A dental click in Australia is cheap by medical standards and expensive by every other standard. Emergency dental runs about $5.43, implants about $4.83, whitening about $2.86. What decides whether any of that returns is the page the click lands on, which is where most dental campaigns quietly fail.
Someone searching for an emergency appointment and landing on a homepage carousel has to find the answer themselves. Most will not. The single largest return in dental paid search is a matched landing page, not a better bid.
"dentist" as a broad term collects people looking for a job, a course, a definition and a competitor. Treatment terms with cost or urgency attached convert several times better for the same money.
A report showing impressions, clicks and cost per click can be entirely true and tell you nothing. The only number that matters is what a booked new patient cost.
Superlatives, outcome promises, and offers without terms. Advertising rules apply to a paid ad exactly as they apply to a page, and an ad is the surface least likely to have been reviewed.
Campaigns built on treatment and urgency terms rather than the profession name
A landing page matched to each campaign, not the homepage
Conversion tracking that counts booked appointments, not form loads
Ad copy and extensions read against the advertising rules before anything runs
Hours and location targeting set to when and where the practice can actually take the call
A monthly report stating cost per booked new patient in plain language
The Google Ads account stays in your name, so it is yours if we part ways
Seen enough? Let’s talk about your practice.
Indicative Semrush AU cost per click, September 2026. Live auction prices move.
The highest intent in dentistry. Worth the most and worth pausing outside the hours somebody can actually answer the phone.
Enormous volume and mixed intent. Viable with tight location targeting and a landing page that states availability, wasteful without both.
Highest treatment value in the set, longest decision, so it needs a page that stages the process rather than a booking form.
Brand demand you can capture locally. Cheaper than the category term and closer to a decision.
Cheapest clicks and the lowest value per patient. It works as a first appointment, not as the campaign.
Treatment value against click cost against how quickly organic could reach the same term. Some of it should never be bought.
Ads pointed at a homepage are the most common cause of a failed dental campaign. The pages exist before the spend starts.
Enough budget to gather signal, not enough to lose money learning. Scale follows the treatments that actually convert.
Cost per new patient by treatment, monthly, with the terms that produced nothing named rather than hidden.
Prefer it on its own? Available as the Ads Management programme, starting from $1,000/mo inc. GST.
An ad is advertising under the National Law in exactly the way a web page is. Superlatives, outcome claims and offers without terms are the three most common problems, and they run for months before anybody notices.
A campaign and a landing page are one job. Splitting them between an ads agency and a web agency is how a practice ends up paying for traffic that arrives somewhere useless.
Set up in your name, with your billing. If the relationship ends, the account, the history and the learning stay with the practice.
Homepage
Homepage
Matched page per campaign
The profession
Whatever has volume
Treatment and urgency terms
None
None
Practising doctor
Clicks
Cost per click
Cost per booked patient
Yours
Often theirs
Yours
A call, the treatment economics, and an honest answer on whether ads are the right channel yet.
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