How it works

One practice, one month, and every change we would make.

The whole process on one practice. The steps are what AdHelm does today; the money is a model, and every assumption behind it is on this page.

A projection, not results. Assumed figures are tagged Modelled; Google's own data is tagged Measured. Nothing here is a guarantee.

The practice

Northside Family Dental

Single location · General, cosmetic and implant dentistry · Morris County, NJ

Monthly ad budget: $3,000
Bid found, every treatment Measured: $2
What it advertised Measured: Cleanings

“More implant and Invisalign cases. Fewer enquiries carrying a plan we dropped.”

The process

Nine steps. Four of them need you.

Every step names the part of AdHelm that does it. Nothing here is modelled.

01Day one
We read the account
Ninety days of history, read-only. Every search term that triggered an ad, what it cost, and who was really searching — patient, job seeker, price shopper.
Approve the connection. Five minutes.
Read-only connection, restricted in code to settings and totals
02Day one
We read your website
Your treatments are already published, so we read them rather than ask. For Northside that surfaced the mismatch at once: the site sells implants, the campaign advertised cleanings.
Confirm the list. One click.
Site read and service matching
03Day two
We rank treatments by demand and by who pays
Volume from Google’s Keyword Planner for your area. Then who settles the bill — an implant is paid by the patient, a cleaning by whichever plan they carry. That is why your payer mix changes what a cleaning is worth and barely touches an implant.
Treatment ranking, demand scored against payer route
04Day two
We bid each treatment at what its clicks cost
The biggest change and the least visible. Google prices an implant click here at $8.78 and a check-up at $2.05. One bid for both does not split the difference — it wins the cheap auctions and loses the rest, all month.
Per-treatment bids from Keyword Planner estimates
05Day two
We put your plans in the ad
The ad is the last filter before you pay. Name Delta Dental, Cigna and Aetna and mostly those people click. Free-care searches — one word away from your own — are excluded outright.
Confirm which plans you take and which you dropped.
Payer-aware ad copy and negative keywords
06Day three
Google checks it before it exists
We submit the campaign for validation without creating it, so policy problems surface first. Healthcare trips a personalisation policy most practices are exempt from; we request the exemption and retry rather than hand you an error.
Validate-only submission with policy-exemption retry
07Day three
It launches paused
Created in your own account, paused, every ad group and bid visible. Nothing spends until someone at the practice turns it on. That is the only moment in this process where money starts moving.
Review and activate.
Paused creation, explicit activation
08Every morning
It holds the line
Each day we review against conservative limits and propose what to change — a term to exclude, a keyword that is not working, budget drifting back to the cheapest group. On autopilot the small ones happen within those limits and you get an email; on Review first each one waits for you.
Read the daily email. Undo anything you disagree with.
Daily optimizer with limits, audit log and rollback
09Month two
You tell us who walked in
Once a month, how many new patients arrived on each plan. Totals only, never a patient. Fifteen patients or more and your budget reweights to match. Stop reporting for three months and it reverts to your setup assumptions, and we say so.
Four or five numbers. Two minutes.
Payer-mix reporting, pooled and expiring, feeding the treatment ranking

The campaign

The same $3,000, split by what each treatment is worth.

Shares come from local demand scored against who pays. The bids are Google's own estimates for this service area — which is why the implant click is $8.78 and not a round number.

Ad group	Who pays	Bid Measured	Budget	Clicks Modelled	Case value
Dental implants Highest local demand among the treatments this practice wants, and patients settle the bill themselves — so contracted rates do not reduce what the practice collects.	Patient pays	$8.78	$1,140 38%	129.8	$3,000
Invisalign Strong adult demand, largely self-funded, and the highest production per case on the list.	Patient pays	$6.40	$810 27%	126.6	$4,500
Veneers Lower volume than implants but entirely elective, so none of it is exposed to the practice’s payer mix.	Patient pays	$5.12	$540 18%	105.5	$2,400
New patient exam Kept deliberately. It is the cheapest click in the account and the route to patients who later need everything else — it just stops being the whole campaign.	Billed to insurance	$2.05	$510 17%	248.8	$300
Total			$3,000	610.7

The ad AdHelm writes · implants

Fewer patients. Considerably more production.

