"Not (Quite) Set It & Forget It" - How to Maximize LSA Performance & Profitability for Dental Practices

Google Local Services Ads can be one of the most cost-effective ways for dental practices to generate new patient leads — but they’re definitely not a “set it and forget it” ad product.

In this episode of The Dental Marketing Mix, Dan Brian and Brian Craig dig into what actually drives strong LSA performance and ROI for dental practices. They break down the behind-the-scenes management work that Google looks for, from call handling and response time to lead rating, booking feedback, and review signals.

You’ll learn:

• Why LSAs often outperform traditional pay-per-click ads for dentists
• How call handling and responsiveness impact LSA visibility
• The role Google reviews play in lead quality and volume
• Best practices for managing and rating LSA leads
• Why marking appointments as booked helps Google send better leads over time
• What dentists should realistically expect for cost per lead

If you’re running Google LSAs — or considering them — this episode will help you avoid wasted spend and turn LSAs into a reliable, high-ROI new patient channel.

Don't miss the full video conversation and show notes: https://www.dentalscapes.com/not-quite-set-it-forget-it-how-to-maximize-lsa-performance-profitability-for-dental-practices/

And, if you’d like help setting up or optimizing your Local Services Ads, schedule a free strategy call with the DentalScapes team at https://dentalscapes.com/start.

