The Four Numbers to Demand From Any Marketing Agency

Most agency reports are built to be impressive rather than useful. Twelve pages of impressions, reach, keyword positions and a chart that goes up and to the right, and nowhere in it a plain answer to the only question you have: how many new patients did this bring, and what did each one cost.

You can fix this in one email. Four numbers, every month, in the same format so you can put them side by side. Everything else is context. If an agency cannot produce these four, it is either not tracking properly or the answer is not flattering, and both are worth knowing before you renew.

Number one: new patients who actually sat in a chair

Not leads. Not inquiries. Not form fills. New patients who booked and attended, counted from your practice management software, split by where they came from. Inquiries are a step in the process, and a month with forty inquiries and eleven attended patients tells you something very different from a month with twenty and sixteen.

This number has to come from your system rather than the agency's dashboard, which is exactly why it gets avoided. Someone at the practice has to record the source at booking and the agency has to reconcile against it. It is fifteen minutes a month at the front desk and it changes every conversation you have about budget.

Number two: what each of those patients cost you

Take everything you spent to get them, the agency fee plus the ad spend plus anything else, and divide by the number of new patients who attended. That figure is your cost per new patient, and it is the one number that makes different channels comparable. Practices are often surprised: the channel with the most inquiries is frequently the most expensive per patient who actually shows up.

There is no single correct figure, because it depends on your area, your competition and the treatment mix. What matters is the direction over six months and how it compares to what a new patient is worth to you over a few years. A rising cost with flat patient numbers is the earliest warning sign you get.

Number three: inquiries by source, including the ones nobody answered

Split calls and forms by channel, and inside the calls, show answered, missed and voicemail. This is the number agencies hate most because it exposes the boundary between their work and yours. It is also where most practices find their cheapest win, because missed calls at lunchtime are usually paid for twice: once in the ad and once in the patient who called somebody else.

Ask for call recordings or at least call durations. A thirty second call is not a booking. If you want an outside read on where the drop off is before you argue with anybody, a free leak check shows where inquiries are leaking away, who is outranking you locally and what to fix first.

• Calls answered, missed and sent to voicemail, by time of day
• Form submissions and how long until somebody replied
• Inquiries from the map listing separately from the website
• Directory and listing inquiries emailed to the front desk

Number four: what those patients were worth

New patient counts hide their own mix. Twenty patients who came in for a cleaning and twenty who came in for implant consultations are not the same twenty. Ask for production or revenue attributed to new patients from each channel, even roughly, over a rolling three or six month window rather than the month they arrived.

This is the number that stops bad decisions. Plenty of practices cut the channel with the highest cost per patient and later discover it was the only one delivering treatment cases, while the cheap channel filled the hygiene diary. Cost per patient without value per patient is half a picture.

The metrics that are mostly decoration

Impressions, reach, followers, ranking screenshots for phrases nobody searches, and traffic that is not broken down by intent. None of these are lies, and some are useful context, but none of them prove anything on their own. A ranking screenshot in particular is often taken while logged in and near the office, which flatters the result.

The tell is whether the report explains what changed and what happens next. A good monthly report is short: the four numbers, what was done this month, what is planned next month, and one honest paragraph on what is not working. If you get twelve pages and no plain sentences, you are being managed rather than served.

• Impressions and reach with no calls or bookings attached
• Rankings for phrases with no realistic search volume
• Total website traffic quoted without a source breakdown
• Social followers presented as a business result

Make sure the tracking is yours before you ask

None of this works if the tracking sits inside the agency's accounts. Analytics, the ad accounts, the call tracking and the Google Business Profile should be owned by the practice with the agency invited in. Otherwise the reporting ends the day the relationship does, and so does the history you need to judge whoever comes next.

The same principle applies to the places patients find you. Claiming your listing in the Dent-OX directory is free, keeps the services, hours and fees in your own words, sends patient requests straight to your front desk by email rather than through an intermediary, and gets the page indexed by Google, which unclaimed records are not.

Frequently asked