How Ads Work in Dental Marketing Tool
Dental Marketing Tool lets you put ads in front of patients in your area on Facebook and Instagram without hiring an outside agency or learning complicated ad software. This article explains how the ads feature works from start to finish so you know what to expect before you launch.
What You Are Actually Doing When You Run an Ad
When you run an ad through Dental Marketing Tool, you are placing a paid post on Facebook and Instagram that shows up in the feeds of people who live near your office and match the audience you choose. The platform handles the technical setup on your behalf. You pick your offer, set a daily budget, choose your local target area, and launch. Everything else happens automatically through your connected Facebook Business account.
Patients who see the ad and respond are captured directly inside your dashboard. You do not need to log into a separate ads manager or check a different inbox.
How the Pieces Connect
Before you can run ads, three things need to be linked to your account:
- Your Facebook Page: this is what your ad shows as the "sender." Patients see your practice name and photo, not a generic source.
- Your Facebook Ad Account: this is the billing account that Facebook charges your daily budget against.
- A payment method on file with Facebook: your ad spend is billed directly by Facebook, not through Dental Marketing Tool.
If you have not connected these yet, start with Connecting Your Facebook Page and Ad Account before trying to launch a campaign.
What a Campaign Looks Like
Inside Dental Marketing Tool, a campaign is made up of a few key pieces:
- The creative: the image or video and the copy (headline, body text, and call to action) that patients actually see in their feed. You can choose from pre-built dental ad templates or customize your own. See Using Ad Templates and Creatives for details.
- The offer: what you are inviting people to do. Common examples include a new patient exam, a teeth whitening promotion, or a free consultation. This should be specific and clear.
- The audience and location: a radius around your office and basic demographic settings so your budget goes toward people who could actually become patients.
- The budget: a daily dollar amount you are comfortable spending. You can start small and adjust any time.
Where Patient Responses Go
When someone clicks your ad and fills out a form or sends a message, that contact appears automatically in your Conversations inbox and in your Contacts list. You can also track which patients came from a specific campaign by opening the Ads section and reviewing the results for that campaign.
You do not need to manually import anyone. The platform links the response to the ad so you always know where a new patient came from. For more on following up, see Tracking Leads from Your Ads.
How to Monitor Performance
Once your campaign is live, you can see how it is performing at any time. Open the Ads section and click into the campaign you want to review. The results screen shows how many people saw your ad, how many responded, and what you spent. You do not need to log into Facebook to get these numbers.
If something is not working, you can pause the campaign, edit the creative or budget, and relaunch. Nothing is permanent. See Reading Your Ad Results to understand what each number means.
Ready to Launch
Now that you understand how everything fits together, the best next step is to follow the walkthrough in Launching Your First Ad Campaign, which takes you through the full setup screen by screen. If you want to think through your offer first, Choosing the Right Offer for Your Ad can help you decide what to promote before you build the campaign.