Questions to Ask a Cosmetic Dentistry Marketing Agency

How will you prove which consultations came from your work?

Attribution is the first question because it exposes whether an agency reports outcomes or activity. An agency that answers with impressions, traffic, and rankings is telling you what it measures. You are buying booked cosmetic consultations, so ask exactly how a new consult on the schedule gets traced back to a specific channel and campaign.

Google's documentation defines attribution as assigning credit for conversions to the touchpoints along the path, and it applies to the key events you define, such as a consultation request. Ask which key events the agency has configured and whether a booked consult is one of them. Ask too how they handle the known limits: in Google Analytics 4, attribution models exclude direct visits from credit unless the whole path is direct, and conversions can be reattributed for only up to seven days. An agency that cannot name a limitation of its own reporting has not thought hard about it.

• Which key events are configured, and does one map to a booked consultation?
• How do you trace a phone consult versus an online request?
• Which attribution model do you use, and what are its limits?
• Can you show a sample monthly report from a real account, names redacted?

What are your terms, and what happens when I leave?

Long lock-ins shift risk from the agency to you. A twelve-month term with auto-renewal means the agency gets paid whether or not consultations materialize. Ask for the minimum term, the notice period, and any early-exit fee in writing before the sales call ends.

Then ask the offboarding question, because that is where practices get burned twice. What transfers to you on the last day: the website, the pages, the consented galleries, the tracking configuration, the ad and analytics accounts? If any of it is described as proprietary, price the cost of rebuilding it into your decision. A month-to-month structure keeps the incentive where it belongs, on producing consultations.

Who owns the accounts, the website, and the galleries?

This is the question that separates recoverable mistakes from expensive ones. Campaigns run inside an account the agency owns mean your history and conversion data leave when you do. Google's guidance is that an agency should link to your account through a manager account while you retain ownership, and that a client account still owns its data and can remove access by unlinking. Apply the same standard to your Google Business Profile, analytics, domain, hosting, and booking platform.

For a cosmetic practice, add the galleries. Your consented before-and-after library is a hard-won asset with real compliance context, and it should live in accounts you control, with the consent records in your hands. Ask for a written inventory of every account and asset, who owns each, and what transfers if you part ways.

• Do campaigns run in an account I own, linked to your manager account?
• Am I the administrator on my Analytics property and Business Profile?
• Is the domain registered in my name, at a registrar I control?
• Do I keep the website and the consented galleries if we part ways?

How do you keep my results and claims compliant?

Cosmetic dental marketing sits under both dental board ethics and FTC advertising rules. The ADA code requires that communications not be false or misleading in any material respect, and the FTC's Health Products Compliance Guidance requires competent and reliable scientific evidence and a reasonable basis for health claims before an ad runs. The FTC has acted against agencies, not only advertisers, so a competent partner treats this as shared exposure.

Test their fluency directly. Ask how they present a before-and-after without implying a guaranteed outcome, how they handle patient consent for media, and whether they understand your state board's specific rules. Vague answers here mean you become their compliance training, on your license.