If your agency reports reach and followers, you are paying for decoration. These are the five numbers a practice should demand every month.
Every month, thousands of doctors receive a marketing report full of reach, impressions and follower growth — and cannot find the only number that matters: how many patients did this produce?
The reporting hierarchy that matters
Here is the hierarchy we report against, and the one we believe every practice should demand. One: attributed appointments — booked and attended, by source. Two: cost per acquired patient, computed against real spend. Three: inquiry-to-booking rate — the funnel leak most practices never measure. Four: speed-to-lead — because an inquiry answered in 5 minutes converts several times better than one answered in 4 hours. Five: review velocity and rating trajectory, the trust asset that compounds.
Where likes actually belong
Notice what is missing: likes. Vanity metrics are not evil — they are diagnostic exhaust. But when they appear on page one of your report, they are hiding something. Ask your agency for the five numbers above. If they cannot produce them, the problem is not the algorithm.
Judge marketing the way you judge treatment
Why agencies default to vanity reports
Not malice — incentives. Reach and impressions always go up if you spend anything at all, so they make every month look like a win. Appointment numbers can go down, and reporting them means being accountable for them. An agency that reports attended patients is betting its retainer on your OPD. That is exactly the bet you want your partner to make.
The five numbers your monthly report must contain
- Inquiries by source — calls, WhatsApp, forms; each tagged Google / ads / referral / walk-in.
- Speed-to-lead — median minutes from inquiry to first response. The single highest-leverage number on this list.
- Booked appointments — inquiries that became a calendar entry.
- Attended appointments — the only number that pays salaries.
- Cost per attended patient, by channel — what a patient actually costs from each rupee lane, so budget follows evidence. (How to set that budget: the honest math here.)
Switching your reporting in 30 days
- Week 1 — instrument: tracking number for marketing calls, source field at the front desk, WhatsApp click tracking.
- Weeks 2–3 — build the sheet: one page, five numbers, updated weekly. No dashboard software required to start.
- Week 4 — the ritual: a 30-minute monthly review where next month's budget moves toward whatever produced attended patients.
If your current agency cannot produce these five numbers, that is itself the finding. Our free practice audit reconstructs them from your existing data in five days.
A real report, before and after
Before: "Reach 4.2 lakh (+38%), 8,900 likes, engagement rate 4.1% — a great month!" The OPD did not notice this great month. Nobody at the clinic could say what those numbers had produced, because reach does not have a chair in the waiting room.
After the switch: "84 tracked inquiries (Google profile 41, ads 28, referral links 15) · median first response 9 minutes · 51 booked · 41 attended · cost per attended patient ₹613." Every number leads to a decision: the ads channel got more budget, the 33% no-show gap got a reminder flow, and the front desk saw its own response time improve week over week. That is what a report is for.
Three questions to ask your agency tomorrow: Which channel produced the most attended patients last month? What is our median speed-to-lead? What did one attended patient cost us per channel? If the answers take more than a day to assemble, the measurement system — not the marketing — is the first thing to fix.
We built our entire reporting system around this hierarchy. Judge us the way you judge a treatment: by measured outcomes.
Written by Gaurav Malik
Chief Growth Magician · Founder & Growth Strategist
Founder & Growth Strategist at Digital Magicians — India's healthcare-only growth agency.
Reviewed and published by Seema Dahiya for performance.
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