An overview of the homepage strategy for dental practices and setting realistic performance expectations.
What Is the Homepage Strategy?
Our homepage strategy is designed to kickstart your online presence and patient acquisition efforts swiftly. Here's how it works:
- Launching the Homepage: Our first step is to launch your homepage as soon as possible. This ensures that your website is live and ready to engage with potential patients.
- Initiating Google Ads: Once the homepage is live, we begin setting up Google Ads campaigns to drive traffic and generate new patient leads. Simultaneously, our web team continues working on building the rest of your site or landing page.
- Campaign Focus: Within Google Ads, we concentrate on building three key campaigns: Branded, Geo, and Local Dentistry. Our primary objective with the homepage strategy is to attract general dentistry and emergency leads with our ads. This approach is to ensure the best user experience, as only the homepage will be live initially. Since we won’t have additional service-specific content yet, it will allow us to effectively capture users seeking general dentistry or urgent dental care.
- Branded Campaign: This campaign is tailored to reach users actively searching for your dental practice by name or specific doctors at your practice. By bidding on various keyword variations of your practice name and doctor's names, we secure the top position in search results for your brand terms, preventing competitors from encroaching.
- Geo Campaign: In this campaign, we target users searching for dentists in your practice's city or nearby cities. This approach attracts general dentistry leads, as it focuses on location-based search terms, such as ‘dentist in miami’, rather than specific dental services.
- Local Dentistry Campaign: This campaign generally targets users searching for specific dental services. In the homepage strategy, our initial focus is on the General Dentist and Emergency ad groups, aiming to capture users searching for phrases like "dentists near me," "dentist appointments," and "emergency dental care." Once the rest of your site or landing page is complete and live, we will expand the campaign to include additional dental services as needed.
This strategic approach allows us to enter the learning phase right away, which typically spans 30 to 90 days after launching new campaigns. During this phase, our main focus is on data collection, enabling us to make initial optimizations that guide performance in the right direction. Additionally, it helps the Google algorithm learn how to effectively prioritize our ads and target the right audience.
What Ad Performance Can I Expect with the Homepage LP Strategy?
With the homepage strategy, it's crucial to set realistic performance expectations. Since we have only developed the homepage at this point, it’s reasonable to anticipate slightly lower performance compared to what can be achieved when the full site or digital landing page is complete. Additionally, as we enter the learning phase with our brand-new campaigns, it's common to experience slightly lower and inconsistent performance during this period. However, we expect gradual improvement and performance stabilization by the end of the 90-day timeframe.
Here's a general guideline for performance expectations over the first 90 days (i.e. the learning phase):
- 30 Days: Conversion rates typically range between 5% to 7%. In more competitive markets, some practices may initially start below this range, necessitating additional campaign refinements to achieve optimal performance.
- 60 Days: Expect to see an improvement with conversion rates in the range of 7% to 10%.
- 90 Days: As the strategy matures and we near the end of the learning phase, conversion rates should further increase, reaching levels of 10% to 15%.
Note: Establishing precise conversion volume benchmarks can be challenging due to various variables, including budget, location, competition, service offerings, and conversion tracking methods.
Our objective is to observe a positive performance trend throughout the learning phase, laying a strong foundation for sustained success beyond the initial 90 days. It's important to note that performance can fluctuate during this phase. For example, you may notice a higher conversion rate in the first 30 days, followed by a slight dip in the subsequent 60 days. We closely monitor these fluctuations and promptly make necessary adjustments to steer the account in the desired direction.
Should we detect an account deviating from the desired trend, we immediately heighten our focus and implement campaign refinements to realign it. After the initial 90 days, the learning phase typically concludes, resulting in performance stabilization. In certain cases, some accounts may initially fall short of our conversion rate goals during this phase. In such instances, we dedicate additional efforts to help them regain momentum.
It's worth mentioning that some highly competitive markets, like Chicago, present greater challenges due to high competition and rapidly changing dynamics. Rest assured that we remain committed to optimizing performance and adapting strategies to suit the unique characteristics of each market.
What Should Be Avoided During the Learning Phase?
During this period, it’s best to avoid major strategy changes as they can interrupt the learning phase and force it to need to be restarted. We consider major strategy changes to include significant location targeting changes, a change in ads focus, a complete overhaul of ad copy, and a change in the bid strategy, among others.
By minimizing these disruptive actions during the learning phase, we allow the algorithm to collect valuable data, adapt to user behavior, and optimize our campaigns more effectively over time.
What Happens When My Full Site or Digital LP Goes Live?
When the full site or digital landing page goes live, we then adjust the Google Ads campaigns accordingly. This means adding additional dental services offered by your practice to our Local Dentistry campaign, such as dental implants, endodontics, and orthodontics, alongside general dentistry and emergency. We also update all ad URLs to ensure that we’re driving traffic to the accurate, most relevant page of content based on the full site or landing page. Lastly, we always perform a quality assurance (QA) check on conversion tracking and make any necessary adjustments to ensure the accurate tracking of all valuable actions on the site or landing page.