Do you know exactly, I mean exactly where every single new patient in your practice comes from. If you don’t, then your marketing is basically running in the dark. This episode is all about smart lead tracking, how to finally understand what’s working, what’s not. And how to make sure that every marketing dollar is pulling its weight, because let’s be honest, it’s one thing to say you should be tracking leads smarter, but if it’s a nightmare to set up or to manage, nobody’s gonna stick with it.
I know I don’t. I’m gonna break this down into a simple, clear four part framework for you that you can take this and run with it right now. This is exactly what we recommend to our clients at Kickstart and when they actually implement this. It. It is a game changer whether they have us do it or they do it themselves.
No more asking patients, how did you hear about us? Because honestly, most of them either don’t remember or they’ll say something generic like I Googled you.
Hey everyone. Welcome back to the No BS Dental Growth Podcast. I am your host Chris Pistorius and the founder of Kickstart Dental Marketing, where we cut through the fluff and focus on what actually. Grows your practice. Now, today’s episode is one of these topics that separates really, I think, anyway, the amateurs from the serious players.
Let me ask you something. Do you know exactly and I mean exactly where every single new patient in your practice comes from, not just, I think some come from Google or we ran a Facebook ad once and phones rang. I’m talking about actual data source to call. It’s a con to conversion. If you don’t, then your marketing is basically running in the dark.
This episode is all about smart lead tracking, how to finally understand what’s working, what’s not, and how to make sure that every marketing dollar is pulling its weight. So we’re gonna talk about the myths. The mistakes, the tech, and I’ll even give you a simple lead tracking framework that you can plug right into your practice and start using today.
So if you’re tired of hearing your front desk, say we got 50 calls last month, but having no clue if any of them turned into new patients. You’re in the right place. So let me talk why lead tracking is so mission critical. Why is it such a big deal? You know, you’ve done it for years, haven’t done it for years, whatever.
So here’s the deal. Most dental practices think that they know what’s working in their marketing. But the reality is they don’t at all. They’re relying on gut feelings, hearsay from the front desk, or worse whatever marketing report that their agency sends over that’s just full of fluff and really zero clarity.
You might hear stuff like, well, we got 54 calls last month. Cool, but how many of those were new patients? How many actually scheduled? How many came from Google versus Facebook versus referrals? How much did those new patients produce? Crickets, in most cases. Now, I’ve even had some dentists tell me, oh yeah, we asked patients how they heard about us, and do you know what they say?
The internet. Well, I’m sorry, but that’s not lead tracking. That’s wishful thinking. And without a really clear understanding of where your patients are coming from, you’re flying blind and you could be spending $2,000 a month and maybe more, um, on Facebook or whatever, and it’s bringing in nothing.
Meanwhile, your Google business profile is doing all the heavy lifting and you are ignoring it. And that’s the biggest issue I think is misal budget and energy. Time, things like that. So let me paint a picture. Imagine that you, uh, you’re running a faucet with five hoses. All five are attached, but only one of them is actually filling your bucket.
But since you’re not paying attention, you just keep turning up the water hoping something works. That’s most dental marketing. Lead tracking puts the data in your hands. It shows you which hose is working, which ones are leaking money, and which ones need to be shut off altogether. You can’t optimize what you don’t measure.
And in today’s marketing world where every ad dollar counts, guessing can be very expensive. So if you’re still basing your marketing decisions on vibes, it’s really time for a wake up call. So what does smart lead tracking really mean? I mean, I’m sure a lot of agencies have said that to you or other summits or events you’ve been to.
Let’s talk about what smart lead tracking really looks like, because here’s what it’s not. It’s not just counting how many phone calls you got last month, or how many clicks or impressions. It’s not your front desk asking patients, how did you hear about us? And jotting it down on a Post-it note, and it’s definitely not a spreadsheet that you update when you remember.
Smart lead tracking, uh, really goes way beyond volume. It’s more about attribution. You’re not just collecting numbers, you’re connecting the dots. So let’s, let’s try to break that down a little bit into more reasonable efforts. So first of all, smart lead tracking answers, in my opinion. Anyway, three critical questions.
Number one, where did this lead come from originally? Right. Was it Google Organic? Was it Google Ads? Facebook, Yelp. Was it a mailer? A billboard, a referral, whatever. Each lead has a source, an original source, and you should know it. ’cause that is absolutely critical. So number two would be, all right, great.
We got the lead. What happened to the lead? Did they call, did they fill out a forum? Did they use our web chat? Did they schedule an appointment? Or did they just ghost you completely? We’ve all had those patients books filled up and then people don’t show up. That happens. And number three for me, was this lead a good one?
Are they a potential new patient or are they an existing patient? One rescheduling a cleaning that can’t be counted as a new lead. Not only does not every phone call turn into a lead or a. A patient, um, you know, they also have to be in your area. They have to be looking for a service that you provide.
