Two clinics on the same high street each spend £600 a month on Google Ads. Both get around 300 clicks at roughly £2 each. One books 12 patients that month. The other books 42.
The first clinic pays £50 for a new patient. The second pays £14.
Neither clinic bought better clicks. They spent the same money on the same kind of adverts and put the same number of people in front of the same offer. Everything that separates them happened after the click.
The number you should be able to say out loud
Not what a click costs. What a booked patient costs.
Anyone running ads on your behalf should have set conversion tracking up before spending a penny of your money, and most do. If you already know your cost per booked patient, you are ahead of a good number of clinics and the rest of this guide is for you.
If you can’t produce that figure, stop here and fix that first. It isn’t a small gap and it isn’t a technical nicety. You are making decisions about money using a number you don’t have, and every judgement you make about whether advertising works for your clinic is a guess. Any competent person handling your ads will set it up in an afternoon. Ask them today.
Working out yours
Three lines on the back of an envelope.
- What you spent on Google last month.
- How many appointments came from it.
- Divide the first by the second.
The second line is where people get sloppy, so be strict with it. Count the patient who rang you after clicking the advert, because that booking belongs to the advert. Don’t count the returning patient who searched your clinic by name, because you didn’t need to buy that one.
One thing worth checking while you’re there. If your booking finishes on a different web address from the rest of your site, which is what happens with most booking systems, make sure those bookings are actually being recorded against your ads. When they aren’t, your reports show clicks going up and nothing else, and the system spends your budget chasing clicks because clicks are all it can see.
What good looks like
Until now you have had a number and nothing to hold it against, which is the same as having no number at all. A cost of £40 a patient could be excellent or dreadful, and you cannot tell from the inside.
Unbounce studied 41,000 landing pages and found that professional and commercial services convert at a median of 6.1%, with the top quarter reaching 14.1% or better.
So here is our line, and it is our judgement rather than a published figure. For a targeted campaign, where the advert and the page both match what the person searched for, 7% is the number to beat. Clear it and you are converting better than most clinics advertising alongside you. Fall short of it and there is money on the table.
Here is what that looks like in pounds. Same £600, same 300 clicks, and only the conversion rate changes.
| Conversion rate | Patients booked | Cost per patient |
|---|---|---|
| 4% | 12 | £50.00 |
| 6.1% (median) | 18 | £32.79 |
| 7% (better than most) | 21 | £28.57 |
| 14.1% (top quarter) | 42 | £14.18 |
A clinic sitting at the median pays more than twice what a clinic in the top quarter pays for exactly the same patient, on exactly the same budget.
Reading your own number
Work out your rate, then find yourself in the table.
If you’re above 7%, your page is doing its job and your money is better spent on reach than on repair. If you’re between 4% and 7%, you’re leaving somewhere between a fifth and a third of your budget behind, and the fix pays for itself inside a couple of months. If you’re below 4%, this is the most valuable thing on your to-do list, because the lower your starting point, the more every improvement is worth.
The maths here runs the opposite way to instinct. The worse your number, the more a small improvement is worth. A clinic moving from 12% to 14% gains a little. A clinic moving from 4% to 7% cuts the price of every patient it wins by almost half, and that saving applies to every click it buys while the page keeps performing.
Where the difference comes from
None of the gap between 4% and 14% is advertising skill. It’s the page.
Google’s own analysis found that as a mobile page goes from one second to ten, the chance of a visitor leaving rises by 123%, and that as a page grows from 400 elements to 6,000, the chance of converting falls by 95%. Unbounce found that pages written at a fifth to seventh grade reading level convert at 11.1%, which is 56% better than pages pitched two grades higher. And 83% of the people who see your page are holding a phone.
We covered the page-side fixes in detail in 5 fixes to get more bookings from the Google Ads you already pay for. Start there if your number came out low.
Get the number first
You cannot improve a figure you have never worked out, and you cannot judge one you have nothing to compare against. Ten minutes with last month’s spend and your booking diary gives you both.
Next time we’ll look at the same problem from the other side of the screen, at what a person in pain is actually trying to find out before they’ll book with a clinic they have never used.