Managing spend and the people who run your ads

Ad accounts drift. Google finds new searches to match, Meta tries new placements, and costs creep up while nobody is looking. A short, regular review keeps the money going to searches and people that book patients.

Review the search terms

The search terms report shows the actual searches that triggered your Google ads, which are often different from your keywords. It’s the single most useful report in a dental account. Review it weekly for the first couple of months and at least monthly after that.

• Add irrelevant searches as negative keywords: jobs, schools, services you don’t offer, other practices’ names you don’t want to pay for.
• Note searches that produced calls or bookings, and consider adding them as keywords with their own ads.
• Watch for broad-match drift into searches only loosely related to dentistry.

Budget pacing

Platforms spend a daily budget unevenly and can spend more than the daily amount on some days while staying within a monthly limit; check the current rules for each platform. Look at spend against plan midway through the month. If a campaign runs out of budget early every day, it’s missing searches later in the day; you can narrow the keywords or locations, or raise the budget if the cost per new patient supports it.

When to pause or cut

• Pause when the schedule is full, when the phones can’t keep up (a staff shortage, a holiday week), or when something is broken, such as a landing page or tracking number.
• Rework a campaign that produces calls but few bookings: listen to the calls first. The problem may be the searches, the ad, the page or the front desk.
• Cut when cost per new patient stays above the limit you set at the start for the number of months you agreed, after checking that tracking and phones aren’t the cause. The budget and ROI guide covers setting that rule.

Change one thing at a time and give it time to show results. Changing the ads, the page and the bidding in the same week leaves nobody able to say what helped.

Working with whoever runs the account

Whether it’s an agency, a freelancer or someone on staff, ask for the same things every month:

• Ad spend and management fees, shown separately.
• Calls and booking requests, with data you can check against your own call tracking.
• Booked and seen new patients, matched against your practice software, and cost per new patient.
• What they changed, which search terms they excluded, and what they will test next.

Keep ownership of the accounts and look inside them occasionally yourself. The guide to hiring a dental marketing agency covers choosing one and the questions to ask.

Your checklist

The free paid ads checklist covers every chapter of this guide on one page. Use it before launch, then at each monthly review.