As more patients use the internet to find a dentist, paid marketing methods like Google Ads are essential for practices to grow. But with limited budgets and a highly competitive marketplace, dentists need to be certain they are producing the best possible results.

The key to unlocking more efficient paid marketing is measurement – and the most important metric of all is return on investment (ROI).

What Is ROI (Return on Investment)?

ROI indicates the net financial impact of an investment. The simplest way to calculate it is to divide your total revenue by your total costs. If, for example, you spend $100 on paid marketing and generate $200 in new patient bookings, your ROI would be 2x or +100%.

Why is ROI Important for Dental Marketing?

Marketing is only worthwhile if it helps your practice generate more profit. But it’s easy to lose sight of the bottom line impact of marketing and focus on the visible benefits, such as how many new patients you’ve acquired. As a result, you might mistakenly assume your marketing is working well – even if it’s producing a net loss.

Measuring the ROI of your marketing helps ground your decisions in the reality of your business economics. It enables you to:

• Quantify how effective your current marketing strategy is
• Find ways to make your marketing spend more efficient
• Avoid overspending on strategies or tactic that don’t produce measurable results

Three Reasons ROI is Particularly Important for Paid Marketing

1. The impact of paid marketing is exclusively about your bottom line

While brand building or developing a website could be seen as long-term investment that produce intangible value by increasing patient awareness and trust, the only reason to buy Google Ads is to produce measurable results.

You can reasonably consider your website a sunk-cost – and therefore not worry too much about its short-term ROI. But paid marketing that produces losses should be dispensed immediately.

2. The ROI of paid marketing campaigns varies wildly between practices.

Research shows that top performing paid marketing for dentists produces results more than 10x better than the industry average – so there is a big gap between marketing strategies that “work” and those that produce a major competitive advantage. Measuring your ROI helps you benchmark your existing performance and see how much you could improve things with the right strategy.

3. The common errors dentists make in paid marketing are easy to mitigate

You could be overspending on keywords that don’t produce quality leads or simply bidding on the wrong keyword altogether. But these mistakes will quickly be revealed by a solid ROI calculation and can be fixed with relative ease. That means ROI is not just a retrospective measure but something that can be used to proactively improve your marketing within days.

How to Measure the ROI of Your Paid Marketing

A simple ROI calculation does not capture the full complexity of paid marketing. Instead, a truly accurate assessment of your marketing profitability should factor in:

• The cost of your total paid marketing spend
• The number of patients you generate
• And your average patient lifetime value (PLV)

But even that misses out key factors that determine the true impact of your paid marketing.

Why? Because every marketing channel and strategy involves opportunity costs. Your marketing budget is limited, and the true “cost” of your paid marketing is not just the price of your ads – it’s missing out on other marketing methods.

Dentists should always ask themselves: could we get a higher ROI from a different service? Because while paid marketing may produce positive ROI, you may still be making a loss if the opportunity cost is too high.

3 Ways to Fix Poor Paid Marketing ROI

1. Refine your keywords

Dental searches range from extremely broad (“dental practice”) to extremely specific (“root canal surgery in Casper Wyoming”). This creates a huge scope for dentists to bid on the wrong keywords that produce unsuitable patients.

Assess which keywords have produced the highest conversion rate and turned into actual patients. This will help you refine your strategy, remove underperforming terms and zone in on ads that actually produce a return.

2. Change your bidding strategy

The cost of paid marketing varies wildly depending on the level of competition for keywords. Many dentists assume that competitive keywords are inherently more valuable, but this is often not the case. In fact, most dentists are served by highly specific keywords that have fewer bids but more accurately capture your ideal audience.

Your best strategy is to determine the ROI of specific keywords and find a balance between volume and profitability. Get rid of ads that cost too much, as well as ads that are underperforming in terms of their CRT. This process of optimizing will quickly improve your overall performance and leave with only the most effective ads.

3. Experiment with new platforms

Don’t get stuck on one form of paid marketing. While ads can yield a strong ROI, you may be better served by a patient acquisition platform like Opencare that connects you directly with dental patients.

This doesn’t have to be either/or: you can experiment with both and compare the results. If you find one produces significantly higher or more reliable ROI, then you can progressively alter your digital marketing strategy to focus on that approach.

How Opencare Delivers Best-in-class ROI

No upfront fees

Our platform doesn’t charge set-up fees or fixed fees, and you won’t have to pay if a patient doesn’t show up or is under 18. This helps keep the initial investment low.

Zero-risk model

We only charge you when our platform produces a paying patient. As a result, you will only have to pay when you start producing revenue from our service, which removes the risks associated with lead generation agencies.

Extensive marketing

Our long-term investment in SEO, social media and content marketing has helped us build a strong brand and a reputation for expertise in the dental space. We rank for the majority of organic Google searches for local dentists, and our popular referral programs brings in a large volume of new users each month.

Long-term relationships

Not only do we help the average dental practice win 5-10 new patients per month (and some as many as 40!); the patients we produce are loyal. Our average rebooking rate is 85%, producing a high life-time value for every patient.

The result? A zero-risk, highly efficient service that helps you generate and retain lots of high-quality patients – and produce an average ROI of 640% within the first year alone.

Boost Your Bottom Line with Opencare

The average paid marketing campaign produces 200% ROI, but Opencare delivers considerably higher ROI – and is considerably more reliable. If you are currently using paid marketing but want to try a different approach, book your free Opencare demo today.