Proven Ways To Improve Your Dental PPC Campaign

If you need new patients for your dental practice, online PPC for dentists is excellent. But, if PPC is incorrect, you can burn through thousands of dollars to no effect. So, that makes it extremely important to start your dental PPC campaign off right.

If your PPC for dentists is not achieving a good ROI, stop reading the following proven tips to improve your PPC ad campaigns.

Make a List of Negative Keywords

A negative keyword list aims to prevent clicks from irrelevant keywords. For example, if you specialize in cosmetic dentistry, you don't want your ads to show up for orthodontics. So, adding orthodontics and orthodontist as negative keywords will keep your ads from displaying on these irrelevant searches.

Without negative keywords, you risk wasting money on clicks that won't convert into a new patient. The search term report from Google AdWords can help you uncover negative keywords. This report shows the exact keywords that triggered your ads.

You may see some keywords related to but not strictly related to your services. Add these to the negative keywords list to eliminate them.

Switch on the Conversion Optimizer

AdWords allows you to switch on a conversion optimizer feature if you have more than 15 conversions in 30 days. This conversion will help you optimize your campaign for a maximum cost per acquisition or CPA.

For example, if you need 50 clickthroughs at $10 each to maintain your budget, but your campaign averages a $15 CPA with more than 15 conversions in 30 days, set the conversion optimizer for $10. The system will automatically adjust your bids to achieve a maximum number of conversions at $10 each.

If this is confusing, you can hire a PPC specialist to crunch the numbers and help set it up for you.

A/B Split Testing

Conducting A/B testing can help to improve your clickthrough rates. A higher CTR means more people click your ad and visit your website. Therefore, ads with a high CTR ultimately have a lower cost per click.

Also, they can appear higher on the search results when bidding on keywords. That means improving your CTR can help to lower your costs and improve your return on investment.

Creating several different ads in the same keyword group is the best way to do A/B testing for ads. Next, rotate the ads evenly to see how each one performs.

You'll revise the wording of the ads with the poorest CTR until they outperform your ads with the highest CTR. Keep repeating this process. By doing A/B split tests, you'll quickly refine your ads, improving the CTR of your campaign.

You can also do A/B split testing on your landing pages. Your landing pages are where you convert clicks into patients, making it the most critical part of a successful PPC campaign. Unfortunately, many dentists do not use landing pages for their PPC campaigns, but that's a mistake.

One of the fastest ways to improve the performance of your PPC campaigns is to create dedicated landing pages and A/B test them. For example, you can create two or three slightly different landing pages and routinely switch links to these pages to see which ones perform best.

Each landing page must reflect the content and keywords of the ads. But, each landing page should have a slightly different language like testing your ads. For example, testing your landing pages will reveal which one converts more clicks into new patients.

Optimize Your Ads for Phone Calls

Include your phone number and a call-to-action in your ad, encouraging people to make an appointment. Moreover, schedule your ads to only run when someone is in the office to answer the calls.

However, the best way to optimize your PPC ads for phone calls is to use the optional call extension available on AdWords. This feature allows smartphone users to call your office directly from the ad. You can set this feature only to put through calls during your office hours.

You can also make your phone number on your landing page click to call for smartphone users. Complete this with a piece of HTML code embedded into your landing page. If you don't know how to do this, a technical SEO expert can do it for you.

Making it easy for potential patients to call and make an appointment is the best way to convert clicks into patients.

Monitor the Way Your Calls Are Handled

The final step in converting clicks into new patients is the phone call to make an appointment. Without that, your PPC for dentists will be a failure.

Many dentists fail to recognize that the way their receptionists handle these calls can make or break their PPC campaign. Therefore, your receptionist needs to complete the process of attaining new patients. The more PPC leads they close, the higher your ROI on your PPC campaigns.

For one thing, your receptionist should ask how they heard about you and write down their response. As a result, this will show how many people called due to your PPC ads.

You can improve call conversion by recording all calls. Then, if the closing rate seems low, you can have a sales expert listen to the recordings to learn how to improve conversion rates.

Then, have the sales expert train your staff to improve their closing rate in the future. You could also offer your receptionist a bonus for each call they convert into a new patient.

As you can see, optimizing a PPC campaign takes a lot of steps, from creating the ads and landing pages, A/B testing, and optimizing everything for phone calls. Then, of course, the final step in the whole process is a call to your office and a confirmed appointment.

Doing all this will result in a great ROI from your PPC for dentists and plenty of new dental patients for your practice. But, it's a lot of steps that take specialized knowledge. Hiring a PPC agency to handle your campaigns can relieve the stress and bring even more outstanding results.