Columbus, Ohio
Three locations

Google Ads Case Study

317 patient enquiries in the first ten weeks.

A brand-new Google Ads account, built from nothing for a three-location practice — and $19.74 per enquiry by week ten.

Get this for your practice

daily DENTAL & bracesbar · Columbus, OH New account build Apr – Jun 2026

Patient enquiries

317

Cost per patient enquiry

$19.74

Enquiries per 100 clicks

The situation

Starting from nothing, in three markets at once.

daily DENTAL & bracesbar runs three offices across the Columbus suburbs — Gahanna, Dublin and Grove City. Well-known locally, 1,800+ five-star reviews, open seven days a week. What they did not have was a working Google Ads account.

There was no history to learn from, no data to optimise toward, and no way to tell which of the three locations would respond. A launch is the one situation where nobody can tell you the answer in advance. You have to buy it.

Challenge one

Three locations are three different markets

Gahanna, Dublin and Grove City sit on opposite sides of Columbus. A patient in Dublin will not drive to Grove City for a cleaning. Running one campaign across all three would have averaged three very different results into one meaningless number.

Challenge two

A new account has no idea what works

Google's bidding needs conversion data before it can do anything useful, and a new account has none. Spend too broadly in week one and you teach it the wrong lesson — expensively, and for months afterwards.

The evidence

The account, ten weeks in.

Straight from Google Ads. Account identifiers are cropped; nothing else is altered.

Account overview

Apr 1 – Jun 10, 2026
71 days

1,677Clicks

317Enquiries

$19.74Per enquiry

The account went from effectively dormant to 26,196 impressions and 1,601 additional clicks in the same window.

Campaign structure

Six campaigns
Three locations × two intents

Google Ads campaign view showing six campaigns split across Gahanna, Dublin and Grove City, each with a branded and a cold-audience campaign.

6Campaigns

$105Daily budget

18.90%Enquiry rate

Every location gets its own budget line and its own cost per enquiry. Nothing is averaged across the city.

How we counted, in full. An enquiry means a contact form submission, an appointment request, or a phone call click — not a booked or attended patient. All figures cover Apr 1 to Jun 10, 2026, at account level. Fractional conversion counts are Google's own attribution, not rounding on our part.

How we built it

Five decisions, made before a penny was spent.

A launch is mostly decisions. Get these five right and the account teaches itself. Get them wrong and you spend three months unlearning them.

The obvious wayWhat we did instead

One campaign for the whole practiceSimplest to set up, and how most accounts start.

One campaign per locationGahanna, Dublin and Grove City each get their own budget and their own number. You can see which office the money is filling.

Chase new patients onlyBrand searches feel like a waste — those people already know you.

Run brand and cold side by sideBrand capture is cheap and funds the learning. Cold acquisition is what grows the list. Separated, you can see the true cost of each.

Launch with a big budget to gather data fastMore spend, more signal, sooner.

Start at $15 a day per campaignSmall enough that early mistakes cost little, steady enough to feed the bidding. Gahanna's cold campaign later earned a raise to $30.

Count every click as progressTraffic looks like momentum in week one.

Track three enquiry types from day oneForms, appointment requests and phone taps counted separately, live before the first ad ran. Nothing was ever guessed at.

Set it and review next quarterGive the algorithm time to settle.

Read the search terms weeklyIn a new account, the first month of search queries is where the waste hides. Blocking it early is the cheapest work there is.

The results

Two kinds of patient. Two very different prices.

This is the number most launch case studies quietly average away. People already searching the practice by name cost a fraction of what it costs to reach someone who has never heard of it. Both matter. Only one of them grows the practice.

Already knew the nameNever heard of them

Clicks875802

Spent$2,420$3,836

Patient enquiries22097

Cost per enquiry$10.98$39.75

Blended, that comes to $19.74 an enquiry across 317 enquiries and $6,256 of spend. Brand searches produced 70 percent of the enquiries from 39 percent of the budget — which is exactly what you would expect from a practice with 1,800 five-star reviews and no ads running until now.

The honest read: a large share of the early wins came from capturing demand that already existed. That is the right thing to do first, and it is also why the cold number matters more from here. At $39.75, reaching someone new is already viable for a practice whose patients return for years.

Location	Clicks	Spend	Enquiries	Cost per enquiry
Grove City	574	$1,906.48	122.3	$15.59
Gahanna	692	$2,523.73	136.0	$18.56
Dublin	411	$1,826.04	58.7	$31.12
All three	1,677	$6,256.25	317.0	$19.74

Grove City and Gahanna carry the account. Dublin costs roughly twice as much per enquiry and is the next thing to fix — not by spending more, but by finding out what is different about that market.