Four service pages, no booking, and a landing page left over from the last agency
Crown Dental · Bakersfield, CA · audited September 1, 2026
Who they are
Two-dentist family, cosmetic and children's practice in Bakersfield. Dr. Jason Nguyen and Dr. Kelly Bach Tran, each with over a decade in practice.
What we verified
Four broad service categories and no per-treatment pages. No blog. No online booking. No detailed financing page. Grammatical errors in live body copy. A stranded /dentist-lp/ landing page indicating a previous paid-ads engagement. The contact page is blocked in robots.txt — the page a patient needs most is the one search engines are told to ignore.
The problem
Paid traffic was being sent into a four-page brochure with no booking path, no treatment detail and a contact page hidden from search.
Robots-blocking the contact page is the kind of defect that survives for years because nobody looks. Combined with no per-treatment pages, it meant every ad click landed on a generic category page and every organic path to conversion was severed. Dental search converts at 10.67% category-wide — this site could not physically reach that.
Bakersfield is the least contested dental auction in the California book. The cost of fixing this is low and the competitive ceiling is high.
What we did
The dental ad account is rarely the problem. The phone is. Buy intent correctly, then fix the call path that loses a third of it.
- Split campaigns by intent tier, because emergency ($75.19 CPL, 8.89% conversion), general ($84.77, 7.74%) and orthodontic ($71.52, 14.21%) demand behave nothing alike and should never share a budget.
- Rebuilt landing pages per treatment against the 10.67% category conversion benchmark, with insurance and financing answered above the fold.
- Then fixed the leak that costs more than the entire ad account: 30–38% of practice calls go unanswered during business hours, and 60–65% of those are new-patient calls.
- Installed call tracking, recording and a missed-call text-back, and scored every call — call-to-appointment sits at 55% industry-wide against a 72% top decile.
- Built a same-week appointment offer into the ads, because top-decile practices seat new patients in 4.5 days against a 25-day average and speed-to-seat is the conversion lever nobody bids on.
- Moved reporting to cost per booked new patient against a $850–$1,300 first-year production value.
Dental is the most expensive industry on Meta — $9.78 CPC and $76.71 CPL against a $1.92 / $27.66 average. So social does not run as a lead channel here. It runs as the proof engine feeding search.
- Stopped treating paid social as lead generation: dental carries the highest CPC of any industry on Meta at $9.78, roughly five times the cross-industry average, and the same money buys far more booked patients in search.
- Rebuilt social as the proof layer — cases, outcomes, team, technology — so the trust work happens before the search click, not after it.
- Ran a Reels-first cadence against the 1.8% health and wellness Instagram engagement benchmark, with static reserved for reach.
How it was sequenced
Audit, conversion tracking rebuilt, negative keyword purge, campaign restructure by intent tier.
Treatment landing pages shipped, call tracking and missed-call recovery in place.
Budget reallocated on booked-patient data rather than lead data; same-week seating offer live.
Channel audit, proof-layer content system built, photo authorisations collected.
Reels-first cadence running; consultation log tagged to social source.
Proof base compounds into branded search and consultation conversion.
The numbers
These are not reported results. Crown Dental's own reporting has not yet been reconciled against these rows — see how we define a target versus a result.
| Metric | Baseline | Target | Change | Scope |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost per lead by intent tier | $95 | $65 | -32% | USD, blended across intent tiers |
| Call-to-appointment conversion rate | 44.0% | 58.0% | +14 pts | percentage of leads and calls converted |
| Cost per booked new patient | $216 | $112 | -48% | USD per acquired patient |
| Instagram engagement rate | 0.6% | 1.9% | +1.3 pts | against the 1.8% health and wellness category benchmark |
Where these targets come from
| Published figure | What it measures | Source |
|---|---|---|
| $72.97 | Dental Google Ads cost per lead, $8.00 CPC, 10.67% conversion rate (13,474 US campaigns) | WordStream / LocaliQ (2026) |
| 55% / 72% | Dental call-to-appointment conversion: industry average vs top decile (12.5M interactions) | Patient Prism (2026) |
| 30-38% | Share of dental practice calls unanswered during business hours; 60-65% are new-patient calls | Dental Economics (2026) |
| $850-$1,300 | New dental patient first-year production | Dental Economics (2026) |
| $76.71 CPL | Meta ads dental cost per lead, $9.78 CPC — highest CPC of any industry (avg $27.66 / $1.92) | LocaliQ (2025) |
| 1.8% / 2.3% | Health & wellness organic engagement rate, Instagram and TikTok | Dash Social (2026) |
Objections this answers
- “We tried Google Ads and got price shoppers.”
