The fastest way to waste an orthodontic launch budget is to accept every setting Google offers. Building a new Search campaign takes a few minutes, and nearly every screen arrives with choices already made. Those choices aren't wrong for everyone. They're made for an advertiser who wants as much reach as possible with as little setup as possible, which describes a national retailer much better than a three-office practice selling $5,000 treatment plans to parents within a 20-minute drive.
The first eight chapters built the pieces: tracking that reports signed contracts, treatment ad groups, landing pages, keywords, bids and ads. This chapter goes through the settings that decide where all of that actually runs. Most of them take one click to change. Leaving them alone can quietly spend the first month's budget on traffic that was never going to book an exam.
Google Builds Every New Orthodontic Search Campaign With AI Max Running. Hand-Set Exact-Match Bids Need It Off.
Build a braces campaign today and AI Max is already ticked before you type a keyword. Google's AI Max setup instructions confirm the box comes pre-checked. AI Max is a bundle of automation. With it running, Google can show your Invisalign ad on searches you never chose, write new headlines out of your site's copy, and land a parent on your blog instead of the Invisalign page you built in Chapter 4.
That's the opposite of what the first campaign in our method is for. Isolation, as we call it, runs exact match keywords with a person setting each ad group's bid. Its whole job is to learn, cleanly, which treatment searches book exams and what they cost. AI Max widens every one of those decisions at once. And Google's own setup page notes that its matching, page selection and text features need conversion-based automated bidding to work effectively, which Isolation deliberately doesn't use.
So at build, AI Max goes off. That also turns off text customization, the setting that writes extra headlines from your site, which now lives inside AI Max. Keyword match stays exact in Isolation. Exploration brings broad match in later (Chapter 6). AI Max is the final step of the rollout, Chapter 13, after months of booked exams have taught the bidding what a real orthodontic patient looks like.
Two settings in the same neighborhood go the other way. Auto-tagging stays on: it adds Google's click ID to every visit, and that ID is how Chapter 1 sends a signed contract back to the right ad. Ad rotation stays on Google's "optimize" setting, which favors the ads that perform once there's enough data to tell.
Search Partners Come Included, and Google Won't Say Which Sites. An Orthodontic Launch Unticks Them and Display.
The next screen asks which networks the campaign should use. Next comes the networks box, and one of its ticks is already there for you: Google's help center states that a new Search campaign arrives with search partners switched on. Those partners are other companies' sites, hundreds of them by Google's count, plus YouTube, and your braces ad can turn up inside their results pages.
The problem isn't that every one of those sites is bad. It's that you can't see them. Google's own page says it doesn't provide information on which Search Network sites showed your ad, outside Performance Max. A practice spending its first few thousand dollars needs every click to be readable: which search, which ad, which page, whether it booked. A click from an unnamed partner site can't be judged, so it can't be improved.
Display is the other box, and it's a different animal: banner ads on websites and apps, shown to people who weren't searching for an orthodontist at all. If a practice wants banner ads at all, they get their own campaign, budget and yardstick, never a seat inside the braces campaign. In a Search campaign it just dilutes the numbers.
Untick both. After a few months, when the account knows what a booked exam costs on Google's own results page, tick search partners back on for a trial and hold them to that same price. If they hold up, keep them. If they don't, the test cost a few weeks, not the launch.
Google Suggests Reaching People Interested in Your City. Orthodontic Patients Have to Live Close Enough to Drive In.
Location targeting has a setting most people skip. Open the location options and you'll find Google offers a choice in how it reads "people in Detroit." "Presence" means someone physically in the area or there on a regular basis. The other, Google's recommended option and the default, also includes people who've merely shown interest in the area, wherever they actually are.
Interest makes sense for a hotel or a wedding venue, where the customer is somewhere else by definition. It makes very little sense for an orthodontist. A patient doesn't visit once. In a Reddit thread from someone who'd sat through six consultations, the treatment plans they were quoted ran from 20 to 32 months. That's a family committing to drive to your office, again and again, for a year or two. A person two states away reading about Royal Oak will never sit in your chair for an adjustment.
Google's own page lists when "Presence" makes sense, including a business in a sensitive vertical with strict targeting limits and an advertiser who only wants people actually in its locations. An orthodontic practice fits the second cleanly, and health care is the first. Set Presence, then draw the area around where patients really come from. The practice's patient addresses or ZIP codes are a better guide than a round 20-mile circle, because a river, a highway or a school district line usually decides who drives in.
