Will My Paid Media Be Diversified Or Does It Rely Solely On The Google “Machine?”
It’s true that Google is still the “800-pound gorilla” of search and probably will be for the foreseeable future. However, Bing and Facebook also offer significant new patient opportunities for dentists. And let’s remember that paid media can also include social media ads like promoted Facebook posts.
Everyone’s situation is different, so “your mileage may vary” when it comes to the final “mix” of online marketing platforms and how much you invest with each. To maximize your return on investment, your paid ads need to be fully optimized across platforms.
Der Google
Google Ads gets all the buzz, but there are a number of other Google products that can be combined with Ads to optimize the optimization, so to speak.
Optimizing your paid media also means not overspending. Your Google Ads Quality Score is a completely transparent 1 to 10 scale in AdWords. A low Quality Score, which can be caused by lack of relevance between the keyword phrase, ad copy, and landing page, can significantly raise your cost-per-click – as much as 400 percent!
A great Quality Score can lower your cost-per-click by up to 50 percent! It takes some research, probably some ad rewriting, and a bit of patience to improve your Quality Score, but it’s well worth it. And any firm you retain to promote your practice should automatically do that work. If they don’t, they’re not acting in your best interests and you’re throwing money away.
Beyond your Quality Score, the timing of paid media has a lot to do with a campaign’s success. Google Analytics has the capabilities to track the days and times when your click-through-rate (CTR) is highest. Google Event Tracking can also keep track of online actions that don’t result in a visit to your website such as watching a video.
Everybody Else
Bing claims 6 billion unique searches a month and a 34 percent share of U.S. desktop searches. Since mobile searches now outnumber desktop searches, that figure probably translate in about a 16 percent overall market share.
It’s not Google, but it remains a very viable way to reach non-Google users. And, you can pull your Google ad content into Bing, so your ads have continuity across platforms.
Facebook remains the Google of social media in terms of number of users – some 2.27 billion worldwide and more than 200 million in the United States. As Facebook has steadily reduced organic reach of posts to roughly 3 percent – less in many cases – it makes sense to invest in paid ads or promoted posts to reach your market.
Depending on your market, you might want to consider investing in other social media platforms. Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Twitter remain popular, but there are many others out there that may or may not meet your needs.
Paid Media Isn’t “Fire and Forget”
No matter what search engines or social media platforms you’re advertising on, monitoring your campaigns is crucial to your success. Non-performing ads need to be pulled and reworked, or abandoned. Campaign spending has to be analyzed in term of return on investment.
Remember that the only metric that truly matters is new patient butts in your chairs. That means you need to have a mechanism in place to track how your ads are functioning to return new patient opportunities, not just clicks.
If That Sounds Like A Lot Of Work, You’re Right
Paid media doesn’t directly make you one dime. Fortunately for SmartBox dentists, they don’t have to spend any time on their paid advertising. SmartBox handles every aspect of creating, posting, optimizing, and monitoring their campaigns. And, we provide our PracticeHQ
dashboard so that interested dentists have complete transparency and insight into their results.
The bottom line is that if your paid advertising isn’t being promoted across platforms and optimized for each, you’re throwing money away. And if you’re having to manage your paid media spends, you’re losing both time and the money that seeing more patients will bring.
Of course, you don’t have to put up with that. Learn more about the comprehensive and strategic dental marketing services that SmartBox provides.