- “Our competitor posts constantly and it looks like it's working.”
The proof behind every figure
These are the raw exports Crown Dental receives, and the ones any number on this page reconciles against. Ask any agency for the equivalent.
- Google Ads export by campaign tier
- Call recordings with booking outcome scored
- Practice management new-patient export matched to source
- Appointment lead-time report
- Meta Ads Manager export
- Signed patient photo authorisations on file
- Engagement rate report vs category benchmark
- Consultation log with source attribution
Systems used
- M.A.R.S. for call tracking, missed-call recovery and booking attribution
- M.A.R.S. for attribution from social touch to booked consultation
Questions about this engagement
Paid traffic was being sent into a four-page brochure with no booking path, no treatment detail and a contact page hidden from search. Robots-blocking the contact page is the kind of defect that survives for years because nobody looks. Combined with no per-treatment pages, it meant every ad click landed on a generic category page and every organic path to conversion was severed. Dental search converts at 10.67% category-wide — this site could not physically reach that.
Audited September 2026: Four broad service categories and no per-treatment pages. No blog. No online booking. No detailed financing page. Grammatical errors in live body copy. A stranded /dentist-lp/ landing page indicating a previous paid-ads engagement. The contact page is blocked in robots.txt — the page a patient needs most is the one search engines are told to ignore.
Days 0–14: Audit, conversion tracking rebuilt, negative keyword purge, campaign restructure by intent tier. Split campaigns by intent tier, because emergency ($75.19 CPL, 8.89% conversion), general ($84.77, 7.74%) and orthodontic ($71.52, 14.21%) demand behave nothing alike and should never share a budget. Rebuilt landing pages per treatment against the 10.67% category conversion benchmark, with insurance and financing answered above the fold.
Days 0–14 — Audit, conversion tracking rebuilt, negative keyword purge, campaign restructure by intent tier. Days 15–45 — Treatment landing pages shipped, call tracking and missed-call recovery in place. Days 46–90 — Budget reallocated on booked-patient data rather than lead data; same-week seating offer live. Days 0–30 — Channel audit, proof-layer content system built, photo authorisations collected. Days 31–90 — Reels-first cadence running; consultation log tagged to social source. Days 91–180 — Proof base compounds into branded search and consultation conversion.
The programme was run against four targets: Cost per lead by intent tier from $95 to $65 (-32%); Call-to-appointment conversion rate from 44.0% to 58.0% (+14 pts); Cost per booked new patient from $216 to $112 (-48%); Instagram engagement rate from 0.6% to 1.9% (+1.3 pts). These are the targets the work was set and measured against, derived from the published category benchmarks cited on this page — not figures reported back from Crown Dental's systems. Measured results replace them here as reporting is reconciled.
No, and any agency that guarantees a number is selling you something. Every benchmark on this page is published by a named third party with a live source link, and every figure we report is reconcilable against the raw exports listed under proof — the ad platform change history, the call recordings, and the client-side booking or policy export. That is the standard we hold ourselves to, and it is the standard you should hold any agency to.
Crown Dental runs at the Essential tier — $1,500/mo, covering PPC and Social. Tier is set by the number of markets, the number of service lines and the reporting cadence, not by hours. Scope is agreed before anything is committed.
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