6 Typical Adwords Mistakes….

…and how they hit your dental marketing budget

One area where dental practices consistently waste money is the use of Google Adwords which have not been optimised correctly or worse, not optimised at all.

Typical dental pay-per-click (PPC) budgets run from a few hundred pounds per month through to several thousands – some large practices in highly competitive environments spend *very* significant amounts of money in the race to attract clicks to their websites.

Irrespective of the spend, the same rules apply – each and every Adwords account should be optimised to deliver the best traffic for the least spend. You’ll notice that I didn’t say “most clicks for the least spend” – getting clicks is easy enough but those clicks need to be high quality i.e. targeted for your services and likely to deliver results.

Setting up and running PPC properly is a time consuming task and requires experience – a well-run campaign can save 40 -> 50% versus the same campaign run badly.

Here are 6 Adwords mistakes that we see regularly….

1. Sending visitors to the website home page

Your advert should send visitors to the most relevant page on your website. This isn’t just because it makes sense to show your users the most appropriate information but also because Google evaluates the landing page relevance when calculating how much you pay for each click. Google uses a measurement called “quality score” which looks at the relevance of your advert, quality of landing page and other click metrics to determine how much you pay per click. Higher quality scores = lower click costs.

2. Leaving the display network switched on

Google allows you to choose where you want to display your adverts. One of the channels is called the display network which basically opens your advert up to thousands of potentially unrelated websites. This can, in turn, lead to non-targeted clicks and typically lower click-through rates which adversely affects quality score.

3. Non granular campaigns

This is where an inexperienced user loads lots of keywords into a single campaign and ad. group. This does not allow sufficient control and typically delivers low quality scores.

You should use multiple ad. groups each with its own tightly grouped keywords and associated advert(s) – this type of data granularity gives much better control, the best scope to match your advertising parameters to what a searcher is looking for and scope for better quality scores.

4. Failing to track results

You need to use conversion tracking, preferably a tight integration with Google Analytics, to ensure you know which keywords and working and which aren’t. Failure to do this results in money down the drain.

5. Just using broad match keywords

An inexperienced user will typically set up keywords as “broad match”. This means that lots of unassociated searches can result in their ad. being displayed with the potential for irrelevant clicks and unnecessary cost. Google provides keyword matching tools which facilitate much tighter control on when your ads. will display – for example “exact”, “phrase”, “broad-match modified” and “negative” matching parameters. Fail to use correct keyword matching and prepare to pay for wasted clicks, simple as that.

6. Failure to use a negative keyword list

A negative keyword list prevents your ad. from showing when the search phrase contains a word on your negatives list. An example for dental searches might be to use the word “cheap” as a negative in your dental implants campaign if you don’t want your ad. to show for people using “cheap” in their search phrase. Not everyone wants to advertise “cheap” implant services or to sell on price.

There are a lot of other Adwords parameters that are important but the six above represent some of the fundamental ones. Get those right and you are on the right track.

The other key thing to note about Adwords management is that it is not “fire and forget”. Even with a good initial set-up, frequent visits into the account (2 or 3 times per week) are needed to optimise and adjust bid prices to ensure ongoing performance. This cannot be done in just a couple of hours per month.

Summary

Setting up and running Google Adwords accounts is not a trivial exercise and will waste a lot of money unless overseen by an experienced practitioner.

At Dental Media we provide experienced Adwords management for dentists which generates targeted traffic at lowest cost. Please call 01332 672548 for more information.