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 multi-location 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
$39k a year recovered by stopping the group from bidding up its own keywords — a 7× return on the $5,950 Audit + Sprint fee. For any multi-location 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 — inside our fixed 5–7 day window.