Google Ads management for dentists

Which searches waste money for dental practices?

The costliest wasted searches for practices are usually career, education and price-shopping searches that match broad dental keywords.

• Career and school searches: dental assistant jobs, hygienist salary, dental school requirements.
• Free or charity care searches when you don't offer it: free dental clinic, dental grants.
• Treatments you don't provide, picked up by broad matching — for example orthodontic or implant searches at a general practice.
• DIY and home-remedy searches: how to fix a chipped tooth at home, toothache remedies.
• Searches for a competitor practice by name, which rarely convert and can be expensive.

Common tracking problems for dental practices

Most practices book by phone or through a booking widget, and both are easy to miss in Google Ads.

If the booking tool runs on another domain or inside an embedded frame, the confirmation page may never fire your conversion tag. Check whether bookings show up as conversions at all, and on which date the last one was recorded.

Calls are the other gap. Counting a tap on the phone number is not the same as counting a call that lasted long enough to be a real enquiry. If calls are your main source of patients, make sure you know which kind of call conversion you're counting.

What does a good cost per lead look like?

A good cost per new patient depends on what a new patient is worth to your practice over time, not on a national average.

A cleaning-only patient and an implant patient are worth very different amounts. Work out the typical first-year value of a new patient, decide what share of that you're willing to spend to win one, and compare it with what Google Ads is actually costing per booked patient.

If tracking is unreliable, you can't calculate this from Google Ads alone — count booked new patients from your practice software for the same period instead.

What should a dental practice check first?

Confirm bookings are being recorded, then sort the search terms report by cost.

• Last recorded date for each conversion action
• Top 20 searches by cost in the last 90 days
• Service-area settings for each campaign
• Whether emergency and cosmetic services have separate campaigns

Frequently asked questions

Related guides and tools

• How to audit a Google Ads account — A step-by-step checklist, in business language.
• How to find wasted spend in Google Ads — Where money leaks and how to check each place.
• Which Google Ads search terms are wasting your money — How to find the search terms wasting your Google Ads budget, group them into patterns, and exclude them with negative keywords without blocking real customers..
• How much should Google Ads cost per lead — There's no universal good cost per lead.