Numbers and measurement
How to calculate the cost of one booking from each channel
Followers and views say little about revenue. Cost per booking is the number that ties marketing to your appointment book.
Many clinic owners ask: are the ads working? The answer needs one number per channel: how much did one booking from this channel cost us this month?
The formula
Cost per booking = what you spent on the channel in the month ÷ the number of bookings it brought.
An illustrative example: you spent SAR 12,000 on Snapchat ads in a month and they brought 80 bookings. Cost per booking = SAR 150. If average revenue per visit is SAR 800, every riyal spent returned more than five times over on the first visit alone.
The real difficulty: knowing where each booking came from
The formula is easy. The hard part is knowing where each patient came from. Three steps solve most of the problem:
- A different WhatsApp link for each channel, with a slightly different opening message, so the team knows the source from the first word.
- A fixed question at reception: how did you hear about us? Recorded in the same place as the booking.
- Connecting the website booking form to a tracking tool that keeps the visit source.
You will not reach perfect accuracy, but knowing the source of 70% of bookings is enough to make sound decisions.
Read the number in context
- Compare a channel with itself month by month before comparing channels with each other.
- Some channels bring higher-value patients. An implant booking from Google may cost more than a cleaning booking from Instagram, and be worth far more.
- Add content and management costs to ad spend to see the true cost.
When to raise the budget and when to stop
Set an acceptable ceiling for cost per booking for each service, based on its value and margin. A channel that stays under the ceiling for three weeks in a row deserves a gradually larger budget. A channel above it needs a change in message, audience or booking page, then a pause if it does not improve.
In practice
Start this month with a simple table: channel, spend, bookings, cost per booking. After three months, deciding how to split the budget will be clear and based on your own numbers.