They have to be aligned with your insurance situation, whether it’s fee for service or PPO or you know, an in-house plan. So there’s a lot of different things to you really have to think about. And I, I. The last one. That last point is where most practices do fall off a cliff. I’ve seen practices count every call as a lead and then wonder why their cost per lead looks so good, but their new patient numbers still are behind.
Here’s kinda a spoiler alert if you’re counting Mrs. Johnson calling in to ask about our next cleaning as a lead. Your numbers are fake news, and I don’t think I, I think most of you aren’t doing that at this point, or at least I hope not. But you really do need some clarity on, you know, where these leads are coming from, which ones are good ones, and that’s the only way you can make really educated decisions on your marketing.
Or even if you’re not doing marketing, at least you know where your new patients are coming from. Let’s now talk about channel level clarity. A smart system will tell you not only how many leads come in, it does tell you where they came from, what we just talked about. So you know, if in a month you’re using Google ads and it brought in 20 leads, 12 booked, and nine showed up, 7,200 bucks in revenue.
That’s the detailed level tracking that you really need to install. Um, Facebook maybe brought in 40 leads five, book two showed $900 in revenue. Now you tell me on those two scenarios, where are you putting your money next month, right, or the month after that? We used to have, we usually take to have about 90 days of data, but.
Without that kind of visibility though, you’re just guessing, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to guess with my own money, and you really shouldn’t either. So third, smart tracking isn’t just about calls, it’s about the whole lead ecosystem. So we’re talking about phone calls tracked by source.
That’s. Definitely absolutely. Um, important and critical. Um, but you gotta web forms. More and more people are wanting to not call and use a web form, for instance, but that needs source attribution as well. Where did it originally come from? Chat inquiries. More people are now using online chat or ai manned chat, social media, direct messages.
Yes, those are those count. And somebody should be paying attention to those by the way. And even walk-ins. They still count, right? And we can track what your signage has brought in. So there’s a lot of different channels there. And really the kicker of all this, I think, is that all of this data should be centralized in one dashboard, one view, clean and simple.
Not five platforms or a legal pad or a post-it note, right? And I know you’re doing the best you can, but really this is the next level of stuff that you really need to think about. Lastly, smart lead tracking is continuous. It’s not a set it and forget it type thing. You have to be looking at this stuff monthly, minimum weekly if you’re really in growth mode.
So ask yourself in your staff meetings, what channels are working, what type of leads are converting? Are Facebook better than Google? Is Google better than Yahoo? I don’t know. Um, what’s costing me the most without delivering anything? And if you can’t answer those questions in 30 seconds or less than your tracking system.
Needs an upgrade. It’s just that simple. You really need that scorecard there. So I, I do wanna give you a quick real life example here. Um, we worked with a practice that swore that their Facebook ads were crushing it. They were getting tons of engagement comments, likes, shares, the whole deal. But when we put smart lead tracking in place for their ads, guess what?
Almost zero booked appointments came from Facebook. Meanwhile though, Google Organic SEO stuff, which they hadn’t touched in a year, was quietly bringing in 80% of their actual new patient volume. So what did we do? We focused on more content. We reallocated the budget on SEO, optimizing their GMB profile.
New patient volume went up. Cost per lead went down and the dentist looked like a hero. That’s the power of smart lead tracking. It takes the guesswork out so you can stop feeling like something’s working and actually know for sure so. Let’s, let’s get into now maybe more of the how, like how do you actually do this, right?
Because let’s be honest, it’s one thing to say you should be tracking lead smarter, but if it’s a nightmare to set up or to manage, nobody’s gonna stick with it. I know I don’t. So I’m gonna break this down into a simple, clear four, four-part framework for you that you can take this and run with it right now.
This is exactly what we recommend to our clients at Kickstart and when they actually implement this. It is an, it is a game changer whether they have us do it or they do it themselves. Number one, use call tracking numbers by channel. This is non-negotiable for this. If you don’t have a unique phone number for each marketing channel, you’re already behind.
You should have a number for your Google Ads. You should have a number for your Google Organic ads. You should have a number, which by the way, when I say Google Organic, that’s really on your Google business profile. You should have a tracking number there. You should have one for Facebook and Instagram ads.
Those can be the same number because they’re on the same platform. You need just one on your website for general inquiries, right, so that you’ve got all of those bases covered. You also need one for offline marketing, like postcards, billboards, or even referral cards. You need these call track. They need to be local numbers in your market.
And then each number will route to the same phone line, typically your front desk. But behind the scenes, it’s tracking where the call came from. So when somebody calls you, you immediately know, ah, this came from our, our Facebook campaign, or this originated from Google Organic, the SEO type work. And no more asking patients, how did you hear about us?
Because honestly, most of them either don’t remember, or they’ll say something generic like, I Googled you let the tech. Tell you the truth because it certainly can and it’s capable of it. Now, step two in this sequence would be classify the outcome of every caller lead. This is where most systems do break down.
You don’t just want volume, you want context. So for instance, was the caller a new patient lead or where they an existing lead? Um, an existing patient with a question. Right. Um, was it a referral perhaps, or was it a, just a bad lead, like a vendor, a wrong number or a, or a tire kicker? Right. Those aren’t really good qualified leads that we found.
