A report full of reach and click charts looks good, yet it leaves the clinic owner without an answer to the one question they care about: did the advertising pay off? Two numbers are enough to answer it, and both can be measured without the campaign touching any health data.
Cost per booked patient
The most important metric is simple. The ad budget divided by the number of bookings it brought in. A booking means a submitted form, a phone call or a reservation in the clinic’s system.
The number is worth tracking over time and by channel. When the cost per booked patient from Google falls and from Meta rises, it’s clear where to move the budget.
Cost-to-revenue ratio
The second metric adds money. The cost-to-revenue ratio (PNO in Czech) compares ad spend with revenue from the patients it brought in.
An example from our Be Fyzio project: we spent CZK 7,739 on ads, 38 leads came in, and the cost per lead was CZK 203. With an average service price of CZK 1,500, that meant revenue of CZK 57,000. The cost-to-revenue ratio was 14%.
Measuring bookings correctly
Measurement records the booking itself, without information about the specific procedure. That’s why we don’t place tracking codes in booking and patient-record systems. We cover what this means for GDPR in a separate article on health data.
Reach and views are a supplement. The result is a booked patient and what it cost to get them.
What belongs in a monthly report
- the number of bookings and their source
- cost per booked patient by channel
- cost-to-revenue ratio, if the clinic shares the average procedure price
- what didn’t work last month and why
The last point is the most valuable. A report that only shows successes doesn’t help anyone make decisions.