Meta Advertising For Dentists – Latest Agency Trends And Guidance

Big budgets and pre-qualifying leads become the norm.

The pace of change with Meta paid ads, particularly in the Invisalign and implants sector, continues to be extremely rapid. As I explained in an earlier blog just a few months ago, this has been stimulated by huge competition not just from dentists, but also among the agencies supplying the ad services.

Over the last couple of years we’ve seen agencies having to up the ante considerably in an effort to keep pace with the rapid changes. In the not too distant past, agencies were offering ‘20 leads per month’ and little else, but things have changed considerably. We now see promises of hundreds of leads per month together with pre-qualification and booking directly into the dentist’s appointment system. We’ve even seen agencies offering to pay the dentist if the leads don’t come to fruition in terms of new treatment. These changes are all indicative of an element of saturation and desperation by agencies trying to stay ahead.

But there is another set of changes coming to the fore which again is indicative of the lengths Meta ads practitioners are having to go to, to squeeze acceptable returns from Facebook and Instagram advertising.

The latest dental agency Meta ads trends

This is a summary of how the ads market is shaping up in late summer of 2025:

• “hands off” promises – i.e. the agency does all the work including pre-qualification and booking of leads
• more leads generated (but many of them very speculative)
• pre-qualifying questions in use at the point of contact to “weed out” speculative enquiries
• much larger daily budgets required

Why are we seeing these latest changes and are they all sustainable?

There are three main reasons for the latest changes in the Meta dental ads market:

• continuing saturation in some areas
• the use of leads ads attracting increasingly speculative enquiries
• Meta privacy controls removing a lot of scope for targeting and driving agencies to use “blanket bombing” tactics – complete with much higher ad budgets

Typical dental ad budgets – Q3 2025

So what are you expecting to spend on your dental Meta ads campaigns? Unfortunately the changes discussed about have had a fairly significant effect on what you need to spend to get traction with dental ads on Facebook and Instagram. What could have been achieved for £20 per day just a few years ago, now demands and investment of two to three times that amount to get similar traction.

Unfortunately you need a wider net to capture lots more leads which then have to be sifted through carefully – this is simply to get to the same result you could have achieved a lot more easily just a few years ago. This needs a bigger ad budget and bigger agency fees to manage the campaigns and pre-qualification.

Is it worth dental advertising on Facebook and Instagram in late 2025 and into 2026?

The answer to this is “yes” but with the following qualification:

• expect larger ad budgets
• expect larger agency fees
• expect the level of speculative enquiries to rise
• in line with the above, expect the resources you (or your agency) needs to rise

Pre-requisites for ad success

Given the high level of competition, the following elements must be in place to give yourself the best chance of success with dental ads in 2025/2026:

• excellent ad creative (images, video clips etc) – cheesy, static stock images no longer cut it
• a realistic budget
• suitable expectations – you will have to do some work to make it happen
• a great dental agency with transparent reporting
• use of CAPI and other tools to work around strict targeting (privacy) controls
• a compelling value proposition – the campaigns which provide a valuable service to potential new patients always do much better than those which don’t
• patience – it takes time for campaigns to “learn” and for tools like the Meta CAPI to take effect
• consider starting with a “brand awareness” campaign to gain traction before jumping into the Invisalign/implants melee.

Conclusion

Advertising for new dental patients using Facebook and Instagram is still worthwhile in 2025/2026 but you will need realistic expectations, great ads, a sensible budget and patience. For all of the reasons discussed above, it’s no longer the case where dentists can blast out a few basic ads on Facebook and expect new patients to flood in. It’s more difficult and costly to get the same results now and we should not expect that to change. However, if you prepare well and meet the success criteria we’ve discussed, then good results are still achievable.

Need more advice and some assistance to get up and running? Please call the Meta team at Dental Media on 01332 672548 for a no-obligation discussion.