Wrangling the West: Sponsored Results Drives a 46% Booking Surge for Signature Dental Partners
How Signature Dental Partners powered a record month with multi-product synergy
Josh Harvey was talking with a Signature Dental colleague about provider visibility when the discussion turned to sponsored placement: a familiar concept in paid search, but newer in targeted provider search.
Signature — a dental service organization with 100+ locations across the Western U.S. — had already built a strong baseline on Zocdoc. The Marketplace was helping drive a steady flow of new patients to dozens of regional offices. But as Signature’s footprint grew, so did the operation’s complexity.
Patient demand concentrated in high-density metropolitan markets, which were also the most fiercely competitive. At the same time, Signature was frequently onboarding new providers and managing growth across disparate locations. A newly arriving doctor could be ready to see patients before they had built up the robust local profile, patient reviews, and online visibility to stand out.
That got Harvey, Signature’s Vice President of Marketing, thinking: Even with steady organic demand on Zocdoc, standard search results made it tough for some individual providers to cut through local noise.
The marketing team needed a dynamic, sustainable mechanism to boost provider visibility, highlight new doctors instantly, and efficiently fill empty chairs across a growing network.
Dentistry is quite a competitive landscape in the healthcare marketplace. We needed a leg up.
Boosting Same-Day Bookings with Sponsored Results
An Ecosystem for Instant Patient Access
Signature Dental Partners partnered closely with Zocdoc to build a more complete patient acquisition strategy, using its different features to reach patients at key moments in their search and booking journey.
Everything starts with Zocdoc Marketplace, which reaches a steady stream of local patients looking for care and ready to book.
Booking Link brings Zocdoc’s seamless online booking experience directly to Signature practices’ websites, so patients can easily schedule appointments and Signature can easily add them to the local office’s calendar. This eliminates messy paperwork and phone tag across 100-plus locations.
Finally, to cut through the noise in busy, competitive cities like Phoenix and Denver, Signature added Sponsored Results to spotlight specific practices, highlighting priority providers at the very top of search pages so patients see them first. By introducing Sponsored Results to their existing Zocdoc setup, Signature gave their newest or shifting providers an immediate head start.
46%
year-over-year growth in new patient acquisition
18%
of bookings were for an appointment with 24 hours
2x
growth rate of competing service
This strategic alignment completely shifted Signature’s numbers, lassoing steady booking trends and bending them sharply upward. Leveraging internal reporting and matchback analysis to measure mid-2025 and early-2026 impact, the organization identified a massive surge in patient activity since implementing this suite of growth tools.
“We just had the biggest new-patient month in the history of our company,” Harvey says. “Zocdoc played a huge role in that.”
These gains provided Signature with a highly predictable formula for deliberate, long-term network growth:
- Instant provider visibility: New doctors can get top search placements before building a massive local review history.
- Frictionless speed-to-care: Securing nearly one-fifth of bookings within 24 hours keeps local schedules optimized and fills last-minute cancellations.
- Deliberate market growth: Practices in dense hubs can reliably capture patient demand right when they have chairs to fill.
Our northstar KPI metric is new patient acquisition — there’s a significant correlation in terms of what we’ve seen from new patient growth since working with Zocdoc.