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Judge adverts on appointments, not clicks

An advert platform will happily tell you about clicks, and a form will tell you about enquiries. Neither is the number a practice owner needs, which is what it costs to get somebody into a chair.

How the chain is joined up

1. The click is remembered. A patient arriving from an advert carries the platform's own click identifier and campaign details into the booking page.
2. The booking carries it too, so the appointment knows where it came from.
3. Attendance closes the loop. An appointment that was booked and then attended is worth knowing about separately: adverts that bring bookings nobody keeps are not working.
4. Spend is read back from the platforms, so cost per appointment can be worked out per campaign rather than estimated.
5. The result goes back to the platform, as an offline conversion, so the platform can optimise towards appointments instead of clicks.

What is sent, and what never is

• Sent: the platform's own click identifier, the time of the booking or visit, and its value.
• Never sent: patient names, email addresses, phone numbers or anything clinical.
• Off by default. Sending results back is a switch, and it stays off until the practice turns it on.

The report a practice owner actually reads

Per campaign: spend, bookings, attended appointments, and the cost of each. Plus where the booking page loses people, which is usually the cheapest thing to fix: in most practices roughly half of visitors never pick a time at all.

Common questions

Does this need a tracking pixel on our website?

Not for the booking pages, which carry the identifier themselves. A pixel is only needed if you also want to measure your main site.

Will it work if patients ring instead of booking online?

Partly. A phone call cannot carry a click identifier, so those appointments are attributed by what the patient says. The online path is the one that measures itself.

Is this GDPR-safe?

No patient details are sent to the advert platforms, and the practice is in control of whether results are sent at all. The privacy policy sets out exactly what leaves.

Read next

• Online bookingBooking pages that work from real free time, not a form in an inbox.
• Use casesEvery job Lynqpod is bought to do, in one list.
• For groupsMany practices, separate data, one view.