Google Ads – What Should My Budget Be for My Practice?
One big topic that is often brought up and sometimes overlooked when creating a marketing strategy is how much your advertising budget should be. In this example, our advertising experts at Med Rank Interactive will be talking about how to identify how much your Google Ads’ budget should be for your practice.
There are several factors that go into what your Google Ads’ budget should be. A few questions that need to be answered are:
What keywords should you target?
What locations are you looking to get new patients from?
What treatments did you need to advertise for?
What kind of Google Ads’ campaign do you need to run?
All of these questions will factor into what your budget will need to be for your ads campaigns to be successful. We will answer these questions so that you can maximize your ad spend and get the most out of your ads’ budget. The ultimate goal is to make your practice more profitable, not Google!
The Resources You Need
Campaign Type
For this example, we will use a general dentist in Charlotte, North Carolina. Let’s say they are looking for more general, emergency, and cosmetic patients to come into their practice from their Google Ads campaign.
In this case, we will create a text Ads campaign. Why? A text ads campaign will show on desktop and mobile devices for search keywords in Google as an advertisement. We want to attract new patients where they are.
The majority of patients will search for a dentist or independent physician on their smartphone or computer. There are other campaign types, such as call ads, dedicated to getting you more phone calls, or display ads, which are sort of billboard ads on Google. Text ads are a better choice in this scenario because you are able to have your ads shown on both devices, and you have a better chance of getting more new patients.
- The stats show that “significantly more searches are carried out on the mobile phone (64%) than on a desktop computer (35%)”.
Here is an example of a few text ad campaigns. Below, you will see “Sponsored,” which is what a Google Ad looks like. These ads below are dedicated to getting more new patients, as you will see.
You can see in the ads they will have extensions at the bottom of their listing. These extensions can be links to other pages on your website, called sitelinks. The first one shown below uses a location extension, showing their address, and a call extension, showing their phone number.
Campaign Strategy
First, let’s look at keywords. In this step, Med Rank Interactive uses tools like Ahrefs or Spyfu to determine the keywords that our dentists and independent physicians should target by looking at CPC (cost per click) and search volume.
Ahrefs is a tool that can tell you how many website visitors a website is receiving and show how many searches a keyword may get. It will also show you where you are ranking for certain keywords as well.
We use Ahrefs to tell us how much each keyword that we want to target in Google Ads will cost per click. Cost per click tells us how much they will spend each time someone clicks on their ad when a potential patient searches that keyword.
Search volume tells us, on average, how many people are searching for that keyword a month in your local area. We will use the keyword explorer feature in Ahrefs and search keywords for our example client “dentist in charlotte, nc”, keywords like dentist charlotte nc, cosmetic dentist charlotte nc, emergency dentist charlotte nc, teeth whitening charlotte nc, family dentist charlotte nc, etc.
Looking at the image below from Ahrefs this tells us what the search volume (SV) per month is for those keywords.
Using Data to Calculate Your Practice’s Advertising Budget
In Ahrefs, we will see the two biggest keywords are “emergency dentist charlotte nc” with 800 searches per month, and “dentist charlotte nc” at 700 searches a month. However, the cost per click between these two keywords varies significantly.
“Dentist charlotte nc” has a CPC of $3, whereas “emergency dentist charlotte nc” has a CPC of $6. Therefore, when someone searches “dentist charlotte nc” and clicks on your Ad, you will pay Google approximately $3 for that click.
So, you can already start to see the difference between your budget depending on whether you focus on general dentistry, emergency dentistry, or both. When we look at the last image in this article, we can also see the CPC of each of these keywords in Ahrefs.
So, in the particular example above, you are going to want to be able to cover, at the very minimum, 3-4 clicks per day. So, if we run our ads 25 days in a month and want to target both emergencies and general patients, we should have a minimum budget of $1,125/Month in order to give your ads a better chance to succeed.
This would be a higher-end budget. The reason you want to go with a higher-end budget is that you will be able to get more clicks each day, giving you more potential opportunities to get new patients. Also, the bigger your budget is, the higher your sponsored ad will show on Google.
In this scenario, this is a larger budget, so if you have the money to spend, by all means, proceed with targeting both the emergency and dentist keywords. But, if your budget is tighter, you may want to narrow down your focus to just emergencies or general.
In the emergency example with the “emergency dentist charlotte nc” keyword, you can have a decent ads campaign running on the low end, around $450/month. This could bring you potentially 5-7 new leads overall.
You can calculate your average monthly budget by taking the CPC of the keywords you want to target, multiplying it by 3-6 clicks per day, and then taking that number and multiplying it by the number of days you want the ads to run for the whole month.
You can use this formula: Keywords CPC x 3-6 Click Per Day = Number. Then, Number x Number of Days to Run per Month = Your Answer. Here is an example: $6 CPC x 3 Clicks = 18, 18 x 25 = $450/Month.
Conclusion
So, as you can see from this data, it all depends upon what you want to target with keywords, treatments, and locations, and the budget you have available based on the data you find/calculate. There should be at least 8-12 more keywords you start out targeting focused around your patients’ needs as well in order to get your ad more visibility to have ad success.
Those keywords should also factor into your budgeting for Google Ads as well. But this is just an example of the type of budget you should expect to have in a certain scenario regarding the type of patients you are looking to get more of.
Here is an example Google Ads budget proposal that we created for a dental practice to give you an in-depth look at how to go about budgeting for Google Ads:
When it comes to tracking leads, you will need to create your own dedicated Google Ads landing page. This page should not include any internal or external links and should not have any menu from the actual website. The page should also have no follow and no index, meaning Google will not put this page in search engines.
This way, you can fully track how users are engaging via your text ads and track visits correctly. On that page, you will also want to include a contact form at the bottom of the page, allowing potential patients to book an appointment via the form or via phone call. The average new patient for general dentistry can range between $200-$300. Also, the average lifetime value of a new general dentistry patient can be anywhere between $4,500-$22,000.
The ADA states that in order to calculate ROI (Return on Investment) for your practice, you should take the annual value for a patient at your practice multiplied by the number of patients seen from Google Ads. Take the answer you get and subtract your annual investment in Google Ads. Here is an example – $4,500 x 20 = $90,000. $90,000 – $5,400 = $84,600.
This is telling you what your ROI is with Google Ads specifically. It will tell you exactly how much money you are making back in new patients from your Google Ads. So, in this equation above $4,500 is the annual value of a patient as an example, 20 is the number of new patients received from Google Ads. $90,000 was the answer we got from that. Then, we subtracted $5,400, which is our annual Google Ads budget, from the $90,000 to get our ROI of $84,600.
The average cost per conversion you should see from Google Ads with an optimized campaign and ample budget should be anywhere from $10-$30 per month for overall cost per conversion. Anything above those numbers means you may not be focusing on the right keywords, using the right campaign, or having the correct ad targeting.
If you are interested in scheduling a consultation with Med Rank Interactive regarding your advertising or online marketing, please don’t hesitate to contact us today to start your advertising journey.
Med Rank Interactive has worked with hundreds of dentists and independent physicians to help them grow their practice’s profitability through online marketing and Google Ads. We have been helping dentists and independent physicians grow their practice’s profitability and meet their business goals for 10+ years. We have been featured on Dental Economics, Dentistry IQ, and Dental Entrepreneur. We are also a Dental Intelligence marketing partner in order to show true marketing ROI for our clients.
