Tracking calls and booked patients

Ad platforms report clicks and “conversions,” and both can be counted generously. Your job is to connect the ads to the number that matters: new patients who booked and came in. The general tracking setup, call tracking, UTM tags, the referral-source field and a monthly dashboard, is covered in the budget and ROI guide. This chapter covers what’s specific to ads.

Define conversions carefully

Tell Google and Meta what counts as a conversion, because their automated bidding learns from it. Good conversions for a practice are a phone call of a reasonable length from the ad, a click on the phone number on your landing page, or a completed booking request. Page views, scrolling and “engagement” are not conversions. If the platform is told to find people who visit pages, it will find people who visit pages.

Check how each conversion is being counted. It’s easy to end up counting the same call twice, or counting calls from existing patients rescheduling.

Call tracking for ads

Give paid search, and Meta if you run it, their own tracking numbers, separate from the number on your Business Profile, so you can tell the channels apart. With recording, you can hear whether ad calls are new patients and whether they were booked. Check your state’s call-recording consent rules, and treat recordings as sensitive: callers share symptoms and insurance details. Ask the vendor how recordings are stored and whether they will sign a business associate agreement.

Match ad leads to patients

Once a month, take the calls and booking requests the ads produced and check them against your practice management software: which became booked appointments, which patients showed up, and which were existing patients or wrong numbers. Do this inside the practice. The result is the only number worth paying for: cost per new patient.

Example numbers, to show the math: say a practice spends $2,000 in a month on search ads, including management fees. The ad platform reports 50 conversions. Matching against the schedule shows 18 were new patients who booked and 14 came in. The cost per reported conversion looks like $40; the cost per new patient is $2,000 ÷ 14, about $143. Judge the campaign on the second number.

Never send patient information to ad platforms

This is where well-meant tracking goes wrong. Ad platforms offer ways to send back data about who converted, such as uploading lists of booked patients, passing names or emails from forms, or sending offline conversions with details attached. For a dental practice, the fact that a person booked or received care is health information. Don’t send ad platforms patient names, contact details, conditions, treatments, appointment types or anything from your practice software. If an agency or tool suggests doing so, stop and check with a healthcare attorney first. Counting matches inside the practice and reporting totals needs none of this.