their own practice name. Two reasons. Competitors can bid on your name, and if you aren't there, their ad sits above your listing. And brand searches are cheap and convert well, so they flatter any campaign they're mixed into. Keeping brand in its own campaign stops it hiding how the treatment campaigns really perform. I judge brand on protecting existing demand, and the treatment campaigns on finding new patients.

Two settings matter at campaign level before anything else.

Location option. Google's default is "presence or interest", which reaches people in your area plus people who have only shown interest in it. The alternative, "presence", limits ads to people likely to be in, or regularly in, the places you target.¹ For a practice with a real catchment I use presence. Someone researching implants in your town from the other end of the country is rarely a patient.

Separate the entry products. Emergency appointments and new-patient exams have different economics and a different search pattern. I keep them out of treatment campaigns entirely. They have their own page on emergency dentist campaigns.

Keywords and match types

A match type controls how closely a search has to resemble your keyword before your ad can show. Google defines three.²

Google says it's critical to use Smart Bidding with broad match,² because each broad search needs its own bid. I'd go further. Broad match needs a conversion signal worth learning from. If the account counts form fills as its result, broad match will find people who fill in forms, and plenty of those will be NHS patients or price-checkers. Until booked treatment is flowing back, I stay with phrase and exact.

Where the keywords come from. Keyword Planner, inside Google Ads, shows estimates of monthly searches for a keyword, a forecast of clicks or conversions for your spend, and the average cost for your ad to show.³ I use it for the catchment, not the country. National volumes tell you nothing about a practice with a ten-mile radius.

The patient's language changes over a long decision. Early searches are about the problem and the options ("missing teeth options", "implants vs dentures"). Later ones are about cost, finance and trust ("dental implants cost uk", "implant dentist reviews"). The last ones are local and ready ("implant consultation near me"). I put most budget on the last two stages and let content and SEO carry the first.

AI Max for Search. AI Max is an optional layer you switch on inside a search campaign. Google describes three features: search term matching, which expands reach with broad match and keywordless technology; text customisation, which uses your ads and landing page to generate new ad text; and final URL expansion, which sends traffic to whichever page on your site Google predicts will work better. Controls include brand inclusions and exclusions, locations of interest, URL inclusions and exclusions, and turning search term matching off per ad group.⁴

My view for dental accounts: generated ad text is a compliance risk. Every headline a practice runs has to meet GDC and ASA rules, and I can't sign off text I haven't seen. Final URL expansion can send an implant search to a page that wasn't built to convert it. I leave AI Max off until the account has clean booked-treatment data and a reviewed set of landing pages, and then test it against a control rather than switching it on everywhere.

Negatives

A negative keyword stops your ad showing on searches that contain it. In a dental account, negatives do more to protect money than any bid change.

Two behaviours catch people out. First, negative keywords don't match close variants or other expansions:⁵ excluding "job" doesn't exclude "jobs". You add the plural and common misspellings yourself. Second, negatives have their own match types, and they behave differently from positive ones.⁵

Google also notes that an ad might still show on a search longer than 16 words where the negative term comes after the sixteenth word.⁵ It rarely matters, but it explains the odd strange search term.

I build negatives as shared lists and attach them to every treatment campaign. Account-level negative keyword lists apply automatically to all eligible search and shopping inventory in relevant campaign types.⁵

Before launch, not after. Plenty of accounts add negatives only after the waste has been paid for. I build the first lists before a campaign goes live. I search each main keyword on Google myself and note what the results page shows. If NHS pages, job boards or DIY products appear, the words that bring them up go straight onto a list. Then I add the towns just outside the catchment by name. The first week's search terms still turn up surprises, but the obvious waste never gets a chance to spend.

The full set of waste categories, with example query patterns and how to find them in your own search terms, is on the page about where dental ad spend leaks.

Bidding and conversion goals

A bidding strategy tells Google how to set your bid in each auction. Smart Bidding is Google's term for strategies that use its AI to optimise for conversions or conversion value in every auction, using signals such as device, location, time of day and the actual search.⁶

None of these is worth anything if the conversion it chases is wrong. That's where conversion goals come in.

A conversion action is the thing Google is told counts as a result. Google groups actions into conversion goals. It marks each action primary, which means it's used for bidding and shows in the Conversions column, or secondary, which means it's tracked in All conversions but ignored for bidding. An action only influences bidding if it's primary and the campaign uses the goal that contains it.⁷

Google's own guidance for lead generation points the same way. It recommends lead-specific goals such as qualified lead, converted lead or book appointment, which switch on invalid-traffic protections built for lead campaigns, and value-based bidding where you can give leads different values.⁸

Changing strategy. Change one thing at a time and write down what you changed and when. A booking often lands days or weeks after the click, so the account can look worse for a while after a change simply because the bookings haven't come back yet. I judge a bidding change on booked consultations over a period long enough for them to arrive, not on the next few days of clicks. If you change the bid strategy, the budget and the keywords in the same week, you'll never know which one did what.

