A new website and online booking for a clinic group that lived on the phone

How booking used to work

The group runs three clinics offering skin treatments, laser hair removal and facials. Their website was several years old and slow on phones. To book, you either rang during opening hours or filled in a contact form and waited for reception to call you back.

Google Ads were sending a good number of people to that form, so on paper the campaigns were producing lots of enquiries.

What an enquiry really was

When we went through three months of form submissions with the reception team, a lot of them weren't new clients at all. There was spam, existing clients wanting to move an appointment, people asking about jobs, and people who never picked up when reception called back. Google counted every one of them as a success, so it kept finding more of the same.

Reception also told us something we'd never have spotted in the data. Plenty of people wanted to book in the evening, long after the clinics had closed.

Rebuilding the website

We built a new, fast website with a page for each treatment and each clinic, and put online booking at the centre of it. The clinics' practice management software already had a booking system, so we connected to that rather than building a new one. Clients could choose a treatment, a clinic and a time without speaking to anyone.

We kept a phone number on every page for people who'd rather call, and tracked those calls as well.

Measuring the right thing

Instead of telling Google that a form submission was a success, we started telling it about completed bookings, with the treatment attached. A course of laser treatment is worth a lot more to the clinic than a single facial, so we passed that value along too.

We also split the campaigns by clinic and by treatment. Each clinic got its own budget, and it became easy to see which were fully booked and which had room to spare.

What happened next

Over the following four months, new-client bookings from Google rose by 58%, and the cost of each booked appointment fell by 34%. Reception spends far less time returning calls, and 41% of online bookings are now made after the clinics close. Those used to be enquiries that waited until the next morning, or went somewhere else.