Dental clinic network: 7,370 leads at $6.7 and 5 new clinics

Niche: private dental care · Channel: Google Ads · Author: Septminor

In short

• Client: a network of private dental clinics.
• Problem: every time the ad budget went up, each lead got almost proportionally more expensive. More money did not bring more patients.
• What we did: stopped the clinic's own campaigns from competing with each other, made Google count only real leads, and connected the ads to the clinic's appointment records.
• Result over the engagement: $50,200 ad spend, 7,370 leads at $6.7 each, and the client opened 5 clinics in different cities.

Where the client started

The clinic was already running Google Ads, and there was demand for its services. The owners wanted more patients and were ready to invest more. But every attempt to raise the budget ended the same way: a few more leads, each one more expensive. It looked like the ads had hit a ceiling.

What we found

Before changing anything, we talked to the clinic's doctors and front-desk staff: which services bring patients in, who actually makes it to the chair, what people ask on the phone. Then we went through the ad account. There were three causes, and none of them had to do with the ads themselves.

• The clinic was competing with itself. Campaigns for different clinics and services showed up for the same searches, so the client was bidding against itself and pushing up its own cost per click.
• Google was counting the wrong thing as a lead. Opening the booking form counted as a lead, not submitting it. The ads were learning to find people who open the form and close the page.
• Ads and appointment records lived separately. There was no way to see which leads turned into appointments and which got lost, so nobody knew what cost per lead was healthy for the clinic and what was too much.

What we did

1. Rebuilt the search terms and split them between campaigns, so the clinics no longer competed with each other for the same patient.
2. Set up tracking of real leads only. Google now gets a signal only when a person has actually booked. After that, the cost per lead started going down on its own, without manual bid tweaking.
3. Connected Google Analytics 4 with the clinic's CRM to see the full path from click to appointment.
4. Improved the landing pages the ads lead to. This was the last step, not the first: changing the site makes sense only once the leads from it are counted correctly.

Results

The budget could now be scaled, and leads grew with it instead of getting more expensive. Over the course of our work together, the client opened 5 clinics in different cities.

Does this apply to your business?

If your ads have "hit a ceiling" and every extra dollar brings less, the cause is often not the ads or the audience. Most often the ads are counting the wrong leads, or your own campaigns are getting in each other's way. One review of the ad account is enough to see it.

More about the services: Google Ads management and Google Analytics 4 setup. More results on the cases page.