How much to give each campaign is its own question, answered from demand and targets rather than a daily figure. That method is on the page about setting a Google Ads budget.

Assets

An asset is extra information attached to your ad: a phone number, your address, links to other pages, short extra lines. Google lists location, call, sitelink, callout, structured snippet, price, promotion and lead form assets among others. Most are not promised to show. They appear when Google predicts they'll help and your ad rank is high enough.⁹

Two notes. Location assets pull data straight from your Business Profile, so a closed or wrong location there becomes a wrong ad.¹¹ And every asset is ad copy. A callout that promises an outcome breaks UK rules as surely as a headline does. Finance lines carry FCA rules on top.

The ads themselves. Search ads are responsive search ads: you write several headlines and descriptions, and Google combines them. That means any headline can appear next to any other, so each one has to be compliant on its own. I write headlines around what the patient searched, the consultation, finance and the clinician. I avoid anything that promises an outcome, names a result as typical, or uses "specialist" for someone who isn't on the GDC specialist list. Prices in ads must match the landing page. Healthcare ads also carry Google's own rules, set out in Google's healthcare policy for dentists.

Call reporting puts a Google forwarding number on your call and location assets. It's available in the UK, and it records call duration, start time, whether the call connected and, for calls over 15 seconds, the caller's number. You choose how long a call must last to count as a conversion.¹² I count calls as secondary, then match them against the diary. How to join calls to bookings is covered under call tracking for practices.

Landing pages

Every ad goes to a page about the treatment in the ad. The homepage is written for everyone, so it converts nobody in particular.

Google's own floor is its destination requirements: the page must be functional, useful and easy to navigate.¹³ That's the minimum. A dental landing page needs more:

Test every page on a phone before any money goes to it. Check your own device report in Google Ads to see how many of your clicks come from phones, and assume a booking form that's awkward with a thumb loses those patients. Load the page on mobile data rather than office wi-fi, fill in the form, book a test slot, then check the booking reached the practice system and the conversion reached Google. If any link in that test breaks, the campaign waits.

The detail, including the compliance points per treatment, is on the page about landing pages for dental ads.

Measurement

Measurement is the difference between an account you can steer and one you can only watch. The chain has four links: the ad click, the enquiry, the booked consultation in your practice system, and the treatment start. Plenty of accounts only see the first two.

The mechanism is offline conversion import. An offline conversion is a result that happens outside the website and gets sent to Google afterwards. Enhanced conversions for leads is Google's upgraded version. It uses first-party data you already hold, such as an email address, which is hashed before it's sent to Google, to match the booking back to the ad.¹⁴ Google won't import an offline conversion uploaded more than 90 days after the last click, or more than 63 days for enhanced conversions for leads.¹⁵ For long implant decisions, that window is a real constraint, so the consultation booking is usually the event that carries the weight, and the treatment start adds value when it lands in time.

Consent sits under all of this. If the website doesn't collect consent correctly, the click data isn't there to match. That's covered under consent mode on dental websites.

What to report. Once the chain works, the monthly numbers change. Instead of clicks, click-through rate and cost per lead, I report per treatment: spend, enquiries, booked consultations, attended consultations and treatment starts, with the cost of each stage. The gap between enquiries and booked consultations tells you about intake. The gap between consultations and starts tells you about the consultation itself. Neither is fixed in the ad account, but you can't see either without this measurement. The layout I use is on what a dental marketing report should show.

UK practices commonly run systems such as Dentally, Software of Excellence, R4 or Pearl. Getting bookings out of any of them and into Google Ads takes a deliberate build, and the route differs by system, as set out in UK practice software compared. The detail for Dentally is on tracking Dentally bookings to your ads.

Maintenance

An account left alone drifts. Search terms creep, assets go stale, uploads fail quietly. This is the cadence I keep.

The search terms report shows the actual searches that triggered your ads. It leaves out searches that didn't have enough query activity, to protect privacy, and groups those into themes in search terms insights instead.¹⁷ So you'll never see every search, but you'll see enough to act on.

When a term you don't recognise keeps appearing, look it up in the dental marketing glossary or search it yourself and look at the results. If Google shows NHS pages or job boards for it, it doesn't belong on a private treatment campaign. Performance Max has its own maintenance and its own risks, covered on the page about Performance Max for practices.

If you'd like your account held to this method, email Fayez@imfayez.com with the treatment you want more of and what tracking you have now. A first look is free: I check what your ads and landing pages show from the outside and reply with what I find.