Paid Media for Dental & Orthodontics

Price the patient, not the lead

A new general-dentistry patient is worth several hundred dollars in year one and frequently thousands over their time with the practice. An ortho or implant case is worth multiples of that.

Practices that bid as though they are buying a single appointment consistently lose the auction to practices that bid against lifetime value. The number you need before anything else is your average patient value over three years, by service line.

With that number, a $150 lead for an implant consultation stops looking expensive and starts looking like the best purchase in the practice.

Three campaigns, not one

New-patient general dentistry: highest volume, lowest value per lead, most price-sensitive. This funds the schedule.

High-value services — implants, ortho, cosmetic: lower volume, far higher value, longer consideration. These need their own campaigns, their own pages, and much more patient measurement.

Emergency dental: small volume, immediate intent, and the most competitive clicks in the category. Worth holding position on if you can genuinely see emergencies.

Running all three in one campaign averages the economics and hides which one is working.

The front desk is part of the campaign

In dental, the gap between a good and a bad month is usually the phone, not the ad account. Calls during lunch, calls after hours, and calls that reach voicemail are the most common leak in the category.

We schedule delivery around when calls are actually answered, and we push practices toward online booking for exactly the hours nobody is at the desk. This one change reliably moves cost per booked appointment more than any bid adjustment.

Insurance is the message, not the fine print

The first question most patients have is whether you take their plan. Practices that name the major plans they accept in ad copy and on the landing page convert at meaningfully better rates than those that leave it to a phone call.

For cash-pay services, the equivalent is stating a price or a monthly payment. Vagueness about cost is the single biggest reason a high-value consultation never gets booked.

What we do for practices

Separate campaigns and pages by service line, insurance named in the copy, delivery scheduled to your answered hours, and reporting on cost per booked appointment rather than cost per form fill.

For multi-location groups we run each location as its own geography with shared creative, so a practice in one county is not bidding against its own sister location.