Google Ads versus Meta for UK dental practices: buying and measurement guide

Disclosure. This site is published by the company behind Dental Mastery, which runs paid advertising for dental practices. The tests and questions here apply to any supplier, including Dental Mastery.

"Should we be on Google or Facebook?" is usually the wrong first question. The better one is: are the patients I want already searching for this treatment, or do I need to put it in front of them? The answer decides the platform, the budget and, most of all, how you should judge the results.

The real difference: searching versus scrolling

Google search ads appear when someone has typed a query: a treatment, a problem, a practice near them. You are answering demand that already exists, so volume is capped by how many people search in your area.

Meta ads (Facebook and Instagram) appear while people scroll. Nobody asked, so you are creating interest. That gives more reach but colder enquiries, which need faster follow-up and more patience before they book.

Side by side

How each platform charges

Neither platform has a fixed price. On Google, you pay per click, set by an auction in which you pay the minimum needed to clear the thresholds and beat the advertiser below you ^[2]. The daily budget is an average: a campaign can spend up to twice it on a given day, with a monthly limit of 30.4 times the daily budget ^[1].

On Meta, the auction winner is the ad with the highest total value, combining the bid, estimated action rates and ad quality ^[4]. A daily budget is a target across a Sunday to Saturday week: Meta may spend up to 75% over it on a given day, but not more than seven times it across the week ^[3]. For what this means for your overall budget, including agency fees and VAT, the practical maths is in a separate guide on costs.

Targeting limits to ask about

Google treats health as a sensitive interest category. Advertisers promoting products or services in those categories cannot use advertiser-curated audiences, such as lists built from their own website visitors or customer data ^[7]. Ask any agency planning remarketing or customer-list audiences for your dental campaigns how they have checked that against Google's policy. A suspended account costs far more than the audience is worth.

Measuring by started treatment

Both platforms optimise towards whatever you tell them is a success. If that is a form fill, they will find you more form fills, including poor ones. The fix is to feed back what happened later.

• Keep the click. With auto-tagging on, Google adds a click identifier (GCLID) to the landing page address ^[5]. Your enquiry form or CRM should store it with the lead.
• Report the outcome. Google's enhanced conversions for leads lets you import what happened to a lead, matched through hashed details such as an email address, to improve accuracy and bidding ^[6]. Meta offers comparable server-side reporting.
• Keep clinical detail out. Send stages (qualified, attended, started), never symptoms, treatment notes or anything clinical, and name conversion actions neutrally. The GDC treats what treatment a patient is having and its cost as confidential ^[10], so take privacy advice before attaching treatment values.
• Respect consent. UK law requires consent before storing or reading tracking information on a visitor's device, beyond narrow exemptions ^[8]. Tracking that ignores the cookie banner is not a measurement strategy.

The stages and how to record them are set out step by step in implant campaigns: tracking enquiry to paid treatment. Most of the gains are in what happens after the click, which is where I spend most time with Dental Mastery's enquiry capture and follow-up.

Rules for the ads themselves

Paid ads are advertising under the General Dental Council's guidance: accurate, not misleading, GDC number where a professional is named, NHS or private status stated, specialist titles only for those on a specialist list, and social media promotions noting that treatment depends on assessment ^[9]. The advertising regulators expect evidence for objective claims and genuine, representative before-and-after images ^[11].

Choosing, and running both

• If people in your area already search for the treatment and you are not visible, start with Google search.
• If search volume is small, or the treatment needs explaining before people look for it, Meta can create demand, provided your team can call new enquiries back quickly.
• If you run both, judge each on cost per started patient over at least a quarter, not on clicks or cost per lead in a single month.

Before changing platforms, check the account you already have with the PPC account audit checklist, and if you are choosing who runs it, see how to evaluate a dental PPC agency.