Dental practices
A new patient enquiry is not revenue. An attended appointment is the beginning of revenue, and a treatment plan accepted is the thing your year is actually made of.
You run a practice, private or mixed, with chairs, a hygienist and a diary. Implants, orthodontics and cosmetic work carry the margin, and routine care keeps the lights on.
You are paying for new patient enquiries and cannot say how many turned up, how many came back, or which of the expensive treatments any of them led to.
What we keep finding
Five things we see in practice after practice.
Dental marketing has a well developed industry around it and a surprisingly poor relationship with numbers. These five are close to universal.
The enquiry is counted and the attendance is not
Between booking and arriving you lose a meaningful share of people, and the share differs sharply by source. A channel with cheap enquiries and a poor attendance rate is the most expensive thing in most practices.
A hygiene appointment and an implant case are one conversion
One is worth seventy pounds and one is worth several thousand. Reported as a single new patient event, the bidding learns to buy whichever is easier to win.
The consultation to acceptance step is invisible
For implants, orthodontics and cosmetic work, the money is decided at the treatment plan conversation. Practices measure the enquiries into it and the revenue out of it, and nothing about the step itself.
Recall is run as an admin task rather than as a channel
The patients you already have are the cheapest source of next year's revenue and the most neglected. A recall system with actual numbers on it routinely outperforms the entire paid budget.
Reviews and photographs do the selling and are never tested
People choose a dentist on trust and on evidence. Which review goes at the top, and whether the before and after set is on the landing page, changes booking rate more than the advert copy does.
This conversation is where a practice year is decided, and in most practices it is the one step with no number attached to it at all.
What changes
What you can say afterwards.
What an attended new patient costs
Not an enquiry. Somebody who booked, arrived and sat in the chair, measured separately for each treatment you advertise.
Which sources bring implant and ortho cases
Traced from the click to the accepted plan, so the campaigns that bring high value work can be funded properly instead of averaged away.
Where the no shows come from
By source, by day and by how long the wait was between booking and appointment. That last one is usually the fixable part.
What a patient is worth over five years
Which is the number that decides what you can afford to pay for one, and almost no practice has it.
What we measure here
The numbers a practice runs on.
- Enquiry, booked, attended and treatment accepted, as four separate events
- Treatment type captured at the enquiry, so value can be attached from the start
- Attendance and no show rate by source, day and waiting time
- Consultation to acceptance rate for high value treatments
- Recall and reactivation measured as a channel, with its own return
- Five year patient value fed back into what the advertising is allowed to pay
- Call handling reviewed, because in this sector most enquiries are still a phone call and most are handled by whoever is free
- All of it handled without patient identifying detail leaving your systems
Questions people ask
The ones that actually arrive.
Is any of this a problem for patient confidentiality?
It is the first thing we design around. Nothing patient identifying goes to an ad platform. What goes back is an anonymous event with a value and a timestamp, which is all the bidding needs and all it should ever get. If a piece of measurement cannot be done without sending personal health information somewhere, we do not do that piece.
We use Dentally. Will it connect?
Yes, and the same is true of SOE, R4 and most of the common practice management systems. What we need is attended appointments and treatment values out, on a schedule. Where an export is awkward we will use a simpler route rather than propose you change systems.
Our marketing agency specialises in dental. Why you?
If they are good, keep them. We are not a dental specialist and would not claim to be. What we do is the measurement underneath, and a specialist agency running campaigns against numbers they can trust is a better outcome than either of us alone.
We are mostly NHS with some private.
Then the advertising should be aimed almost entirely at the private side, and the measurement should be able to tell the two apart at the enquiry. Practices that skip this end up buying NHS demand they cannot serve and could not profit from anyway.
Proof
An Australian taxi company
More calls, at less than half the cost, by telling Google which callers paid.
Not a dental client, and we will not pretend otherwise. What it proves is the method: decide what a lead worth having is, then let the advertising chase that instead of volume.
Read the case study- more booking calls
+27%
more booking calls
- lower cost per call
−56%
lower cost per call
- average cost per click
$2.10
average cost per click
Where this usually starts
Two pieces of work, in this order.
Businesses that sell the same way
Your turn
Bring the number you do not trust.
30 minutes. Most of these conversations start with somebody describing a report they have stopped believing.