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In this week's Monday Morning Marketing episode, join us as we dive deeper into the world of Google Ads with our special guest, Xana Winans, from Golden Proportions. Get ready to supercharge your marketing strategies as we uncover tips and warnings for a successful Ads campaign. We'll unveil the secrets of setting the perfect Google Ads runtimes that sync with your office hours, discuss what a sensible ad-spend budget entails, and break down click-through rates in relation to your service offerings. Plus, we'll show you how to address potential patient objections effectively and gain a competitive edge over rival offices through savvy keyword usage.

Jump into this episode with Xana to hone in on your best Google Ads strategy in this forever-evolving ads landscape!

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You can reach out to Xana Winans here:

Website: https://www.goldenproportions.com/

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Other Mentions and Links:

Google Ads

Google Local Service Ads

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If you want your questions answered on Monday Morning Marketing, ask me on these platforms:

My Newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/

The Dental Marketer Society Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2031814726927041

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Michael: Hey Xana, so talk to us about Google Ads. How can we utilize this or what advice, suggestions, or methods can you give us that will actually attract new patients through our Google

Xana: Ads efforts? Oh, there's so much good information in that question you just asked. That's loaded. so there's a lot of things that make Google Ads successful.

And let me hit on just like a couple of really important tips. One of the first ones is, be very wary about using Google's own artificial intelligence that they're trying to make it look really easy so anybody can do their own Google Ads. Because if you are using Google's own artificial intelligence platform, you are potentially wasting a lot of money on clicks that are not valuable for you.

and, you don't have as much control over reaching the proper target audience. And besides that, Google's gonna actually, you're gonna spend a lot more of your money and get a lot less for it. So, when we do Google Ads for people, there's a couple of things that we do to make sure that they are hitting that success versus what they've been trying to do on their own.

One is, and this seems so obvious, you gotta make sure that you are setting your times for your ads. Only when your business is open. Some people just run those ads 24 7. But let's think about the patient experience. When patients call, we know that they want to get in immediately, they've got about 3 days to get scheduled.

they do not want to get into a practice that scheduling, They to be able to get in pretty quickly. So they want to be able to. Get in, they want to be able to get a hold of you because you're an errand they're checking off their list. So if you're running, you're at it nine o'clock at night and there's nobody there answering the phone, it's a complete waste of your time and of their time.

one way to overcome that is to use online scheduling. Which I think is critical for absolutely any Google Ads campaign because you want to capture people while they are in the moment and they are ready to make their decision. So ideally using online scheduling, but at the very least, people sometimes have questions, so make sure those ads are only running when you're open.

As a matter of fact, I usually stop them about an hour before the practice hours are over. Because we don't always make our phone call immediately when we're doing our research. It might take us a little time and we want to make sure that that phone call actually becomes an appointment.

another thing that I think is important to think about is the topic that you are using in your Google ads. So there's a lot of things that you can advertise for. You can advertise for just general dentistry patients, emergency patients, peds patients. Those three are great. Those are the winners almost every time.

But a lot of doctors want to use Google ads to go after things like dental implants, all on for cosmetic dentistry, sleep apnea, TMD treatment. And here's what we've learned. The click through rates. Those higher level campaigns can be insane. Our click through rates are usually honest to be 27 to 35 percent on those campaigns.

So literally like 35 percent of the people that see your ad when we're running it, we'll click on it. Go to a landing page. The difference is these types of leads are doing a lot of research. They're what I would call their higher up in the funnel. So they're exploring all of their options. And these are not the leads that are going to just click to schedule an appointment or just call you and immediately make your appointment.

There's a lot of contact follow up contact that they need. So, you know, When they call you or if even if they submit a form, for example, it often takes 7 to 9 additional touches before they are ready to commit to an appointment. So if you're just sitting there and waiting for them to like, make that decision on the spot, you're going to end up really frustrated because you'll get a lot of clicks and a lot of people who seem to be interested.

But a lot of them won't convert into appointments. So you got to be ready with an outbound, text messaging campaign, outbound phone calls, outbound emails to keep in contact with that lead until they are ready to schedule with you. another thing to think about, and this one's so frustrating for people in the beginning.

Have you ever heard of the term fat finger? Where they

Michael: accidentally click it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Me all the time, yeah.

Xana: Yeah, so we're all on our cell phones, and you type in, Dentist in Lewisburg, I'll give you from my community. And there's a couple of listings that come up, so you can have a combination of like, somebody just accidentally clicks on the wrong listing with their fat finger on a small cell phone, and then it's a wrong number phone call.

