If you only track one marketing number, make it cost per enquiry. It tells you how much you spend to get a phone call, a form or a booking request, and it works for any channel.
It is not the whole story, because an enquiry isn’t a patient. But it is a clear, honest starting point, and most practices have never worked it out.
How to calculate it
The sum is simple:
- Take what you spent on a channel in a period, including management fees where you pay them.
- Divide by the number of enquiries that channel produced in the same period.
For example, if a month of Google Ads cost a certain amount and produced a number of calls and forms, divide one by the other. Do the same for each channel so you can compare them fairly.
The catch: you need to count properly
A cost per enquiry is only as good as the counting behind it. That means:
- Tracking calls. Phone numbers that identify the source of a call.
- Tracking forms. Every enquiry form feeds the same reporting.
- Counting the same things. Calls, forms and booking requests defined the same way each month.
- Not double counting. The same patient can call and fill in a form.
What moves your number
Several things push cost per enquiry up or down:
- Competition. More practices bidding for the same patients means higher costs.
- Service and location. Some services and suburbs are more competitive than others.
- Your website. A site that converts well produces more enquiries from the same visitors.
- Targeting and ad quality. Spend that reaches people ready to book is cheaper than spend that doesn’t.
- Seasonality. Demand changes through the year, and so do costs.
Cost per enquiry is not cost per patient
Not every enquiry becomes a booking, and not every booking becomes a patient who returns. Look at the next step too: what share of enquiries book, and how many come back. A slightly more expensive channel that sends better patients can be the cheaper option in the end.
Use it to decide, not to judge
There is no single good number, because it depends on your service, your area and what a new patient is worth to you. Use your own history as the benchmark. Is it getting better or worse? Which channels are cheapest? What changed when it moved?
A worked example
Here is an illustration, with made-up numbers. Say a clinic spends two thousand dollars on ads in a month and receives forty enquiries. That is fifty dollars per enquiry. If twenty of those enquiries book and fifteen attend, the cost per attended new patient is about one hundred and thirty-three dollars. Your numbers will differ, but the method is the same.
Questions we get
- Should we count very short calls? Set a minimum, such as thirty seconds, so wrong numbers and hang-ups aren’t counted as enquiries.
- What about enquiries that come from several channels? Choose a consistent rule, such as crediting the last channel, and stick to it so months are comparable.
- How often should we review it? Monthly is enough for most practices. Weekly checks are useful while a campaign is new.
We report cost per enquiry for every channel we manage, as part of our Google Ads and marketing planning work, so you can see where the money is going.