The 5 Things I Check First When I Audit a Dental Practice's Marketing

When a practice asks me to look at their marketing, I do not start by pitching new ads. I start by finding where they are already losing patients and money, because most practices are leaking in places they cannot see. Fixing a leak is cheaper than pouring in more water. Here are the first five things I check, in order.

1. Is the tracking actually working?

The very first thing I look at is whether anything is being measured at all. Is there a Meta Pixel installed and firing? Is it set up with server-side tracking, or is it an old browser-only install that is missing half the leads? Is there any way to tell which ad or channel a new patient came from?

You would be surprised how often the answer is no. And if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it, and you are almost certainly wasting money you cannot even see. This is always step one, because everything else depends on having real numbers.

2. How fast do they answer a new lead?

Next I check response time, because it is the biggest hidden leak in most practices. I will fill out the practice's own contact form and time how long it takes to hear back. Too often the answer is hours, or the next day, or never. Every one of those slow responses is a paid lead going cold. Speed to lead is one of the cheapest, highest-impact fixes there is, and it usually needs attention.

3. What does the ad creative actually look like?

Then I look at the ads themselves, if there are any. Is it real video of the actual office and team, or is it stock footage and generic stock photos that look like every other ad? On Facebook and Instagram, the creative is most of what determines whether the ads work. Boring, generic, stocky ads get scrolled past no matter how good the targeting is. This is often where a practice's results are quietly dying.

4. Where does the click actually go?

I follow the path a patient takes after they click. Does the ad send them to a fast, focused landing page built to get them to book, or does it dump them on a slow, cluttered homepage where they have to figure out what to do next? Every extra second of load time and every extra click loses people. A lot of practices spend good money getting the click and then lose the patient in the ten seconds after it.

5. How is their local presence and reviews?

Finally I check the free foundation: the Google Business Profile and local search presence. Is the profile complete? Are there recent reviews, or did they stop two years ago? Does the practice show up in the map pack for its own town? This is free traffic from ready-to-book patients, and most practices are leaving a lot of it on the table.

Why I look here first

Notice that none of these five is spend more on ads. That is on purpose. Almost every practice I look at is losing patients somewhere in this list before I add a single dollar of new spend. Fix the tracking so you can see. Fix the response time so leads do not die. Fix the creative so the ads get watched. Fix the landing page so clicks convert. Fix the local presence so you capture the free traffic. Do those, and the ads you are already running start working harder immediately.

This is also exactly what I go through in the free teardown I do for practices. It is not a sales trick. It is genuinely the fastest way to find where the money is leaking, and often the fixes are things you can do yourself.

Want me to run these five checks on your practice? Send me your details and I will take a real look and tell you straight what I find.