Worked scenario · max CPC
A dental practice's £1,000 a month
By Oliver Wakefield-Smith, Digital Signet. Updated July 2026.
At the 2026 US dental median of $8.00 per click LocaliQ, 2026 data, a $1,000 budget buys 125 clicks and about 13 enquiries. The interesting decision is not the total. It is which keywords the money funds, because an implant enquiry and a hygiene enquiry are worth very different amounts to the practice.
The headline ticket
Benchmark figures are USD as sourced, so the ticket runs in dollars; a £1,000 budget divides the same way against your own measured CPC.
Lot 01 · dental median, USD
All figures in the ticket derive from the Dentists & Dental Services row LocaliQ, 2026 data, whose measured cost per lead is $72.97. Our worked $76.92 sits close to it, which is the sanity check passing. Full category detail on the dental benchmark page.
Two lanes, two affordable bids
"Dental implants" clicks and "dentist near me" hygiene clicks come from the same budget but fund different economics. A max CPC (the most you can afford to bid) is target cost per new patient multiplied by conversion rate. Take two planning targets; both are assumptions for you to replace, not market statistics. Pay up to $300 to win an implant patient and up to $30 for a hygiene patient, at the category's 10.67% conversion rate:
Lot 02 · affordable bid per lane
Read against the $8.00 median, the implant lane clears with room to spare and the hygiene lane does not. That asymmetry is the budget split: fund high-value treatment keywords first and let hygiene demand arrive through cheaper channels. The bid-versus-cost mechanics behind this are on CPC vs CPA.
Which lane first
A capacity-constrained practice funds the implant lane first: fewer enquiries, each worth funding. A practice with empty hygiene slots and spare chair time can afford the low-margin lane because the marginal cost of serving it is low. Either way, set the lane's max bid from its own economics, not from a blended average. Rerun the implant lane with your own numbers in the max CPC calculator, pre-filled with this scenario.
Sanity checks
Whether $8.00 is a fair price for your postcode is a benchmark question: what is a good CPC shows how to place your number. Higher-stakes version of the same method: the law firm scenario works £2,000 a month at the most expensive CPCs in the dataset.