Anyone track medical advertising metrics — what matters?

[smithenglish 0]

So I was poking around our clinic's ad reports last week and kept thinking: are we looking at the right numbers? It felt like every dashboard shouted different "wins," and I couldn't tell which actually mattered for getting more patients without wasting money.

Short version — we had clicks, impressions, and cost numbers piling up, but conversions were flaky. Some campaigns showed lots of attention but didn’t bring the steady bookings we needed. I was confused, a bit frustrated, and skeptical of every "optimization" tip floating around on LinkedIn and in vendor decks. It seemed like advertisers were pointing at cool graphs rather than real outcomes.

Personal Test and Insights

I decided to stop guessing and run a tiny experiment with the limited time I had. I picked two things to focus on for four weeks: actual booking actions (calls or online appointment completions) and the cost to get one of those bookings. I intentionally ignored vanity stuff like impressions and raw clicks unless they helped explain the other two.

Here’s what I tried and what I noticed:

• Tracked the booking path: I mapped how people went from seeing an ad to making an appointment. That exposed weak links like a slow landing page or unclear call instructions.
• The main KPI was cost per booked appointment: When that went down, revenue actually rose, even if clicks dropped. More clicks without bookings were meaningless noise.
• Added simple call tracking: We realized some phone leads never got logged, so the campaign looked worse than it was. Once calls were tracked properly, numbers aligned with reality.
• Checked audience fit: A low cost per click from a broad audience was tempting, but those users rarely booked. Narrowing to people who matched our service profile improved the booking rate.

I also kept a casual log of what changes I made and how long it took to see results. Small tweaks — like clearer appointment buttons and a short FAQ on the landing page — often helped more than swapping ad copy or increasing budget.

Soft Solution Hint

If you are wrestling with medical advertising, consider making cost per booked appointment your north star and use a couple of supporting metrics to explain changes. Track calls and online appointments properly, watch conversion rate on your booking page, and don't get fooled by high clicks from the wrong audience. These moves are simple but helped our team stop burning budget on traffic that never converted.

I found one write up that lines up with this approach and explains the specific metrics more clearly than most vendor slides. It helped me put our numbers into perspective: Key Metrics Medical Advertising Uses to Boost ROI. I shared that link with our practice manager, and it sparked a useful discussion about which numbers we should actually measure and report each week.

What I would do next

I plan to keep the experiment rolling, measure cost per booked appointment for different channels, and build a tiny dashboard that shows only three things: bookings, cost per booking, and booking conversion rate from the landing page. For anyone starting out, focus on those three, track them for a month, and then decide if you need deeper plumbing or fancy attribution models.

Bottom line — stop treating every metric like an equal. Some are signals, some are noise. If your goal is more patients and a healthier bottom line, prioritize the metrics that connect directly to booking actions and use the rest only to diagnose problems.