Case Study: Pearly

Reach & motivate a niche audience, without pulling teeth

Challenge

Change an outdated industry

Dental billing & collection hasn’t changed much in decades. Think spreadsheets, mailed statements, and phone reminders. This wastes tons of time, and unpaid balances are a huge drain on practice profits. Pearly’s software can automate patient billing, payments, membership plans, and more. But how could digital marketing reach a niche audience in an industry that’s slow to evolve?

Scope & Goals

Measure the digital buying journey, use creative hacks to send Google Ads more optimization signals, run user tests to improve website conversion.

Measurement  /   Google Ads  /   User testing

Measurement: Brush up on analytics

Pearly already had a solid sales process. But there wasn’t much website data on what helped or hindered a visitor turning into a lead. With low lead volume, it was also hard to gauge the impact of Pearly’s ad budget without a better understanding of the buying journey.

Our Solution

Quiet Owl broke the online sales funnel into ‘micro-conversions’ and tracked each step. This highlighted which actions indicate a propensity to convert. It also spotted where drop-offs occur (e.g. someone clicked to a demo form but didn’t complete it). Most importantly, this holistic measurement avoided the attribution trap that plagues many B2B marketers. Since visitors rarely become leads directly from the first ad click, it provided a more complete picture of how traffic behaved and gave confidence in the ad strategy.

Key Benefits
  • Understand key steps of digital prospect journey
  • Less reliant on ad platform attribution
  • Monthly scorecard to track patterns & trends

Google Ads: Root out irrelevant keywords, give algorithm more signals

Wouldn’t it be nice if “dental revenue cycle management automation software” was a high volume keyword? Instead, Google served Pearly ads for dental-related terms that had nothing to do with their target audience (e.g. patients looking for insurance or payment plans). There also weren’t enough lead conversions for Google’s smart bidding to improve efficiency.

Our Solution

Quiet Owl painstakingly weeded out irrelevant terms, using negative keywords and exact match to focus only on those with strong engagement. What really made Google Ads shine, though, was sending website micro-conversions to the algorithm as extra data signals. Rather than optimize based on a handful of leads, Google now had thousands of ‘weighted’ touchpoints to learn who made an ideal Pearly prospect.

Key Benefits
  • Learn which hyper-relevant keywords drive growth
  • Benefit from Google’s smart bidding strategy

User testing: Examine the website through a prospect’s eyes

Many SaaS companies are so close to their website that it’s hard to see from a customer’s perspective. Pearly wondered whether its new site gave too much information or not enough. Did prospects understand the terminology and offerings? Yet few people – even within a dental practice – were qualified to give meaningful feedback.

Our Solution

Quiet Owl recruited highly-targeted user test participants to answer these questions. The findings uncovered language, messaging, and graphics that caused confusion (e.g. people didn’t understand industry acronyms). We also learned which selling points resonated most and suggested alternate wording and images to make them clearer. The needs of dental groups vs private practices were more different than assumed, which led to clearly separate website journeys for each segment. Price curiosity was also a major factor, inspiring a price quote form which generated even more leads than demo requests.

Key Benefits
  • Structured feedback from real prospects
  • Clear conversion paths based on audiences
  • New lead gen hook for pricing quotes

Results

By drilling into measurement, creating more optimization signals for Google Ads, and refining the website through user research, Quiet Owl helped Pearly build a reliable, scalable digital marketing engine.

61%

Increase in inbound leads (YoY)

10x

Increase in new dental offices onboarded (YoY)

-33%

Decrease in ad cost per new dental office onboarded (YoY)
Year-over-year lead growth
Year-over-year lead growth Image
Client Approved

“Quiet Owl was a great partner and helped us kickstart our digital advertising. Their approach combining creative with detailed analytics allows us to convert digital leads into ROI-positive sales.”

Jeff Cole | Co-founder, CEO

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