What a new patient enquiry costs, and what one is worth.

A phone call from an ad that lasted longer than 60 seconds, or a real booking or contact form submission. Nothing else. A tap on a phone number link, a click on a book now button and a visit to your contact page are all excluded, because none of them prove a human on the other end. That single rule is why these numbers look higher than the cost per conversion most clinic owners see in their own account. Most accounts count the taps.

Real accounts we log into, in July 2026. Spend we reconcile against the account, and enquiries counted one at a time: a phone call over 60 seconds, or a real booking or contact form submission. No link taps, no button clicks, no page views. The one thing worth knowing is that tracking sees fewer enquiries than a clinic does. Clinics ring us about patients we never saw a single event for, and psychology is the worst of it, whole weeks of new clients that barely touch anything trackable. Divide a month's spend by an undercount and the cost per enquiry reads dearer than the clinic's actual experience of it. So where we know a discipline runs well under what its tracking says, the number here reflects that rather than a figure we know reads high. Where we do not know, we leave the measurement alone.

Because one number would be a lie. Two physio clinics in the same city, same budget, same month, can pay very different prices for the same enquiry. Catchment size, which searches you buy, how fast your booking page loads and whether anyone answers the phone all move it. A quarter of clinics sat at or under the lower figure. A quarter sat at or above the upper one. The middle half lived between them. That spread is the honest version, and the calculator lets you stand on any of the three and see what it does to your return.

Your budget divided by the cost per enquiry gives the enquiries. Those multiplied by your average appointment fee and your average number of visits per new patient give what they are worth. Worth divided by budget is the return. It is a model, not a measurement, and it moves the moment your fee or your retention differs from typical, which is exactly why the calculator lets you change both. Two honest caveats. That revenue arrives across the whole course of visits, not in month one. And it runs on a cost per enquiry that moves with your account, your suburb and your season.

No, and this is where a lot of clinic owners get talked into the wrong thing. Cheap enquiries from vague searches convert to booked patients at a much lower rate than dearer enquiries from people describing a specific problem. A podiatry account can halve its cost per enquiry by buying broad foot searches and end the month with fewer patients. What matters is the cost of a booked patient who is worth having. Cost per enquiry is the first checkpoint on the way there, not the finish line.

Start with the assumption that your number is wrong before you assume your account is broken. Above the range is usually tracking gaps or campaign structure, not a broken market. In order: your tracking is counting some enquiries and missing others, so the figure you are looking at is not comparable to this page. Your targeting reaches too far, so you are paying for clicks from people who will never travel to you. Or your booking page leaks, so clicks arrive and quietly leave. All three are fixable and none of them are solved by raising the budget. Fix the tracking first, because until that is right you cannot tell whether anything else you changed worked.

Because knowing which searches are worth buying in a given discipline is most of what a clinic pays us for, and handing that list over would help the clinic down the road more than it helps you. The mix is different. Knowing that psychology searchers describe the problem while chiropractic searchers name the practitioner changes how you write an ad and what you put on the page. That part is genuinely useful and giving it away costs nobody anything.

Every tracked figure is the July 2026 cut and we will refresh it as more accounts clear the bar. Disciplines showing our band rather than tracked figures will move across as they get there. We would rather publish five disciplines we can stand behind than ten with three clinics apiece. Some of them already publish what they spent and how often their ads were clicked while their cost per enquiry is still short of the bar, because the three figures need different evidence and clear it at different times.