"Should we pay for promotion?" is a frequent dilemma in Meituan operations for dental clinics. Without it, you worry competitors will take your traffic; with it, the money goes out and visits do not rise. Paid promotion is not a choice between doing it or not, but a combined judgement about when, what and how much. This article explains how Meituan promotion works and offers a decision framework to help clinics spend money where it is effective. Advertising amplifies operations: if the foundations are weak, it amplifies the problems, not the results.
First, be clear what promotion solves
Meituan promotion (the platform's various paid traffic products) works simply: you pay for display priority. Other things being equal, a store running promotion ranks higher in search results and recommendation slots and gets more exposure.
But exposure is only the first link in the chain. A patient sees your store → clicks in → looks at the offers and reviews → orders and visits. Every step has a conversion rate. Promotion pours traffic in; if the store's rating, offers and reviews cannot hold it, the money is wasted. This is the truth behind many stores' "we advertised and nothing happened": promotion is not useless; the store's ability to convert failed first.
So the question that comes before any advertising decision is: are the store's basics in order? A rating no lower than the local business-district average, a sensible offer structure, a review section that is not bleak, complete page information. If these pass, advertising is an amplifier. If not, fix them first and talk about advertising later.
Another common mistake is treating promotion as a lifeline: the store's data is at the bottom, and the hope is that promotion will pull it up. When the basics are poor, the traffic promotion brings sees a poor store. Conversion is low and the cost per click is high (the platform charges by results, and poor conversion drives costs up sharply), creating a vicious circle.
When to advertise: three typical scenarios
Drawing on Sanqi Internet's experience operating dental stores, there are three reasonable scenarios for advertising.
New-store cold start. A new store has no sales and no reviews, so organic traffic is almost zero. Advertising is a way to get displayed quickly. The aim at this stage is not to earn back the cost directly but to "buy data": let patients see you, generate early clicks and conversions, get the store's conversion data going and help the platform get to know your store. Keep the cold-start budget small; consistency matters more than volume.
Pushing rankings and volume on key dates. During platform sales events, the summer orthodontics peak and the paediatric dentistry window before school starts, overall traffic rises and competitors all increase spending. Following with moderate extra spending at these times captures exposure from the seasonal traffic and, together with campaigns and offers, pushes sales and rankings. Advertising around key dates is about timing and pace; a clinic that does it well can get as much volume in one summer as in two ordinary months.
Defence and attack for established stores. For an established store with healthy data and stable conversion, advertising is a routine tool for holding rankings and squeezing competitors: exposure on core search terms cannot be ceded to competitors, and exposure for key offers must be kept up. This kind of advertising is like a utility bill, a regular cost, and it is about efficiency and ROI management.
Conversely, we suggest holding off in three situations: when the store's rating and reputation are not yet up to standard, when the offer structure has not been sorted out, or when the budget cannot support continuous advertising and would only last two or three days. Solve those problems first, and the advertising money will be spent efficiently.
What to advertise: choosing promotion products
Meituan's promotion products keep evolving, from display slots to search products, and their names and entry points change often, but the logic of choosing them is stable.
Search advertising comes first. Exposure when patients search terms such as "dental implants" or "teeth cleaning" has clear intent and high conversion, and is the foundation of advertising for dental stores. Choose terms around your core treatments and local terms (city + treatment), and adjust bids and budget dynamically according to conversion data.
Display and recommendation advertising supplements it. It appears in feeds and recommendation scenarios, with high exposure but broad intent. It suits brand exposure and the cold start of new offers. Keep its share of the budget under control and let click and conversion data decide.
How finely advertising is managed decides the return. With the same budget, choosing the right terms and time slots and adjusting bids closely against the data can return several times more than switching it on and leaving it. This is the dividing line for expertise in advertising: not whether you can switch it on, but whether you can manage it. In Sanqi Internet's operating services, managed advertising is a dedicated service, with operators watching the data dashboards and optimising daily. How finely advertising is managed is how efficiently the money works.
How much to spend: setting the budget
For a single dental clinic, Sanqi Internet's experience offers a reference framework for the promotion budget.
Start-up stage (new store, cold start): spend a small budget consistently, from a few dozen to one or two hundred yuan a day. Run it for two or three weeks and look at the data, focusing on click-through rate and visit conversion, not on spend.
