Before you spend a dollar on ads

Ads don’t fix a practice’s marketing; they amplify it. Every weakness you already have, a thin profile, a slow website, a phone that rings out, gets more expensive once you’re paying for each visitor. So the first question isn’t “Google or Facebook?” It’s whether the practice is ready to turn paid clicks into patients.

When ads make sense

• You have room in the schedule. If new patients already wait weeks for an appointment, ads add frustration, not production.
• You want more of a specific service, such as implants, clear aligners, emergency visits or a new sedation option, and you can say who it’s for.
• You’re new or have moved, and reviews and search visibility haven’t built up yet. The new practice marketing guide covers the launch plan.
• The free channels are already working and you want to add volume on top of them.

Fix these first

• Your Google Business Profile. Many people who see your ad will also look you up on the map before they call. A complete, accurate profile with recent reviews does part of the selling. See the Google Business Profile guide.
• Your website. The pages ads send people to must load quickly on a phone, show the phone number at the top, explain the service plainly and make booking easy. The dental website guide covers this.
• Your phones. If calls go to voicemail at lunch or after four o’clock, you’ll pay for calls nobody answers. Check who answers during the hours the ads will run, and how quickly missed calls are returned. The front desk guide covers scripts and call handling.
• Your tracking. Before launch, decide how you’ll know a booked patient came from an ad: a call-tracking number, tagged links and a required referral-source field in your practice software. Without this, you’ll be judging the ads by the agency’s report.

Own the accounts

Create the Google Ads and Meta business accounts under the practice’s own login and payment method, and add an agency or freelancer as a user. If the agency owns the ad account, leaving them can mean losing the account history, conversion setup and everything learned about what works. The budget and ROI guide covers ownership and contracts in more detail.

Decide what success means

Write down, before you start, how many new patients a month you want from ads, what you’re willing to pay for each, and how many months you’ll run the test before deciding. The budget guide shows how to work out what a new patient is worth to your practice. Setting the rule in advance keeps you from cutting a campaign after one slow week, or keeping a weak one because the clicks look busy.