Transcript

0:00

All right, welcome back to the Dental Marketing Mix. I'm Dan Brian co-founder of DentalScapes, joined today by my other co-founder, Brian Craig. What's up, Brian? All right, so we are ready to dig into something that a lot of clients are jumping into, and rightly so, and that's local services ads, Google's local services ads, otherwise known as LSAs. And before we dig into our primary topic, which is what can you as a practice do to be as successful as possible with LSAs, I wanna just hear from you just so that folks listening have some understanding if they're not familiar already, what are local services ads and what makes uh them such a compelling ad product for dental practices? Yeah, so local services ads are a specific type of Google ad. The first thing that I usually like to cover with them is how they get paid for. So traditional ads are what we call pay per click. So it's what it sounds like when somebody sees the ad, they click on it, you pay for it, whether or not they contact you, whether or not they become a patient. LSAs on the other hand are pay per lead. whenever somebody clicks an LSA ad, they either message you or they call your practice. And Google uses their AI to determine, um not successful 100 % of the time, but they try to do their best to determine whether or not it's a new potential patient. Yeah, it's better than it was when it launched. They're moving in the right direction. Yeah, and you also have the opportunity to dispute leads and say this wasn't within my service area or wasn't for something that we offer. But we always encourage, or I should say 95 % of the time, we're gonna encourage the practices we work with to uh experiment with local services ads because in our experience recently, and correct me if I'm wrong or you think I'm off base, Brian, but. We've actually seen local services ads be more cost-effective in most cases than traditional pay-per-click for dental practices. So it's a really cool ad product. You can get started with them very quickly. There's a background check, a few other boxes to check, but super easy to get started. uh But, oh, and by the way, I was going to say two weeks ago we did another podcast, Brian and I, on LSAs versus PPC versus social media ads. So if you're... curious about dipping your foot in the water in terms of online advertising for your practice, go back and check that episode out. It's a good one. But today, instead of focusing just on the difference between these ad products, we really want to zero in on LSAs and talk about what's needed to make them as successful as possible. Like I said, we've seen them be really cost effective and efficient for most of the practices that we work with. But there are a few things that you have to keep in mind and that you really have to stay consistent with if you want to get that, you know, sky high return on investment with them. So where would you start, Brian, with? So I would start by saying, one of the additional benefits of LSAs, and I'm backtracking a little bit, so I apologize in the process here. One of the reasons these are one of our favorite ad products right now is whenever somebody's searching for your practice, LSAs are at the very top. So if you're doing great in traditional ad, you're doing great in organic, you're still gonna have other practices above you in search results for LSAs. So one more benefit there, uh LSAs, the setup of them is pretty straightforward, like Dan had mentioned. ah It's signing up, it's doing a background check, it's providing some information about your practice. uh If you visit dentalscapes.com slash LSA, we've got. uh a whole bunch of resources on setting up LSAs for your practice and screenshots and all of that good stuff. uh But compared to traditional Google Ads, cakewalk to set up. Yeah. And so, you know, one of the other cool things about LSAs and in the last episode we did about this, you know, we talked about it as a trust building ad product. LSAs actually feature very prominently your Google reviews, your overall average rating right on there. So folks, you know, have a sense that you're trustworthy right up front, can make for, you know, a little bit warmer lead when they actually, you know, make that phone call, which is awesome. But to that end, Google reviews really do influence. the uh prominence, the positioning of your LSAs and can really influence how successful they are. So what would you say to that for practices interested in these? Yeah, so within the last year or so, Google has unified reviews across LSAs in your Google business profile. It used to be they were separate, it made it a little bit complex. Now it's easy. Get Google reviews. There are a couple of things that I'm sure we'll talk about today that go into uh ranking and getting consistent potential new patient leads from your LSAs. uh But what I would want people to take away from this is that Google's goal with this product is to funnel potential new patients to practices that it deems are doing a good job that are quality practices. So what does that look like from Google's eyes? It means you respond quickly. It means you respond consistently. You pick up the phone, you get five star reviews from new patients. You're doing all the things that are signaling online. hey, this practice is doing a great job. If Google sends them here, they're gonna be happy with Google for sending them there. So that's what all this plays back into. Yeah, and to that point, mean, call handling is so important response time. Like you said, if you're not picking up the phone or LSA calls or going to voicemail, you're going to get dinged in terms of performance and, you know, the frequency with which your ad shows up on there. So very, very important, you know, as you run LSAs, make sure you have the support staff in place to be able to take that phone call or take that message. You should say that LSAs allow for both phone calls and messages that come in via email. um So really, really important there. What are some of the other considerations, uh you know, when it comes to managing LSAs? And, you know, one of the things I wanted to talk about today is lead management. So every time, every time you get a lead or a phone call or a message through an LSA ad, you actually have access to a dashboard where you can see all that in real time. And what's needed on that backend to ensure that, you know, you're keeping up with all this. Yeah, so that back end, there's a couple of different items for each lead that comes in. And from a best practice standpoint, what we recommend is filling in the name kind of at a high level, what service they were calling about. And this is private within Google's dashboard there. And the other piece that I strongly recommend practices do is there's a little rate this lead button at the top right hand of each of those leads. And um this is how you can potentially get credits back if it's not a good lead. And by not a good lead, mean, you know, it's not a service you provide. It's not in your geographic area. ah It's just, you know, some random person calling. It's a repeat patient. Yeah. practice and hits the ad. ah Yep. So the more, the, the, the two sides of this or the more consistently you're, you're doing this classification and rating, uh, you know, the more Google is, is going to get that signal, Hey, this is a practice that's on top of it, along with those other things we just talked about. And the other side of that is when they charge you, it will happen. They will charge you for bad leads. Uh, when you rate those very dissatisfied, We've seen more of a pattern recently where practices will actually get credited back those leads in a lot of cases. So you're making yourself money by doing that. Yeah, so do that, you know, regularly. We always encourage the practices that we work with. If you can do it five minutes at the end of each day, doesn't take long. know, however it works in your workflow, it really is enough to do it every couple of days though, just to make sure that you stay on top of it well enough. uh This doesn't have to be a huge time suck for your front desk and it really is very intuitive. And we obviously, you know, coach all the practices that we work with on how to do this. The other thing I would say is when you do book that appointment successfully from an LSA lead, know, make sure you mark that appointment in the dashboard as booked because what Google does then is it interprets that data and says, hey, this was a great lead. We're going to go after and, you know, try to find more of those for you. And so you can really improve the performance of your LSAs over time by marking those appointments as booked when they schedule and also doing, you know, the kind of due diligence and homework that Brian was just talking about. So definitely some opportunities to make what's already, generally speaking, a very cost effective ad product even more effective and more efficient for you. So you can really increase the ROI on that ad spend there. Is there anything else though, you know, that practice owners today considering local services ads should keep in mind, Brian, any, you know, helpful tips or tricks or things that you'd wanna, you know, keep in mind? Sure, yeah, there are a ton of different troubleshooting things and I know we talked about earlier how easy they are to set up. There are certain SOPs and best practices that we have and we use as an agency if an account isn't performing or isn't bringing in leads for some reason. ah The biggest thing that we see practices run into ah is if an account, if you tell it, hey, you can spend up to $500 a week, Google or a thousand a week or 5,000 a week, whatever that number is. And then you do it for a month and you're like, oh, it brought in one lead at $80. Why isn't it spending my budget? So there are a number of things you can do from that standpoint. But it really is as simple to get started as we talked about before. One thing I would recommend practice owners take away is it is important to track your cost per lead and your cost per new patient, just like with any advertising platform. Depending on market and depending on competition, we have seen new patient leads as cheap as 30 to $35 each. Will all of them be that cheap? No, no, on average we see 60 to 80 in most markets. it, you know, even at 60 to 80, if you're getting new patients for that, the lifetime value of a patient being a couple thousand dollars, ah you should be doing that all day long. Yeah, exactly. And the other thing too, and I don't want to get back into the weeds here, but you do have an opportunity to select which services you want to advertise on with LSAs. so, yeah, so I mean, you will pay more per lead for a dental implant lead than you will for a cleaning or you will for even a crown. It's just the way of the world. There's an opportunity for orthodontics as well, which is cool. So those leads are gonna be more expensive, but when push comes to shove, this is a very cost-effective ad product. Like you said, lot of the clients we get started with on LSAs say, I'm getting this patient for X dollars pretty consistently. I'm gonna do that all day long, like you said. And so it can be a really nice supplement to your SEO strategy. If you're running pay-per-click, it's still important to be there, I would say, because like you said, Brian, these do appear before everything else. um And so, you you want to own as much of the quote unquote digital real estate as possible. And so it's a great opportunity to do that super low barrier to entry. And I would say, you know, we typically advise the practices getting started with LSAs to start with at least a thousand dollars a month in ad spend. it's, you know, it's going to give Google enough data to work with to better optimize those ads and get you better results going forward. So. Anyhow, lots to consider here, but again, very straightforward ad product. We'd love to help you if you're interested in learning more about LSAs or want to partner with DentalScapes to help you run them as well as your overall digital strategy. Just go to dentalscapes.com slash LSA. Like Brian mentioned, you'll be able to find a bunch of resources there as well as a link to schedule a free strategy call with our team if you'd like to explore that further. But in any case, uh Can't talk. In any case, thank you so much for joining today. If you enjoyed what you heard, please take a minute to leave us a five-star review on Apple podcasts or Spotify, YouTube. Give the video a like wherever you find this show. You rating the podcast is the best way for us to reach other dentists and practice managers and we really appreciate it. So thanks so much. We will be back at it next week. Look for these episodes every Wednesday coming at you and. uh Take care, thanks for tuning into the Dental Marketing Mix. We'll see ya. Alright.