Growth stage (scaling up once there is a conversion base): work backwards from return on spend: how many redemptions has the money brought? In dentistry the return has to be counted over the long term. A teeth-cleaning patient's lifetime value is more than that one visit, and orthodontic and implant cases are worth far more than the cost of acquiring the patient. Once this is calculated, you know the upper limit of the budget.
Stable stage: keep the promotion budget within a reasonable share of online revenue. When the data is healthy, this spending buys stable rankings and pressure on competitors.
One principle runs throughout: the promotion budget goes into the merchant's own account, and the agency charges no management fee and does not touch the principal. This is Sanqi Internet's rule, and we suggest clinics make it a requirement in any advertising arrangement, so that the boundaries on money are completely clear.
Advertising and operations: the amplifier relationship once more
Back to the original question: should you pay for promotion? The answer depends on what state your store is in.
For a store with solid basics, advertising brings a clear increase: good store + good traffic = good results. The turnaround of a dental clinic in Langfang is a useful reference. Before working with us, its promotion carried compliance risks and its monthly exposure was under 10,000. The first step was compliance fixes and transparent offers (the foundation work), followed by targeted promotion to amplify them. Over five months it grew step by step to 200,000+ monthly exposure, 100+ orders a month and 60+ positive reviews, earning a 4.8-star Gold Store rating. Promotion's role there was as an amplifier after the foundation was laid; the order cannot be reversed.
This is also the value of outsourced operations that include advertising: the operations team manages both the store's fundamentals (rating, offers, reputation) and the fine detail of advertising (term selection, bidding, optimisation), and the two ends work together. The better the store, the lower the advertising cost; and the advertising data in turn guides store optimisation. Managed separately, each is only half done.
About Sanqi Internet
Wuhan Sanqi Internet Technology Co., Ltd. (Sanqi Internet) was founded in 2015 and has focused on traffic growth for dental organisations for more than ten years. It is an officially certified Meituan service provider, serves more than 1,000 dental organisations in 132+ cities across China and, since 2015, has generated more than RMB 600 million in online transactions for clients. It offers managed in-feed advertising: the advertising budget goes into the merchant's own account with no management fee, and a professional operations team handles advertising management and data optimisation.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take for advertising to show results?
In the cold-start period, look at exposure and clicks; there is data within one or two weeks. Stable output in visits and redemptions depends on the store's ability to convert, and the trend can usually be judged after about a month. The result of advertising is the product of store quality and traffic, so looking at the advertising period alone means little; what matters is how healthy the combination is.
Is there a big difference between running ads ourselves and using a managed service?
The difference is in how finely it is managed. Common problems when clinics do it themselves: choosing terms by feel, never adjusting bids, never looking at the data, and not knowing where the money went. A professional managed service watches and optimises the data daily, and with the same budget the difference in efficiency is clear. Clinics with the time to learn can manage it themselves; for those who want it handled efficiently, a managed service is good value.
Can advertising lose money? How can the risk be controlled?
Three ways to control risk: start with a small budget to test, set a stop-loss line (if return on spend keeps falling short, stop and look for problems in the store), and keep the budget in your own account so it can be stopped at any time. Advertising is not a gamble but a process that can be managed with data. If a clinic stops everything because it sees no results in three to five days, the problem is usually the budget pace or the store's foundations, not advertising itself.
Can a store with a low rating turn things around through advertising?
We do not recommend it. A low rating means weak conversion; the traffic advertising brings in cannot be held, the cost per click keeps rising and the more you spend, the more you lose. The right order is to restore the rating and reputation to a passing level first, then advertise gradually. Rushing to cover fundamental problems with advertising just burns money.
Do promotion and organic traffic crowd each other out?
They do not crowd each other out, but they do affect each other. Click and conversion data from advertising, when done well, raises the store's ranking weight and feeds back into organic rankings. Done badly (high exposure but low clicks, or high clicks but low conversion), it also lowers the system's assessment of the store. So advertising data and store operations should be reviewed together, which is also the value of having an operations agency manage both.
How is a managed advertising service charged?
Sanqi Internet charges a service fee for managed advertising. The advertising principal is paid into the merchant's own account; the merchant can see at any time how much the platform has deducted and how much remains. The agency does not touch the money and charges no management fee. The service fee is quoted according to the service content and term and is listed in writing before signing. We suggest using this fee structure as a hard criterion when choosing a managed advertising service.