The importance of tracking marketing campaigns

For many businesses phone calls is an important source of getting new customers. Dental offices receive at least 50% of their new patients through incoming phone calls and in many areas where online scheduling is not yet widely popular this percentage can go as high as 95+%. This shows the importance of being able to measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts that lead to receiving a phone call.

Traditionally, ad agencies focus on sending a volume of calls from, supposedly potential new patients, and they argue that converting that volume to new paying patients is the job of the office. Obviously, the office does have a role in converting a caller but the quality and the marketing message that the caller saw before making the call is also very important. For example, if an ad agency is showing ads for “FREE DENTISTRY”, their office will receive a huge volume of calls, but they will not actually convert because as soon as they call they find out that dentistry is not free and they will not book their appointment. This can also happen at any stage of patients’ lifecycle so it’s important to measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns, not by the volume of the call, but by more effective measures like:

• Appointments made
• Appointments kept (i.e. people actually showed up to their appointment)
• Revenue generated on patients’ first visit
• Revenue generated during the first 30 days of a patient after their first visit
• Revenue generated during the lifetime of a patient

Each of these metrics have a particular role and should be looked at to create an effective marketing strategy. There are also other metrics like the effectiveness and professionalism of the person answering the call which are out of scope for this article but are certainly important to consider