How Swish Dental went from 10 studios to 23 - and nearly doubled revenue.

10 studios became 23. Revenue nearly doubled. Year-over-year growth held at roughly 25% for four consecutive years.

Six ad channels. HIPAA-compliant tracking. More creative testing than most agencies would attempt. And a marketing manager who says she can’t imagine working with anyone else.

Here’s how it happened.

About Swish Dental

Swish Dental reimagined what going to the dentist could feel like – modern, conveniently located studios instead of clinical offices, a friendly team, and comfort-first amenities like blankets, eye masks, and Netflix during your visit. No judgment, no lectures.

The result is over 100,000 patients treated and over 15,000 five-star reviews.

Swish had built something patients genuinely loved. They needed a marketing partner who could put it in front of the right people. Growdent came on when Swish Dental had 10 studios in Austin. Since then, we’ve helped them expand into Houston and San Antonio, growing to 23 locations across three cities.

The first six months

Over the first six months, Google Ads bookings increased 54%. Facebook ads shifted from awareness to conversion-oriented, with an average CPA 32% lower than Google. New patients increased 64% month over month, and average monthly revenue jumped 49%.

That early momentum set the tone for everything that followed – but sustaining it meant solving problems most dental agencies never have to think about.

The challenge

When we started, Swish had 10 studios concentrated in Austin. The goal was to expand into new metros, open new locations, and keep growing year on year. Three things made that harder than it sounds.

HIPAA compliance. Every tracking pixel, every conversion event, and every audience has to meet HIPAA standards. Most ad platforms aren’t built for this, and most agencies don’t know how to navigate it. We helped pioneer HIPAA-compliant tracking so Swish could clearly measure performance without putting the practice at risk.

Multi-location complexity. Each studio needs location-specific targeting. Austin patients behave differently than Houston or San Antonio patients, but the brand has to stay cohesive across all of them. That means dozens of campaigns, budgets, and creative sets – all managed as one system.

Reaching patients who aren’t looking for a dentist. A huge part of Swish’s (or any dentist’s) patient base isn’t Googling “dentist near me.” They’ve been putting off the dentist for months or years – dental anxiety, busy schedules, or just falling out of the habit. You can’t capture demand that doesn’t exist yet, so we had to create it, which required different channels and completely different creative.

We started by figuring out what actually makes people book.

Six channels, one system

Through ongoing creative and copy testing, we built a clear picture of what drives patients to book at Swish – what they care about, what holds them back, and what makes them choose one practice over another. That research informs every channel we run and every piece of creative we produce.

We didn’t go wide and hope something sticks. We expanded channels methodically, proving performance on each one before scaling spend.

The expansion from Google and Facebook into Bing, TikTok, Disney Ads, and Connected TV wasn’t about chasing trends. Each channel was tested, proven, and then scaled.

But channels alone don’t drive results. What runs on them does.

Creative strategy: test more, learn faster

Most dental marketing runs on a handful of ads with little planning, oversight or optimization. We take a different approach – we test far more creative variants than industry standard, double down on what works, and cut the rest fast.

And recent changes to how Meta delivers ads have made this approach even more important.

Meta’s Andromeda algorithm, fully deployed in late 2025, changed how ads get delivered. The old system evaluated a few hundred ad candidates and relied on advertisers to define the audience. Andromeda is fundamentally different – it processes far more creative data and decides who sees what based on the creative itself. It reads your visuals, copy, pacing, and emotional tone to find the right users on its own.

The practical impact is that creative diversity is now the primary performance lever on Meta. Minor copy tweaks and background swaps no longer count as “new” because the system recognizes near-duplicates and clusters them together. You need genuinely distinct concepts, formats, and angles.

High-volume creative testing has always been core to how we work. Andromeda gave us reason to push it even further – more distinct concepts, more formats, faster testing cycles. And so far, it’s working. The accounts producing the most genuinely different creative are seeing the strongest performance under the new algorithm.

Some of the creatives we tested in the process 👇

All of the above – the channels, the creative volume, the compliance work – adds up. Here’s what it looks like in numbers.

Results

HIPAA deserves its own section.

HIPAA compliance

This is something most dental practices don’t think about until it’s a problem.

Most marketing agencies run standard Meta Pixels and Google Tags without considering that patient data – appointment bookings, form submissions, even page visits for specific treatments – can constitute protected health information under HIPAA. As of December 2024, violations can carry fines up to $2.1 million.

Before we started, Swish didn’t have any insight into tracking. We worked with their developers to properly install the necessary pixels and set up HIPAA-compliant tracking with granular measurement of each channel’s impact on appointments – decreasing wasted spend and increasing overall volume.

Compliance is one area where we’ve been ahead of the curve. AI is another.

How we use AI

We don’t follow AI trends blindly, and we don’t use unsafe or untested technology. Every tool gets vetted before it touches a client account. Here’s what we’re actually doing.

AI video for ads. We tested over 10 AI video tools, including Arcads, HeyGen, and NanoBanana, to produce influencer-style video clips for ads. Frankly, most of them looked bad. But a few produce output that’s indistinguishable from real footage at scroll speed, which helps cut asset production costs while keeping up with the creative volume that Andromeda now demands.

AI-powered analytics. We rely on a custom integration between our reporting infrastructure and AI models like ChatGPT and Claude. The integration allows AI to read live data from the ad accounts and surface insights specific to each client’s performance – patterns and opportunities that a human analyst might miss or take longer to find. It’s still in testing, and AI does hallucinate, so every insight gets human verification. But it’s showing real promise as a recommendation engine that helps us spot improvement opportunities faster.

Automated performance alerts. We’re implementing custom alert workflows using n8n, an AI workflow engine, connected directly to our team’s Slack. When an ad platform sends underperformance signals, the team gets flagged in real time.

AI across the ad platforms. We rely on AI-powered targeting and bidding strategies across Google, Meta, TikTok, and Bing. On Google specifically, we’ve introduced AI Max campaigns, which Google claims improve reach and conversions. Our experience hasn’t confirmed that yet, but we test before we judge and we’re giving it a proper evaluation window.

Creative production. AI touches multiple stages of our creative workflow – Adobe AI, Photoprompt AI, and Figma AI for image editing, ElevenLabs for voiceovers, Higgsfield for video, and ChatGPT or Claude for copy generation support (though every piece goes through manual human review and frequently heavy correction). We’ve also built a dedicated AI assistant loaded with Swish’s brand information and marketing context to keep copy consistent and on-brand.

The principle is the same across all of it: AI as a multiplier, not a replacement. Every output gets human review. Every tool gets tested before deployment. The goal is better results, not a shinier tech stack.

The partnership

Growth is one thing. Sustaining it over four years without burning out the relationship is another.

We handle strategy, execution, creative testing, channel expansion, tracking, compliance, and optimization. Swish’s team focuses on what they’re best at – dentistry and their patients. As Brittany puts it, they don’t have to manage or worry about marketing day to day. It’s a true partnership, and one that both sides are excited to continue.

What this means for your practice

You don’t need 23 studios to benefit from the same approach. Creative testing, multi-channel strategy, HIPAA-compliant tracking, and constant optimization – these principles work whether you have one location or fifty.

The question isn’t whether marketing works for dental practices. It does. The question is whether your current approach is leaving patients on the table – people who’d love your practice if they knew about it, or if someone gave them a reason to come back after years away.

Ready to grow your practice?