Ideally, your front desk classifies this after every call. Now, realistically. That almost never happens. This is where AI, and I gotta toot my own, own horn here, but our call guard system, it’s an AI system that steps in, it listens to calls, identifies what kind of lead it was, and even scores the front desk’s handling of it.
This isn’t just helpful, it’s fuel for your decisions. Now you can say, we got 85 calls. 40 renewed patient leads. 25 were booked, and 12 came from Google ads. Now you’re cooking with gas, right? You got a much better, easier picture of what’s going on. So step three in this process, connect the lead to the revenue.
This part gets missed all the time. A lead isn’t worth anything unless they actually schedule and ideally show up and pay you, right? So you should be able to trace that path. Lead source scheduled, showed revenue in that order. This is where a lot of C CRMs and EMRs come in. If you can integrate that data, do it even better.
If your marketing dashboard pulls in revenue data, not just to clicks and calls, if not, create a habit. Have someone follow up on leads to see what happened. Use your database, right? Even doing this manually once a month is better than flying blind. I think you’ll just be absolutely shocked at how many good leads your team never followed up with.
Which is a big problem. And yes, that’s exactly why we did build our Smart Follow AI system, but we’ll do more on that later. So step four here, let’s review and adjust monthly. These numbers don’t mean anything if you don’t use them, right? You can’t just like set it and forget it. Every month religiously review your lead sources and the outcomes.
Ask what channels brought in the most new patients. Should be easily answered by either you or somebody on your staff that’s in charge of this. What was the cost per booked patient? Do you know that right now? And not a guess? What’s converting and why? What’s going on with these Google ads? Why are they doing so well?
Or why are the Facebook ads not doing so well? Is the front desk dropping the ball? That’s a big question, right? And are certain channels sending lower quality traffic? Right now we’re seeing a trend of Facebook ads bringing in lower quality traffic for people. Now, this review doesn’t need to take hours.
It’s 20 to 30 minutes on tops, right? Put it into a staff meeting, but it keeps your marketing lean, efficient, and focused on what’s actually working. We’ve had clients cut their marketing spend by 30% and increase new patient volume just by reallocating. Budgets based on this type of a review. The final thought here is keep it simple, but keep it moving.
You don’t need a $50,000 software stack to make this work. Start with call tracking numbers. We use CallRail. There’s other companies out there, but I believe CallRail is the best. Use a spreadsheet to start. Log lead outcomes. Have your front desk do this. Make it a requirement. After every new patient call, use a recurring calendar.
Remind reminder to review everything monthly. Then as you grow layer in tools like AI classification, we can help you with that CRM integrations and automated follow up systems so you don’t have to be so humanly involved in some of those redundant tasks. The point is, stop treating your leads. Like there’s some, there’s some mystery box that you, that you hope converts.
Start treating them like the investments they are and track them accordingly. So I want to, I wanna kinda land this plane here. Uh, we’ve covered a lot so far. If you’re taking one thing away from this episode. It should be this. You can’t grow what you can’t track. And if you’re not tracking where every patient is coming from accurately, consistently, and with context, then you’re making decisions with a blindfold on.
That can be scary. Smart lead tracking isn’t just about numbers. We learned about that. It’s about clarity. It’s about accountability. It’s about making your marketing dollars actually work for you instead of just disappearing into the void. The practices that win in this market aren’t just the ones spending the most.
Sometimes they’re not even spending that much. They’re the ones who are the most efficient with what they have to spend. The ones who ask every single month, what’s working, what’s not, and where are we doubling down? And now you’ve got this blueprint. You can do this manually. You can duct tape together a system, or you can let somebody like us help.
We’re not the only a agency that offers this kind of stuff, but we’re one of the first at Kickstart. We have built smart follow call guard, patient line, all AI tools. They help you track, classify and follow up with leads on autopilot, and we tie it all back to actual revenue. So if you’re tired of guessing and ready to grow with confidence, go to kickstart dental.com.
Schedule a discovery call with me and we’ll take a look under the hood and show you exactly what’s working and what isn’t. So thanks again for tuning in to the No BS Dental Growth podcast. My name is Chris Pistorius, and until next time, track smarter, grow faster, and never settle for. I think it’s working.
Catch you on the next one. Thanks for joining us this week on The Dental Marketing Podcast. Make sure to visit our website, www.kickstartdental.com/podcast, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes, Spotify, or via RSS, so you’ll never miss a show. While you’re at it, if you found value in the show, we’d appreciate a rating on iTunes or if you’d simply tell a friend about the show, that would help us out too.
If you are ready to grow your practice, then you might want to schedule a free strategy session with us. Just go to kickstart dental.com. And click the free strategy session button and give us 15 minutes of your time to change your practice forever. Be sure to tune in next week for our next episode. And thanks for listening to The Dental Marketing Podcast by Kickstart Dental Marketing, where dentists go to win online.
