Six numbers, reviewed the same way every month: new patients, where they came from, production from those new patients, cost per new patient by source, kept-appointment rate for new patients, and unconverted new patient calls. If your monthly report does not contain those, it is not a marketing report. It is a traffic report.

Impressions, clicks, keyword positions, and follower counts are inputs. They can all move sharply without a single additional patient walking through the door, which is why reports tend to lead with them.

What does each number tell you?

New patients. Count them the same way every month, with a written definition, usually a new patient of record with a completed exam. Changing the definition mid-year destroys your ability to compare.

Source. From the question your team asks every caller, recorded in one field.

Production from new patients. Kept separate from total production. This is what reveals whether a channel brings people who need and accept care, or people who want a cleaning and a coupon.

Cost per new patient by source. What you spent on a channel divided by the new patients you attributed to it. Calculate it from your own records and watch the trend. Treat any figure presented to you as an industry standard with suspicion, because you cannot see how it was built.

Kept-appointment rate for new patients. Some sources produce appointments that never show. A channel that looks cheap per booking and runs a high no-show rate is more expensive than it appears.

Unconverted new patient calls. People who called and did not end up with an appointment. Often the largest recoverable loss in the whole system.

How long before these numbers mean anything?

Longer than a month. New patient flow is seasonal, weather-dependent, and small enough in absolute terms that random variation looks like a trend.

Use rolling three-month averages and compare the same month against the same month last year. A slow February next to January means very little. A slow February next to last February means something.

Resist changing course on one month of data. Most marketing decisions dentists regret were made in a bad month.

What about the reports my agency sends?

Read them, then set them aside. Clicks, impressions, and rankings tell you whether a channel is functioning, which is worth knowing, but they cannot tell you whether it is working.

The productive framing is simple: here is what we booked and produced from your channel last month, so let us both work from that. If a partner resists that conversation, you have learned something useful.

Should I be tracking lifetime value?

Eventually, once the basics are stable. A patient who stays for years and brings family is worth a multiple of one who comes once, and judging acquisition against first-visit production alone will make good channels look bad.

Start simpler. Production per new patient across their first year, by source, is easier to calculate, less speculative, and enough to make better decisions with.

What should I stop measuring?

Anything you have never once acted on. If you have watched a follower count for two years and never made a single decision because of it, take it out of the report.

The same goes for keyword positions, bounce rates, and impression share in most practices. They are meaningless to you if they never change what you do.

How should the review actually happen?

Same day each month, same format, half an hour, with whoever owns the front desk in the room. The repetition is what produces insight. The format matters much less.

Write down one decision at the end of every review, even if the decision is to change nothing for another quarter. A review that produces no decision was a status update.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many new patients should we see each month?
There is no universal target, because it depends on your capacity, your hygiene schedule, how many patients you lose naturally, and whether you are growing or holding steady. Work out what you need to replace attrition and fill open chair time, then measure against that.

Should I judge marketing on new patients or on production?
Both, in that order. Counts tell you whether the front end is working. Production tells you whether the people arriving are ones you can actually help. A rising count with flat production usually means a channel is attracting the wrong patients.

How much should a practice spend on marketing?
Enough to fill the capacity you genuinely have, and never more than you can measure. A new practice needs more than an established one. Rather than adopting somebody else’s ratio, work backward from the chair time you need filled and what a new patient produces for you.