Have you ever noticed that most watch ads have the time set to 10:10? The hands create a smiley face when they frame the brand name on the watch’s face.
Whoever came up with that idea did some serious planning. You may not be selling watches but your Google Ads, formerly Adwords, campaign needs some planning work to get the most bang for your buck.
Let’s look at 7 things to consider when planning your campaign.
1. Who Are You Trying to Reach?
The first step in a successful Google Ads campaign is knowing who you want to reach. If you don’t have an idea of who your ideal patient is, you may not reach them.
And worse, you might reach people who aren’t likely to become patients which will end up costing you a bunch of extra ad dollars with no return.
2. What Services Will You Advertise?
Once you know who you’re targeting with your ads, you need to decide what services you’re going to promote. Are you going to focus on people who are looking for emergency dental work on short notice or do you want to focus on elective work that isn’t as time-critical?
3. Keyword Research
Once you know who you’re targeting, with what services, you need to figure out what keywords and phrases they’re likely to be searching for on Google. Your ads are shown based on those keywords.
Google’s Keyword Planner tool helps you build a list of keywords related to your audience and services. You can search for a wide-ranging keyword and it will give you a list of related terms, which you can then drill further into.
4. Set Up Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are words that you want to exclude from triggering your ads. When you do your keyword research, you’ll likely come across keywords that don’t suit your practice. Those can be set up as negative keywords.
For example, you might want to make the word free a negative keyword. If you’re a family practice in Las Vegas, people who search for “family dentist las vegas” would see your ad but people who search for “free family dentist las vegas” would not.
5. Prepare Your Website
Your website should be attractive, support modern browsers from smartphone-sized displays on up, and use the latest security standards. These will not only make a better experience for your visitors, but they’ll also help reduce your click costs in Google Ads.
6. Set Up Conversion Tracking
Install Google Analytics or another tracking system on your website so you can track how many people who click on an ad end up becoming patients. You should also set up unique landing pages on your site for each ad you run so you can track them all independently.
7. Competitive Research
Finally, make sure you know what your competition is doing. Are they advertising on Google and if so, how and what are they promoting? If they’re running an ad for any length of time, you can presume it’s profitable. Most dentists won’t throw money away on ineffective ads.
Getting Your Adwords Campaign Up and Running
Planning and launching your Adwords campaign takes some time, something you may not have a lot of. And while it’s not that complicated, you will need to learn the ins and outs of the Google Ads system.
About the Author
Florian Tomko is the founder of Profitable Dentistry, a digital marketing company that focuses on SEO and Google Ads for dentists. After learning his craft at a top rated agency, Florian moved in-house to grow his father’s dental practice in Germany and an ambitious dental clinic in a very competitive market in a European capital.
