Chris (00:01.922)
What’s up, everyone? Welcome back to the No BS Dental Growth podcast. I’m Chris Pistorius, your host. And today I’m going to say something that might sound strange coming from a marketing agency owner. Stop running more Google ads. At least stop running more Google ads until you’ve fixed the three things I’m going to walk you through today. Because right now, if you haven’t addressed these, you are literally lighting money on fire and more ad spend will just mean a bigger fire.
I’ve been doing dental marketing now for over 17 years. Yes, I’m that old. I’ve worked with practices all over the country and even in different countries. And I can tell you the number one mistake I see dentists make is trying to solve a conversion problem with more traffic. It doesn’t work. And today I’m going to show you exactly why. If you’re new here, hit subscribe. We do this every week. Real talk about what really moves the needle in a dental practice. So let’s go.
I want to start with a concept I call the bigger bucket problem, if you will. Imagine you’ve got a bucket that you’re filling with water. Those are your leads. But there are three holes in the bottom of the bucket. Some water stays in, but a lot drains out. Now, what most practice owners do when they’re not happy with their new patient numbers is they turn the faucet up higher. More water going in, right? They figure eventually,
Enough will stay, but the holes are still there. And bigger water pressure just means faster drainage. That’s what happens when you increase your Google Ads budget without fixing your underlying conversion issues. You’re getting more leads, but you’re losing just as many of them, just faster and at a higher cost per click. The smart move, the move I always recommend before touching an ad budget is to plug the holes first.
So let’s talk about what those holes are. Hole number one, your phone answer rate. This is the most basic metric in dental marketing and most practices, I shouldn’t say most because many are catching up now, but many practices have no idea where theirs is. Here’s the question, what percentage of new patient phone calls does your practice actually answer?
Chris (02:25.153)
I’ve seen practices with answer rates below 50 % and that’s been pretty recent, which means if you’re running ads and a hundred people call you this month, 50 of them are getting a voicemail or worse, no answer at all, or even worse, an answering service and walking then straight to your competitor who can handle that call at nine o’clock at night or midnight. Now think about what that does to your cost per new patient. If you’re paying $30 per call and only answering half of them,
Your real cost per answered call is 60 bucks. And that’s before we even talk about whether those answered calls converted. Before you spend another dollar on Google ads, pull your call tracking data. If you don’t have call tracking, there’s problem number one, you need it. There’s no reason not to have it no matter how big or small you are. It’s cheap to do and it’s easy to analyze with AI. Look at your answer rate. Look at what time of day call they…
calls are coming in and when you’re answering in there or when you’re losing them. And then compare that to when you’re staffed and by with how many people. Most practices have a gap between 12 and 2 p.m. When the teams at lunch and then between five and seven when people are calling after work and nobody’s there to pick up. Those windows are where you’re bleeding the leads. So the solutions stagger lunch breaks.
Better yet, use an AI voice agent for after hours and overflow. Make sure every call gets responded to in some form with somebody that can actually react to them. Interact with them, I guess I should say. All of this within five minutes. These aren’t hard fixes. They’re things nobody’s paying attention to sometimes. Hole number two, your website conversion rate. Let me ask you something. When was the last time you went through your own website as if you were a new patient?
pulled it up on your phone especially because 70 % of your searches or your traffic, I should say, to your website right now happened on a mobile device. And then actually tried to figure out how to book an appointment through that. You might be surprised if you do that simple drill. If your answer is you don’t do it a lot or maybe never, we need to talk. Because most agencies, most companies out there that will do ads for you,
Chris (04:48.213)
They usually take the easy or the lazy way and they just send the traffic right to your website. Okay. Not necessarily a terrible idea, but you really want to have specific landing pages built for these paid ads. They do convert better, but I know that a lot of you out there that are running Google ads, you have them just going to your website and that’s fine, but we’ve got to make sure that website, it’s going to be a great experience for them. It’s going to make them want to hold up their hand and say, yes, I want more information.
So here’s what a bad dental website does when a Google Ads visitor lands on it. It loads slowly, maybe. It’s hard to navigate on mobile. And let me back up a little bit. Maybe you go to your own website and it loads right away. That doesn’t mean that’s what’s happening for new people, because your website is cached, if you will, on your device. So it’s been there before, so it loads it faster. Go there as a brand new person. See how fast it loads. That could be a whole different situation.
Where’s your call to action on your website? What makes people want to go, yes, I definitely want to talk to these people. Is it buried? Is it even there at all? Or do you just have your practice name up there? Is the phone number clickable on a mobile device? And if it is clickable, does it actually work? Maybe there’s no online booking option. The content you have is generic. It looks like everybody else’s website.
