Imagine turning off your Meta ads for a month. What would happen on Google Ads?

For the first fortnight, probably nothing much. Your search campaigns would keep converting, and your cost per enquiry would look normal. Cutting the social budget would seem like the right call. But, around the end of the month, I suspect searches for your practice name would start to thin out. You’d find new patient enquiries softening. In this alternate vision, your Google Ads account is doing exactly what it was doing before. There are just fewer people arriving in it.
Google Ads captures demand that already exists: people actively searching for treatment. Social ads create that demand, getting people interested in treatment they hadn’t yet decided on, while building awareness of your practice as the place to go.
The connection between Meta and Google Ads often gets missed because the two channels are reported separately, and each is judged only on the enquiries it can be credited with. In short, the last tracked channel wins, so the one that closes the loop can ultimately take the credit for work another channel started weeks earlier.

The question principals don’t actually ask

Will spending more on paid social improve search performance?

Facebook and Instagram often produce enquiries in volume, but the good ones are thinner on the ground – and none arrive with a keyword attached. In contrast, Google enquiries are fewer, but self-evident. When budgets tighten, the channel with the clearer paper trail wins the argument.

Our suspicion has always been that this is a measurement issue, rather than a commercial problem. Social media is a channel that’s seen first and foremost as a lead generator, not a platform for storytelling and brand awareness. When it demonstrates fewer tracked and tangible leads, it seems less valuable.

However, we know that brand awareness really does matter. Social is doing good work upstream, but getting none of the credit for it. Building channels that grow awareness and consideration, leading to intent, is all part of creating enquiries. I call this the blended approach.

What the data suggests

Recently, the performance marketing agency Mabo tested this across 55 accounts, analysing weekly spend against search volume, payment-per-click, conversion rates and return on ad spend (ROAS). As a caveat, their study focused on retail and ecommerce (such as fashion, jewellery, and home and garden) and examined correlation, rather than causation. But from this, three clear patterns emerged.

In 73% of accounts, increases in paid social spend were followed by increases in branded search volume, search clicks and conversions. This was about volume, not efficiency – the pay-per-click return on ad spend often stayed flat. From this, we can see that running social ads wasn’t making Google campaigns cheaper – but it was making them bigger.

In roughly 30% of cases, efficiency also improved. Importantly, this was in premium, visual, high-consideration purchases, meaning the persuading had already happened before anyone reached Google.

The third pattern is the one that costs money. In around 25% of accounts, increasing social spend initially made pay-per-click look worse. ROAS fell, cost per acquisition rose, and performance only recovered three to four weeks later. This is because new people enter the funnel and research before they buy; as a result, activity rises before conversions do. Efficiency then dips while they consider the purchase, and then the numbers rebalance. As the report puts it, “the absence of immediate results is not always the absence of impact.”

Why these findings apply more to dentistry, not less

Nobody commits to Invisalign, implants or a full-arch case on the strength of a search result. They watch a clinician explain the process and check their credentials. They look at before-and-afters, and read through testimonials and reviews. With this, they form a view about whether they trust you with their smile. None of that is attributable, and all of it decides whether a search click becomes a consultation or a bounce.

Three weeks is a fast consideration period for a pair of trainers. For a patient weighing up a four or five-figure treatment plan, six to twelve weeks is more realistic. But the difficulty is that if you review your marketing monthly – as we do – you’re making budget decisions inside the window where good marketing still looks like bad marketing.

Last year, a dental practice running implant social ads believed the campaign was underperforming. It was providing cases and had a positive ROAS, but to the practice, it seemed unsuccessful. They chose to end the campaign. However, over the following three to six-month period there was a downward trend in booked consultations and treatment starts – not just for implants but across the treatment portfolio. The reality only became clear months later, but it fits the pattern identified in the analysis.

This is because the campaign was actually doing three jobs: brand awareness, treatment awareness, and reputation building (AKA, awareness-consideration-intent).

This also highlights the need for brand consistency and good content. It means your creative standards aren’t just crucial for social ads. A weak creative doesn’t only underperform on Meta, it sends people to Google less convinced than they should be. Your search conversion rate absorbs the damage.

Think of them as one account, not two

If social ads build the demand and search captures it, the two have to be planned together, rather than reviewed side by side.

• Say the same thing at every step. Your Meta ad, search ad and landing page should read like the same practice. A patient who watched your implant video in June and searches for implants in your town in August needs to recognise where they’ve landed.
• Pass audiences between the channels. People who watched a treatment video or engaged with a post are your warmest search audience, so retarget them through display networks. If volume allows, build lookalikes from patients who completed treatment or viewed a page, not just from everyone who clicked.
• Use search data to write your social briefs. Your search terms report tells you the words patients are using: e.g. cost, pain, time off work, how long it lasts. If this is what they’re interested in, these are your content topics. Test the message on social, then move what works into ad copy.
• Track the first touch, not just the last click. Use call tracking, ask “how did you hear about us?” on the enquiry form, and ask again at the consultation. This is crude data, and not 100% reliable, but it helps build a more holistic picture alongside an attribution model that credits every case to the final click.
• Watch branded search volume as an early warning. Search Console and Google Ads both show how many people search for your practice by name. This is the cleanest proxy you have for whether awareness activity is working. Tellingly, it moves around three weeks before your enquiry numbers do.
• Judge the account, not the platform. The number that matters is the blended cost per new patient enquiry across all your marketing, set against what those patients are worth over a treatment lifetime. Meta ROAS and Google ROAS are diagnostics; not the score.

The failure mode

Moving budget out of prospecting and into search always improves this month’s figures. It’s a tactic that carries on working, right up to the point where there’s nobody left to capture.

Search is still the most reliable way to convert a patient who has decided to act. But the channel capturing the enquiry isn’t always the channel that created it. As we’ve seen, if you only fund what you can measure, you’ll gradually de-fund what’s actually filling the funnel.

As a team, we specialise in dental practice marketing, meaning we can make recommendations based on deep industry understanding. If you’d like help integrating a blended approach into your digital marketing, just get in touch.