Google Ads for dentists: when it is worth it

Google Ads does one thing SEO cannot: it puts you at the top of the page tomorrow, and lets you stop on Friday. That control is the whole argument for it. The argument against is that dental clicks are expensive and the money leaves whether or not anyone books.

What clicks actually cost

We pulled UK cost-per-click data for 1,068 patient-facing dental searches in August 2026. The pattern is not the one most people expect.

Two things worth noticing. Cosmetic dentistry is the cheapest category, not the most expensive, which is the reverse of what most practices assume. And the dearest single terms in every category are London ones: "invisalign london uk" at £35.79, "private dentist in wandsworth" at £29.13. Outside London the same searches cost a fraction of that, so any national figure overstates what a market town practice will pay.

The number that matters is not the click price though. It is what a click is worth to you.

The one calculation to do first

Before spending anything, work out the most you can afford to pay for a new patient. It takes ten minutes and it decides everything downstream.

1. What is a new patient worth over their first year? Not their first appointment. Include the treatment you would reasonably expect, and be conservative.
2. What proportion of enquiries become patients? Ask reception. It is usually lower than owners assume.
3. What proportion of clicks become enquiries? We have not measured this and will not quote you someone else's benchmark. Take it from your own ads account after the first month, and until then use a deliberately pessimistic guess so the sum errs the safe way.

Multiply those through and you get your ceiling per click. If a term costs more than that, it does not matter how relevant it looks, it loses money at your conversion rates. Most practices that conclude "ads did not work" never did this calculation and were bidding above their own ceiling from day one.

When ads are the right call

• You have a specific chair to fill. A new associate, a new surgery, a hygiene diary with gaps. Ads are the only channel that responds this week.
• You cannot yet win the term organically. If three established practices hold the map pack and the top organic results, buying the position while you build is a reasonable bridge rather than an admission of defeat.
• The treatment is high value. Clear aligner terms run a £10.48 median and reach £35.79 at the top, which one case can comfortably absorb. A routine check-up cannot.
• You can answer the phone. This sounds facetious. It is the most common reason dental ad spend fails.

When they are not

• You are already winning the term. Paying for a click you would have had free is a real and common waste. Check what you rank for before you bid on it.
• Your landing page is your home page. Sending implant traffic to a general practice home page wastes most of what you paid for.
• Nobody is measuring past the click. If you cannot connect spend to booked patients, you are buying a chart, not patients.

The four settings that waste the most money

1. Broad match left on. It will find you searches you never intended to buy. Start with phrase and exact, and read the search terms report weekly for the first month.
2. No negative keywords. "Dental nurse jobs", "dentist salary", "NHS dentist near me" if you are private. Every one of those is a paid click that was never going to book.
3. Radius too wide. Patients do not travel far for routine dentistry. A tight radius around your actual catchment beats a generous one every time.
4. Ads running when you are shut. If nobody answers the phone at 8pm Sunday and your form goes to an inbox read on Monday, consider whether that click was worth buying.

Ads and search together

They are not alternatives and it is a mistake to frame them that way. The sensible pattern:

Find out what you already rank well for. Do not bid on those. Bid on the valuable terms you cannot win yet, while doing the organic work that eventually makes the bidding unnecessary. Re-check every few months, because the terms in each bucket change.

That requires knowing your organic position across your real catchment rather than from your own postcode, which is the part most practices skip and the reason so many end up paying for traffic they already had.