In the latest Monday Marketing Rundown, DentalScapes founder Dan covers one of the most important shifts happening right now in online advertising for dental practices — and why every dental practice running Facebook or Instagram ads needs to pay attention.
As Dan explains, Meta has been aggressively pushing advertisers toward a system called Advantage+. Instead of manually building an audience — picking a radius, selecting age ranges, layering in interest categories — Meta’s AI now takes the wheel. You provide the creative, set a general location, and the algorithm decides who sees your ads.
The old targeting playbook most practices have relied on, Dan says, is being phased out. And the data supports the shift: according to Insider Intelligence, Advantage+ campaigns are now the primary growth engine for 65% of U.S. advertisers, and practices that consolidated into broader campaigns saw cost per acquisition drop by nearly a third.
But as Dan points out, this isn’t just a Meta story. Google has been running the same playbook for years with Performance Max — a campaign type that distributes your budget automatically across Search, YouTube, Display, Gmail, and Maps based on where it’s performing best. Both platforms are now what the industry calls signal-driven systems. The quality of what you feed the algorithm determines the quality of who the algorithm finds for you.
For dental practices, Dan shares, this changes the equation. You’re not just running ads anymore — you’re teaching a machine what success looks like for your practice. Practices that put real thought into their creative, their offer, and their conversion tracking will consistently outperform the ones that set a budget and forget it.
Dan recommends two things worth doing now. First, if you’re running multiple ad sets with different audience segments, consolidate them — fewer campaigns with stronger budgets outperform fragmented setups under the Advantage+ model. Second, check how your conversions are being tracked. If your campaigns are optimizing for clicks and form fills rather than phone calls and appointment requests, the algorithm is learning the wrong lesson.
As Dan puts it, most competitors haven’t adjusted to this yet. That’s the opportunity.
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