How to structure and manage Google Ads for dental practices - campaign split, budgets, cost per new patient and landing page requirements. This guide is written for Dental practices running or outsourcing Google Ads, and everything below comes from work we do on live accounts rather than recycled theory. Skim the sections, take the numbers as starting benchmarks for your own market, and treat the checklist items as a work plan you can hand to your team or your agency this week.
What it costs
Typical dental Google Ads media budgets are $1,500-$8,000 per month per location, with management at 10-20% or a $500-$1,500 flat fee. Cost per click ranges $4-$18; cost per booked new patient commonly lands $60-$250 depending on treatment and market.
Treat every range above as a starting benchmark, not a quote. Competition in your specific market, the current state of your website, how much production capacity you already have in-house, and how aggressive your growth target is will all move the number. The useful exercise is to work backwards from revenue: what is one additional customer worth, how many do you need per month to justify the spend, and does the plan on the table plausibly produce them?
How long it takes
First calls within days of launch. Reliable cost-per-patient data needs 4-6 weeks and at least 30-50 conversions before you make structural decisions.
Two things reliably compress timelines. The first is production volume: more genuinely useful pages and more consistent execution per month means faster results, which is why budget and speed are linked. The second is starting condition - a site with clean technical foundations and existing authority moves much faster than a new domain. Be honest about which one you are, then set expectations accordingly with whoever signs off on the budget.
What actually works
Split campaigns by treatment value: emergency, general checkups, Invisalign or ortho, implants and cosmetic. Each has a different acceptable cost per acquisition.
Send each campaign to a matching landing page with one offer, one form, click-to-call and social proof - never the homepage.
None of these are clever. They are the boring fundamentals executed at unusual quality and consistency, which is what separates programmes that compound from programmes that plateau after one quarter.
Import offline conversions or at least mark call-answered and appointment-booked events, so bidding optimises to patients rather than form fills.
Layer in a tight negative keyword list: jobs, courses, free, school, insurance-only searches and DIY queries.
Mistakes that cost the most
Using one campaign for all treatments, letting cheap checkup clicks eat the implant budget.
Broad match with no negatives, which in dental burns budget on training and career queries fast.
No call tracking, which makes optimisation impossible when most bookings arrive by phone.
Every one of these is common enough that we expect to find at least two of them in any audit. Fixing them costs almost nothing compared with the spend they waste, so they belong at the top of the work plan rather than in a backlog.
Your next 90 days
Weeks 1-2: instrument everything first. Tracking, call tracking where relevant, a conversion definition that finance would accept, and a baseline you can defend later. Skipping this step is the single most expensive shortcut available, because without a baseline you cannot prove anything worked.
Weeks 3-8: ship the highest-leverage items from the 'what actually works' list above, in priority order, one at a time so each change stays attributable. Resist the urge to rebuild everything at once - it feels productive and it destroys your ability to learn.
Weeks 9-12: build the compounding layer - content cadence, review velocity, link acquisition, experimentation - and set a monthly review with a fixed agenda. Dental accounts that separate high-value treatment campaigns from general checkup campaigns typically improve cost per high-value case substantially without raising total spend.
If you would like a second opinion before you commit budget, we run free 30-minute strategy calls and will walk through your current setup using the same diagnostic we use with paying clients.
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