The $50K a Dental Group Was Spending Twice Without Knowing It

A five-location dental group was running Google Ads, had an SEO agency, posted on social media, and sent email newsletters. Every agency reported good numbers. Every channel "worked."

But the practice was spending $50,000 per year on marketing that was working against itself. Nobody saw it because nobody looked at all the reports at the same time.

This is not a story about bad agencies or careless spending. Every vendor was doing their job. The waste was structural — it lived in the gaps between channels, in the space nobody owned.

The Setup: Everyone Doing Their Job

The practice had a typical multi-vendor marketing setup. Each channel had its own team, its own budget, and its own reporting dashboard.

Google Ads agency: Managing $4,200/month in ad spend. Monthly reports showed clicks, impressions, cost-per-click. The numbers looked fine. CPC was within industry range. Clicks were steady.

SEO agency: Handling on-page optimisation and local SEO across all five locations. Rankings were strong — the group held positions #1 through #3 for their key terms. Monthly reports showed keyword positions and organic traffic. Everything looked great.

Internal team: Running the Facebook page, sending email blasts, managing Google review responses. Doing what they could with limited time and no strategic direction.

Total monthly marketing spend across all channels: approximately $8,500. Patient volume was steady. Not growing fast, but not declining either. No alarm bells.

The problem? Nobody had ever pulled all three reports into the same room at the same time.

The Discovery: What Happened When Reports Were Combined

When the reports from all vendors were laid side by side for the first time, four things became visible that no single report could show.

Finding 1: Google Ads Bidding on SEO Keywords

The Google Ads account was actively bidding on 23 keywords that the SEO was already ranking #1 through #3 for organically. Terms like "dental implants [city name]," "emergency dentist near me," and "teeth whitening [location]" — the practice already owned these in organic search.

These overlapping keywords accounted for $4,200 per month in ad spend. That is $50,400 per year, paid to acquire clicks the practice was already getting for free through organic rankings.

Why did nobody catch it? The Ads agency does not check SEO rankings. The SEO agency does not check the Ads keyword list. Each operates in their own lane, reports on their own metrics, and has no visibility into the other channel. This is standard practice across the industry — it is not negligence, it is a structural blind spot.

Finding 2: Landing Page Converting at 2%

Both the paid ads and a significant portion of the organic traffic were sending visitors to a landing page that had not been touched in 18 months. The conversion rate was sitting at 2%.

For context, a healthy conversion rate for a dental landing page is 5% to 10%. At 2%, the practice was converting one-fifth of what the same traffic could deliver with an optimised page.

The SEO agency reported "great traffic numbers." The Ads agency reported "strong click-through rates." Both were accurate. But nobody was reporting what happened after the click. The gap between traffic arriving and patients booking was enormous — and invisible in every individual channel report.

Finding 3: Facebook Producing 3 Patients at $700 Each

The practice was spending $2,100 per month on Facebook campaigns. When actual patient attribution was tracked back to the source, those campaigns were generating 3 patients per month. That is a cost per patient of $700 from a single channel.

The channel itself was not the problem. The audience targeting, creative, and offer were poorly matched to the platform. After restructuring the budget allocation and shifting to better-performing audience segments, the same $2,100 monthly budget produced 22 patients. Same money. Different allocation.

Finding 4: No Cross-Channel Attribution

When a patient called the practice to schedule an appointment, nobody tracked which marketing channel triggered that call. The front desk answered the phone, booked the appointment, and that was the end of the data trail.

Without call tracking, the practice had no way to know which $8,500 of their monthly spend was actually working and which was producing nothing. They were making budget decisions based on channel-level vanity metrics — clicks, impressions, rankings — instead of the only metric that matters: patients acquired per dollar spent.

Nobody was doing anything wrong. Every channel was managed professionally. The waste was invisible because it lived between the channels — in the space nobody owned.

The Fix: What Changed

Four changes were made. None of them required firing an agency, adopting new technology, or increasing the marketing budget.

Fix 1: Paused Google Ads on the 23 keywords where SEO already held top-3 positions. Immediate savings of $2,400 per month. Organic traffic from those keywords did not change — the practice was already getting those clicks for free.

Fix 2: Rebuilt the landing page. Same traffic, new page structure, clearer call-to-action, mobile-first design. Conversion rate moved from 2% to 8%. That is four times more patients from the exact same number of visitors.

Fix 3: Reallocated Facebook budget to better-performing audience segments and updated the ad creative. Instead of broad targeting with generic messaging, the campaigns were narrowed to high-intent local audiences with specific procedure-focused offers.

Fix 4: Installed call tracking with source attribution. Every incoming phone call was now tagged to the marketing channel that generated it. For the first time, the practice could see which dollars were producing patients and which were not.

Why This Is Common, Not a One-Off

This dental group is not unusual. Most practices with two or more marketing vendors have some version of this problem. The scale varies — maybe it is $20,000 per year instead of $50,000, or maybe it is $100,000 — but the pattern is remarkably consistent.

It is not because anyone is bad at their job. The SEO agency optimises SEO. The Ads agency optimises Ads. The social media person posts content. Each report looks fine in isolation. The metrics are accurate. The work is professional.

The waste lives in the gaps between channels — where they overlap, contradict each other, or leave money unaccounted for. No individual vendor is hired to look at that space. It is not in their scope. It is not in their reports. It is, quite literally, nobody's job.

Think of it like having three specialists each treating a different symptom without anyone ordering the full panel of labs to see how the conditions connect. Each treatment plan makes sense on its own. But together, they might be cancelling each other out — or worse, making the underlying issue harder to find.

How to Check If You Have the Same Problem

You do not need to hire anyone to run a preliminary check. Four steps will tell you whether there is overlap worth investigating.

Step 1: Compare your keyword lists. Export your Google Ads keyword list and your SEO ranking report. Put them side by side. Any keywords where you are paying for ads AND ranking in the top 3 organically? That is the first and most common source of duplicate spend. If there is overlap on more than 5 keywords, the annual waste is likely in the thousands.

Step 2: Check your landing page. When was it last updated? What is the current conversion rate? If you do not know the conversion rate, that is itself a red flag. A landing page that has not been touched in 12 or more months is almost certainly underperforming relative to current best practices.

Step 3: Calculate cost per patient per channel. Not impressions. Not clicks. Not reach. Actual patients. How many patients did Google Ads bring this month? How many came from organic search? From Facebook? From email? If you cannot answer these questions, you do not have attribution set up — and you are making budget decisions without the most important data point.

Step 4: Ask one question. When was the last time all your marketing reports were reviewed in the same room at the same time? If the answer is "never" or "I don't remember," there is almost certainly money sitting in the gaps between those reports.

The Bottom Line

This dental group did not have a marketing problem. They had a visibility problem. Every channel was managed. Every report was delivered. Every metric looked reasonable.

But $50,000 per year was being spent twice because nobody's job description included the sentence: "Look at everything together."

The fix did not require more budget, new vendors, or a complete strategy overhaul. It required someone to pull the reports side by side and ask the questions that fall between the cracks of individual channel management.

The result: $14,000 per month recovered, 31% more patients, and a blended cost per patient that dropped from $700 to $180. Same total budget. Same channels. Different outcome.

If your practice runs more than one marketing channel with more than one vendor, the overlap is probably there. The only question is how much.