And there’s nothing that builds trust fast. There’s no real photos. Maybe you’re using stock photos, no social proof, like reviews, video reviews, no clear explanation of what makes this practice different. That visitor bounces, by the way, you paid for the click there. You got nothing out of it because they saw nothing that made them want to like take the next step.
The average dental website converts somewhere between one and 3 % of visitors, meaning for every 100 people who land on your site, 97 to 99 of them leave without doing anything. That’s brutal. And most practices just accept it. A well-optimized dental website, one with fast load times, a mobile-first design, prominent phone numbers, clear calls to action, real patient photos, social proof,
Chris (07:06.794)
Real marketing science applied to these sites can convert at 5 % to 8 % or higher. That’s double or even triple what I just talked to you about on the same ad spend. So before you turn up your Google Ads budget, ask yourself, is my website actually ready to convert the traffic I’m already sending to it? Because if the answer is no, again, we’re burning money. We’re sliding it on fire.
All right, hole number three, and this is the big one, your follow-up process. I did a full episode on this topic recently, so I’m not gonna go super deep here. Just go back and look at it as just a week or two ago. But let me give you the key point here. A lead that doesn’t book on the first contact is not a dead lead. It’s a warm lead, maybe even a hot lead, that needs a system. Most practices have no system for this. A form comes in, somebody calls once, nobody picks up.
Or they say they’ll call back because they got to talk to their spouse or check their insurance. And then that lead is really dead because there’s no follow-up. You’re just waiting for them to call back.
Research shows that the average service business needs five to eight touch points to convert a lead. Most dental practices make one if that, maybe two, and then they go buy more ads to replace the leads that they’re letting slip through. Before you increase your Google Ads budget or any other marketing budget, put an automated follow-up sequence in place. Text, email, calls, multi-channel, multi-touch triggered automatically the moment a lead comes in.
and not just some out of the box solution from Dentrix or Weave or whatever provider you have. It has to be customized for your practice and written in a manner where people are gonna take action. If your ad spend generates, let’s say 50 leads a month and your follow-up system converts 10 % more of them, that’s an additional five, yeah, that’s five additional new patients, math is hard, without spending a single extra dollar on ads.
Chris (09:14.068)
five new patients at an average patient lifetime value of one to two thousand dollars, probably a lot more than that depending on your practice, that’s five to ten thousand dollars from fixing just one single thing in your follow-up and not increasing your ad budget.
Okay, so I’ve been telling you to slow down on the ads. Let me tell you when it actually makes sense to scale up. When your phone answer rate is above 85%, when your website converts at at least 4 5 % of visitors, when you have an automated multi-touch follow-up sequence that runs without your front desk having to think about it, and when you have call tracking in place and you actually know your cost per lead and cost per booked appointment. And when your front desk is trained on how to handle
new patient calls, not just how to answer the phone, but how to actually convert an inquiry into a booked appointment. Can they tell these, this new patient in a few seconds, why you’re better than the 20 other dentists right around you and why they need to bring their family to you. Once all those things are in place, increasing your Google ads budget is like pouring water into a bucket that actually holds water.
Every dollar you put in comes out the other side as booked appointments. That’s when scaling makes sense, not before. The practices that grow the fastest aren’t necessarily the ones spending the most on ads. They’re the ones who built the infrastructure first. All right, let me bring it home. Stop running more Google ad stuff until you’ve fixed your phone answer rate, your website conversion rate, your lead follow-up process, your front desk training.
These are the three holes in your bucket. Patch them first, then scale. This is the exact diagnostic process we run with every new client in our 90 day sprint program. We don’t touch ad spend until we understand what’s happening to the leads you’re already generating. Because every practice I’ve worked with has more opportunity in what they already have than they realize. Thanks for tuning in today. If this episode gave you something to think about or something to fix.
Chris (11:24.828)
Sorry for the extra work, but it will be worth your time. Please take a second and subscribe to our podcast wherever you’re listening or watching. That’s the best way to make sure you don’t miss an episode. And it helps us reach more independent dentists like you who need to hear this stuff. And if you want us to actually run this diagnostic on your practice, look at your answer rate, your site, your follow-up, all of it. Just go to kickstartdentalmarketing.com and book a free discovery call with me.
I’ll tell you exactly where your biggest opportunity is. I’m Chris Pistorius. Go fix those holes. I’ll talk to you next week.