An implant click costs four times a check-up click, so the same budget buys fewer of them. Every count below falls except the one that pays the practice.

The account as found

Budget placedof $3,000 authorised: $1,800
Clicks: 900.0
Enquiries: 36.0
On a plan they take22% arrive on one they do not: 28.1
Cases started: 19.7
Of which implants, Invisalign or veneers: 0

Monthly production Modelled

$5,897

The campaign AdHelm builds

Budget placedthe whole budget: $3,000
Clicks: 610.7
Enquiries: 24.4
On a plan they take8% arrive on one they do not: 22.5
Cases started: 10.4
Of which implants, Invisalign or veneers: 4.0

Monthly production Modelled

$15,305

2.6× the figure on the left, from the same authorised budget.

The arithmetic, net of what it costs

Modelled

Extra monthly production: +$9,408
Extra ad spend, because the flat bid was not placing the budget: −$1,200
AdHelm, one location: −$500
Remaining, per month: $7,708

Production, not profit. Lab fees, materials, chair time and your overhead come out of this. It is what the campaign puts in the chair, not what you take home.

And the number we will actually stand behind

Ignore the model. $500 a month is $6,000 a year. At a conservative $3,000 a case, 2 extra cases a year pays for it. That is the floor we quote on a call, and the one to judge us by.

What to expect

And what not to.

Live within a week of connecting.

Anything live before you approve it.

Fewer clicks, on the work you want.

More traffic. Volume is what the old campaign chased.

Your new-patient count to fall, and what those patients are worth to rise.

Both at once. On a fixed budget, better patients means fewer of them.

Most enquiries on a plan you take, because the ad says which.

Every enquiry pre-qualified. The ad filters clicks, not patients.

Month two to beat month one. Google needs data to bid well.

A step change on day one.

Every change logged, explained and reversible.

A monthly report you cannot check. It is your account.

To be told if this will not pay for itself at your spend.

A guaranteed number of cases. Nobody can honour one.

Not a dental argument

The same thing happens wherever one treatment is worth several times another.

The example is dental because that is the account we have real data for. The mechanism is not.

Med spa

Budget drifts to: facials and consultations

What pays the rent: body contouring and injectable courses

No insurance in the picture, so treatments are judged on demand and case value — and the budget stops defaulting to the cheapest click.

Chiropractic

Budget drifts to: generic “chiropractor near me” traffic

What pays the rent: sciatica and sports-injury care, and cash wellness plans

Condition-led work is billed to a plan, wellness care is nearly always cash. Scored separately rather than sharing one bid.

Physical therapy

Budget drifts to: general enquiries

What pays the rent: post-operative and pelvic floor programmes

A programme is worth many times one evaluation, so the campaign bids for it instead of buying the cheapest evaluation click.

We will run this on your own account before you decide anything.

We audit your account first. Read-only, a few minutes, and the findings are yours either way.

Your figures will be yours, not the ones above — and if the arithmetic does not work for your practice, we will say so.

Book a call

About these figures

The steps above describe what AdHelm does today. The money figures are a model, not results: they apply the assumptions listed on this page to one illustrative practice, shown so you can check the arithmetic and disagree with it. AdHelm has not run campaigns long enough to publish outcomes, and will not present modelled figures as outcomes when it has. Cost-per-click estimates are Google Keyword Planner figures for a real service area, September 2026; conversion rates, close rates and case values are assumptions. Production is gross — lab fees, materials, chair time and your overhead come out of it. Your results will differ, and no number here is a guarantee.

Monthly ad budget: $3,000
Bid found in the account: $2 / click, flat
Budget a flat bid can place: 60%
Clicks that enquire: 4%
Enquiries on a plan not taken, before: 22%
Enquiries on a plan not taken, after: 8%
Consultations that become a case: 30%
Routine enquiries that book: 70%
Implant case: $3,000 gross
Invisalign case: $4,500 gross
Veneer case: $2,400 gross
New patient exam: $300 gross

One practice, one month, and every change we would make.

Northside Family Dental

We read the account

We read your website

We rank treatments by demand and by who pays

We bid each treatment at what its clicks cost

We put your plans in the ad

Google checks it before it exists

It launches paused

It holds the line