And the teams kind of can say, oh, I'm getting a lot of wrong number phone calls. Well, there's still people who are looking for a dentist. So it's still an opportunity to convert them into an appointment. but 1 way to help overcome that is to actually. Upload a list of all the competitors in your area.

As negative keywords before you launch your campaign. And here's why. So if I typed in Dennis and Lewisburg, the area that I'm in Google is gonna be doing, we've got exact match and then kind of some broad match keywords in there. So it would bring up anybody for an ad that had the words dentist and Lewisburg in it.

If I'm a dental practice named Lewisburg Dentistry. The odds are very, very good that my Google ad is going to appear at the top and people are going to think that's what they're clicking on. and it's basically just going to be a waste of their money. So we want to eliminate as many fat finger phone calls as possible.

So uploading that list of competition helps maximize your budget right out of the gate. you had mentioned before we started talking about budget, like what's the right budget for people to put for this? The budget is, I generally say it's a minimum of 1, to be able to do it properly. And if your 1, 000 only gets you one mile or 1, 000 gets you 10 miles, depending on the area that you're living in, real key is about your impression share.

So do you know what impression share is? No. Okay, so anytime somebody would be searching Dennis in it's the percentage of time that your Google ad is going to show up in their search results based on, how many dollars you have available. So if your budget is, say, 500 a month and you're averaging 15 a click. You might miss out on an awful lot of traffic simply because your budget has already been spent for the day. And you might have a very small impression share. So there might be 100 searches for it in a day, but you might only be getting 5 percent impression share because the cost per click is so high or your market area is so wide.

It's a lot better. Instead of necessarily just going with budget, it's more about setting up the parameters of the campaign to make sure that you are maximizing your impression share. You want to be able to make sure that your Google ad is showing up a minimum of 80%, 90 percent of the time when somebody is doing a search.

Otherwise, they're clicking on your competitor's ads.

Michael: Okay. Okay. Interesting. So more budget better, but if we don't have the more budget, what do we do? We just hone in or what are you thinking?

Xana: so yes, you can, limit the hours when your campaign is running. For example, uh, I've seen practices where we'll only run it, say Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.

And we'll front load that at the beginning of the week because we know those people want to get in quickly. So we want to make sure that we're not running an ad on a Friday where they're not going to be able to get in until Tuesday or Wednesday of the next week. so you can kind of compress your budget that way.

You can limit the size of the market area that you're in instead of that 10 mile radius. You can say, I'm, I'm just going to make sure I'm capturing everybody in a 1 mile radius, or I'm going to pick a. Particular zip code that's important to me. Maybe everybody in your immediate area knows you. So we want to go outside of that area and just target a certain zip code.

so there's a couple of different things that you can do to really maximize that budget. The thing that I always keep in mind with budget and I tell everybody this right out of the gate is that. It's always going to go up. This is a bidding situation, teasingly say Google clearly does not have enough money.

this trillion dollar organization. so they're going to make it harder and harder for your ads to appear until you spend more money per time that somebody clicks on your ad, which means. That you will not get as many clicks for the same amount of money over time. So what might start out as a thousand dollar budget might have to be 1, 500 the next year or 2, 000 the year after that.

It's not growing quite that quickly, but just know that sometimes you're, you're going to probably have to end up spending more money to get the same amount of traffic over time, just because those ad costs are going to go up. There's kind of a trend lately. Have people been talking to you about these sponsored listings up at the top?

Michael: Yeah, yeah, it's a is there a green check mark I want to say or something like

Xana: that or yes So these listings the thing that's really different about these listings before Anybody could buy a google ad and set up a campaign. I I mean I could be the guy down the street I could be somebody in china. It doesn't matter anyone could set up a campaign These sponsored listings google is making you go through this deep verification process.

You have to give them Uh, not just prove that you're in your physical location, they need to see your actual credentials, like they need to get your, forget exactly what it is, if they need your diploma or your license number or something, but they need actual proof that you are a licensed practitioner and they're not doing it in every market, the area that we're in is rural enough, they aren't doing those sponsored listings yet, they're still just kind of testing it in some of the more major markets.

But the thing with these sponsored listings that's really kind of interesting is Instead of saying, I have, you know, a budget of 1, 000 and I'm trying to get as many clicks as I can at an average cost of 5 a click, you're paying for performance, so they're charging you per phone call.

