You spend three months advertising. The reports look busy. Thousands of people saw the advert, several hundred clicked it, and the diary looks much the same as it did in May.
At that point you have to explain it to yourself, and three explanations arrive quickly.
The area is saturated. There are two other physios within a mile and a chain that opened last year.
The prices are too high. People are careful with money at the moment, and £65 is a lot to ask for a first appointment.
It’s the market. Nobody has spare cash, everyone waits until it’s bad enough for the GP, and private treatment is the first thing to go.
Every one of those is a reasonable thing to think. Each is also expensive, because each one leads somewhere costly. You drop your fees. You cut the budget. You conclude that advertising doesn’t work for clinics like yours and stop.
The problem with all three
They’re conclusions about your business drawn from a number that never described your business in the first place.
Impressions and clicks measure how many people your advert reached and how many were interested enough to look. Both of those can be perfectly healthy while your diary stays empty, because neither of them says anything about what happened once the person arrived.
If several hundred people clicked, the market found you and wanted what you were selling. That is not a saturated area and it is not a public with no money. Those are people who typed their problem into a phone, saw your name, and chose you over the competition. They got as far as your website.
Whatever went wrong, went wrong after that.
What the numbers actually say
We looked at this in the first guide in this series. Unbounce studied 41,000 landing pages and found professional and commercial services convert at a median of 6.1%, with the top quarter reaching 14.1% or better.
Sit with the size of that gap. Two clinics can buy the same clicks at the same price, and one turns more than twice as many of them into patients as the other. Same town, same competition, same economy, same public with the same amount of spare cash.
Whatever separates those two clinics, it is not the market. Both of them are in it.
The uncomfortable version, and the reassuring one
The uncomfortable version is that if your advertising isn’t producing patients, the likeliest single cause is your own website.
The reassuring version is that this is much better news than any of the three explanations you started with.
You can’t move your clinic. You can’t change what people have in their current account. Dropping your fees costs you money on every patient you already had, including the loyal ones, and you rarely get those prices back. Cutting the budget makes the problem smaller rather than better.
The page is something you can work on. It’s the one part of the picture that’s entirely yours, that doesn’t argue back, and that answers to what you do with it rather than to the economy.
What it’s worth
A clinic converting at 4% and spending £600 a month books around 12 patients from 300 clicks, which is £50 a patient.
Take the same clinic to 12%, which is inside what the top quarter already achieve, and the same 300 clicks book 36 patients at under £17 each. Same budget, same adverts, same town, three times the patients.
That’s not a marketing claim, it’s arithmetic. The only thing that changed is the proportion of people who found what they needed when they arrived.
The two directions are not equivalent. Cutting your prices costs you every month for as long as the prices stay cut, and it costs you on the loyal patients you already had. Improve the page and every click you buy afterwards is worth more than the ones you bought before it.
Before you change anything expensive
If the advertising isn’t working, run three checks before you touch your fees or your budget.
Work out your conversion rate, so you know whether the problem is upstream or downstream. Open your own page on your phone, as a stranger would, and see whether it answers the six questions a patient runs through before they’ll book. Then check that your bookings are actually being recorded against your adverts, because a system that can’t see bookings will spend your budget chasing clicks instead.
Half an hour, and you’ll know whether you have a market problem or a page problem.
It’s almost always the page, which is the best problem on that list to have, because it’s the only one that answers to what you do about it.