Five things to fix before you spend a dollar on new patient ads
New patient advertising works. It also fails more often than it should, and usually not because the ads were bad.
The ad does one job: make someone want to call. Everything after that is your practice. If the handoff is broken, better targeting just buys you more people to lose.
Here are five things to fix first. None of them needs a budget.
1. Answer the phone, or have something that does
Call your own office at 7pm tonight from a number nobody recognises.
Whatever you hear is what a new patient hears. If it is a voicemail greeting with your opening hours and nothing else, you are paying for clicks that end in a shrug.
A new patient is usually working down a list. They are not leaving a message, they are calling the next practice. I have written about measuring this properly, but the two-minute version is the call you just made.
2. Make the booking path shorter than a phone call
People browse for a dentist in the evening. The practice that lets them pick a time at 9pm wins a share of patients that the practice requiring a daytime call never hears from.
Online booking is the obvious answer. A form that promises a callback is a weaker second. Doing neither is the status quo for a lot of practices and it is a real leak.
3. Get your Google Business Profile correct
Not optimised. Correct.
Hours, including holiday hours. Phone number. Address. Whether you are accepting new patients. Photos that are actually your office.
This is free, takes twenty minutes, and a meaningful share of people deciding where to go never reach your website at all. While you are in there, check your review process does not break Google’s rules, several of which changed in April 2026.
4. Work the list you already have
This is the one practices skip, and it is the cheapest patient you will ever get.
A lapsed patient has already chosen you once. They have a chart. They know where to park. The cost of reaching them is a text, a call and a postcard, against whatever a new patient costs you in ad spend.
Scale check: the ADA’s Health Policy Institute found 40% of working-age adults had a dental visit in 2022. A good share of the rest are already in your software. Here is how to put a number on yours.
Spending on ads while a list of 500 overdue patients sits untouched is a decision, and it is usually the wrong one.
5. Decide how you will know if it worked
Before the first dollar goes out, write down what success looks like and how you will measure it.
Not “more patients.” A number, a timeframe, and the specific report you will look at. Then decide who checks it and when. Four numbers are usually enough.
Agencies are not generally trying to deceive anyone. But if you have not defined success, you will be shown whichever metric moved, and that is how practices end up two years into a retainer with no idea whether it paid.
The order that makes sense
Fix the phone. Shorten the booking path. Correct the profile. Work the existing list. Define the measurement.
Then advertise, into a practice that can actually catch what the ads send.
That order is also why we do not sell ads first. Recall and the phones come before new patient spend, and the ads add-on only makes sense once the front desk answers. That sequence is on the homepage, and the free report will tell you what the existing list is worth before you commit to anything.