Services · Dental group
Every location bought the same keywords against each other.
This marketing & margin audit identified $39k in wasted annual spend in a Services business, evidenced, senior reviewed, and delivered in 5 days.
The business
A multilocation dental group allowed each clinic to run its own search advertising independently, with no coordination between locations. Every practice managed its own campaigns and budget in isolation, which felt locally empowering, but meant nobody was looking at how the group’s many separate accounts interacted with one another in the same ad auctions.
What triggered the audit
Group level cost per click kept climbing with no obvious external cause such as new competitors or seasonal demand. Rising CPCs without an external explanation frequently trace back to bidders competing against themselves, so the audit checked the one internal cause nobody wanted to find: the group’s own clinics bidding against each other.
What the audit found
The clinics were, without realizing it, driving up their own costs. Because each location ran its own search campaigns independently and many served overlapping geographic areas, multiple clinics from the same group were bidding on the same keywords in the same auctions, competing directly against one another and inflating the cost per click for the entire group. Every practice thought it was simply buying local demand; collectively they were engaged in an internal auction war that raised prices for all of them and benefited only the ad platform. Because the accounts were managed in isolation with no central visibility, the self competition had gone undetected while CPCs crept up, quietly costing the group roughly $39k a year in avoidable, self inflicted bid inflation.
What we changed
Consolidated search into a geo partitioned account structure, so each clinic owns a distinct territory rather than overlapping with and bidding against its own sibling locations.
Set group level negative keywords and controls to stop clinics competing with one another in the same auctions and inflating the price for everyone.
Centralised search governance and visibility while deliberately leaving each clinic its own local budget and autonomy, so coordination didn’t come at the cost of local control.
Established shared monitoring of group level cost per click, so any future self competition is caught and corrected before it inflates costs again.
The result
The outcomes were measured for three months after a 90 day implementation period. $39k a year recovered by stopping the group from bidding up its own keywords, an annual figure equal to 7× the $5,950 Audit + Sprint fee. For any multilocation operator, the cause is easy to miss and easy to fix: independent accounts meant clinics were quietly competing against each other in the same auctions. If your locations run search in isolation, rising CPCs may be self inflicted, benefiting only the ad platform. Nobody sees it without a group level view. A fixed fee audit consolidates and diagnoses it in days, so each site captures local demand without paying a premium to fight a sibling.
From kickoff to signed off findings: 5 days.
What the client said
$39k a year of wasted spend cut in 5 days
Search cost per click across the clinics: $2.40 → $1.78
“Our cost per click climbed with no new competitor in sight. Leslie found the competitor was us: clinics bidding against each other on the same keywords in the same auctions. One geo partitioned account structure ended it.”
Leslie MartinSenior Auditor · signed this audit off