11 of 12 Orthodontic Sites We Checked Close by 6 p.m. on Weekdays. Google Shows the Phone Number All Day Unless Told Otherwise.
Google's ad schedule starts at "All day," every day. Here's how that lines up with the 12 orthodontic practice sites we profiled in the example market. Eleven close by 6 p.m. every weekday; one stays open until 7 on Thursdays. Six close at least one office on Fridays. Only four offer Saturdays at all, and those are some weeks or by appointment. Sundays are closed or by appointment everywhere.
Our answer isn't to switch the ads off at night. A parent who searches "pediatric orthodontist near me" at 10 p.m., reads your braces page and fills in the consultation form is a booked exam the next morning. Plenty of orthodontic decisions get made after the kids are in bed. Text ads can keep running.
The phone is a different story. The call asset is the tap-to-call button under a braces ad. Google lets you give that button its own hours, separate from the ad's. Use that. A parent who taps "Call" at 7 p.m. on a Friday and gets a voicemail greeting doesn't usually leave a message. They tap the next ad. In our review sample, 35 of the 181 low-star orthodontic reviews were about phones nobody answered or calls nobody returned. Limit the button to the hours the front desk actually picks up, and the after-hours searcher sees the form instead.
While you're there, turn on call reporting. It swaps in a Google forwarding number so the account can count calls from the ad, see how long they lasted, and treat a real conversation as a conversion. Without it, every phone booking looks like a click that went nowhere.
Google's Age Ranges Start at 18. A Teen Braces Campaign Reaches the Parent.
Many orthodontic patients are minors, and that changes what demographic settings can do. Google's age ranges for Search run from 18-24 up to 65+, plus "Unknown." There's no bracket for teenagers, and Google says advertisers can't target ads to show only to teens under 18.
That's fine, because the teenager isn't the buyer. The parent is. The keywords carry the intent ("braces for kids," "pediatric orthodontist near me"), and the ads from Chapter 8 are written to the parent who'll sign the contract. Leave every age range on at launch, including "Unknown," which is where Google puts anyone it can't place and where a meaningful share of real searchers sit. Narrowing by age before you have data mostly removes people you'd have wanted.
Adults paying for their own aligners point the same way. A 28-year-old fixing a relapse and a 52-year-old finally getting the Invisalign she skipped as a teenager are both real buyers. Watch the age report once the account has a few months of bookings. Adjust bids there if the numbers say so, not before.
The Practice Name Gets Its Own Campaign and Its Own Budget Before Launch Day.
One last structural choice. Searches for the practice's own name, and for each orthodontist's name, go in a campaign of their own, separate from the treatment campaigns.
Those searches are different from everything else in the account. They usually cost less than any treatment search, they usually book at a higher rate, and most of the people typing them already know you. Mixed into the Invisalign or braces campaigns, they flatter the numbers: a treatment campaign looks like it books exams cheaply, when really the practice name did the work. Kept separate, they get their own budget, so a competitor bidding on your name can't drain the money meant for new patients, and Isolation's numbers stay honest.
Start every budget lower than feels comfortable for the first week. Google's bid estimates and the first few days of auction data tell you more about what the market actually costs than any forecast, and Chapter 7's bids can be adjusted against real prices before the spending ramps up.
Before you press publish, run down the list once more:
- AI Max off, and with it text customization.
- Exact match only in Isolation.
- Search partners and Display unticked.
- Location set to Presence, drawn around where patients actually live.
- Text ads on all day; the call button limited to the hours someone answers.
- Call reporting and auto-tagging on.
- Every age range on, including Unknown.
- Practice and doctor names in a separate campaign and budget.
None of it is glamorous. All of it decides whether the first month's numbers mean anything.
An orthodontic practice that would rather have someone set up and check every one of these settings before the first dollar goes out can see what our Google Ads management covers.
Next: Performance Max Waits for About 30 Consults a Month. Chapter 10 Shows What It Needs After That.
The campaign is built and launched. Chapter 8 wrote the ads it runs. Chapter 10 looks ahead to the first big expansion: when Performance Max earns a place in the account, and why it needs real photos of your patients' smiles when it gets there.
This chapter is part of Google Ads for Orthodontists, our sixteen-chapter guide for orthodontic practices anywhere in the US.