It is their call tracking line that is used. And so when someone clicks on that ad and calls, it's running roughly around 100 per phone call. For an appointment, which cost per lead, that's actually not terrible, but you got to have a team who's ready to take the phone calls and are able to convert those leads into good appointments.

So, I still kind of see those in like the, testing phase where people are figuring out if they're worth it or not are the. The searcher is actually going to respond to those or not. in my humble opinion, my favorite one, mean, obviously we all love Google Ads and just in general, but I love the ones that are in the Google Maps listings.

That you can do a sponsored listing right in all of the Google Maps so that your name appears at the top. If you are in a market that's so competitive, you can't get into, one, two or three position in your market area, just buy your way into that list.

Michael: Okay. Interesting. Real quick. If you could kind of guide us throughout the part where you were discussing the topic on Google ads, how to keep in contact with the outbound, this. So they click, they don't sign up. You said it takes several touch points. How can we build something there?

Xana: So, uh, great question. It's actually something we're working on is, is trying to close that loop for the doctors. but the idea is when somebody calls they have questions, they're not ready to make a decision yet.

So the team first off needs to be ready with a list of very common objections that the caller is going to have about that particular product. So let's say it's cosmetic dentistry. People are going to ask, what does it cost? Is it covered by insurance? How long does it take? Is this painful? can you fix this particular problem?

What do you charge per tooth? They have all these questions. First step is for the team to have all of those objections written down and your answers for them figured out. It just makes for a better experience. People are not going to make their decision in the moment. You'll get a couple. That you might be able to bring in for a consult, but most of them are like, okay, let me think about it.

That's where it's important to get a follow up phone number, a follow up email and then set a regular outbound set of touch points. So, over the next couple of days, email, phone call, text message, and kind of repeating that process until you get that person to make a commitment because they're doing a lot of homework.

they're, um, talking to a lot of different options to see who's going to be the best one for them. And honestly, the person who makes the sale is usually the person who's just more active and showing more interest in that prospective patient. Mm.

Michael: Gotcha. So, stay active. Basically,

Xana: right. You got to stay really active.

You can't just take that one phone call and let it die with, leave it up to the patient. If they're going to call me back, the team has to be the outbound salesperson who is actually calling and following up with that patient to see if they can move them forward. honestly, it takes some, some good sales training for teams who know how to do that.

So I see this a little more successfully in some DSO practices, where they're, they're able to invest in like a call center and people who do some of that outbound follow up. Do you have any practices you've seen that are really successful with that outbound follow up? A couple,

Michael: it's more front office skills training that I've seen where that works.

You know what I mean? Where they have like the. Confidence to know what to say and do when they follow up and they send a text or they have a software that does all that, right, that sends a text and things like that. Um, but I can see how the bar drops a ton right there, you know what I mean? And then they go and say, well these ads aren't working, who's clicking them, you know, kind of thing.

And it just falls apart. So I can definitely see that in that scenario.

Xana: In my opinion, one thing that I found to be a little more successful if you don't have a team in place who either has like the time or the experience to do all that outbound follow up. I'm a big believer in bring these patients in under a general dentistry campaign.

People who are just looking for I need a new dentist, they're going to come in, they're going to go through their hygiene experience, they're gonna have a comprehensive exam with you that is better than anyone they've ever had in their entire lives. And They build a relationship with you, and you can start asking them questions about, so what do you think about the appearance of your teeth?

Is there anything that you're unhappy with that you've ever wished you could fix? Would you like to know what your options are? you've already got their attention because they're in the office. I find it is much easier to move those types of patients forward to things like implants and all on four and cosmetics and sleep apnea.

Once they know who you are as a doctor, And why you're qualified and they like you as a person and they like your office. So, I find it is a far better spend of your money to actually go for the general to kind of get those big procedures in a roundabout way.

Michael: Gotcha. Awesome, Zonya. I appreciate your time and if anyone has any further questions, you can definitely find her on the Dental Marketer Society Facebook group or where can they reach out to you directly?

Xana: I'd say best way is go to our website, golden proportions. com. There's a chat button in the lower, right? There's usually somebody on there monitoring at all times. I tend to take the after hours ones and happy to have a conversation, answer any questions that your listeners might have about ads.

Michael: Awesome. Thank you so much, Zonya, for being with me on this Monday morning marketing episode. My

Xana: pleasure. Thanks, Michael.