The 12 KPIs dental businesses should monitor daily

When a business is clear on the goals it wishes to achieve, its KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are easier to set and will provide visibility on whether the team is on track to achieve those goals. Monitoring these KPIs will help you see if those whether or not the business is on track to achieve those goals. Here are the twelve KPIs all dental businesses should monitor daily or at least weekly.

Best KPIs to Monitor for Dental Practices

Ad Spend/Marketing ROI

Chances are you already use social media platforms such as Google My Business, Facebook and Instagram to market your practice; and if you do, you may have already dabbled in paid (sponsored) ads. Monitoring your digital marketing campaigns is quick and easy to do because these platforms provide their own native KPIs for you to keep an eye on how your campaign is performing.

Whether your marketing objective is lead generation, re-targeting, brand awareness, or advertising a new product or service, it is crucial to keep a regular eye on these KPIs to ensure that the ad is on track, reaching the right audience, and will serve a profitable ROI at then end of the campaign.

CPC (Cost-Per-Click)

All marketing campaigns cost money, and regardless of your budget, keeping an eye on your spend is important to stay within your spend margin and to ensure your campaign is performing as it should.

CPC (cost-per-click) ads are paid online advertising campaigns. You are charged for the clicks it receives based on the keywords that you are bidding on. How much you pay for clicks is influenced by your campaign’s performance, such as how visible your ad is and how frequently it is shown to your audience.

Your CPC metrics will help you monitor your spend, as well as your campaign’s overall performance.

CPL (Cost-Per-Lead)

Similar to monitoring your CPC, keeping tabs on your CPL will give you a good indication of how your campaign is performing in terms of lead generation by providing essential data as to whether or not your marketing is garnering new clients in a cost-effective and rhythmic manner.

Source of Leads

KPIs that allow you to see your lead sources are important because they provide insight into how (and why) prospects find you. This allows you to utilise the most profitable sources and improve the customer experience/buyer’s journey with specially targeted content, communications, and interactions, thus enhancing the likelihood of conversion.

Number of Leads

As with monitoring your lead source KPIs, tracking how many prospects you’re drawing in over a month/quarter/per annum allows you to see if you’re reaching your goals and whether any ad campaigns you’re running are performing as you’d hoped. If you need to bump up those numbers, these KPIs can indicate areas of your marketing that may need to reworked, such as your target audience, content quality, or ad format.

Average Time to First Contact (Team Responsiveness)

Monitoring your team’s responsiveness is important for two reasons: one, the more responsive the team is the better the customer experience and likelihood of conversion, and two, it shows how well your Front-of-House is handling new customer enquiries. It will let you know if your team are equipped to make the customer experience informative and valuable but also your team has enough time in the day to carry out all their tasks.

Appointments Booked

By keeping a close eye on your practice’s booked appointments over the weeks/months can provide valuable insight to yourself – and your customers. If there is a high volume of clients, there is likely to be a certain waiting period for a new prospect to get booked in, and this can suggest to new prospects that your practice is reliable and well-favoured among your patients, and therefore is a good business to be involved with.

It can also be a useful way to measure revenue. For example, if your appointments are high but revenue is still low, this could suggest that your service costs need to be tweaked.

FTAs (Failed-to-Attends)

Missed dental appointments will cause a practice a number of problems. Simply put, they are a waste of time and money.

While the occasional non-attendance is to be expected, if this is a regular problem, your practice will begin to incur a decrease in revenue. So, if you’re noticing your quarterly or annual revenue is lower than it should be (with no plausible explanation), chances are your practice has experienced a succession of no-shows.

Coming up with a plan to safeguard yourself against FTAs (such as cancellation fees, blocking patients who regularly miss appointments without warning, etc) can help curb this issue. But getting a firm grasp on how many no-shows you are experiencing is the first step.

Conversion Rate (Enquiry to Treatment Started)

This helps you focus on the importance of converting and nurturing a prospect from the initial enquiry to when they undergo their treatment. Once you are aware of your practice’s conversion rate over a set period of time, you can better manage the customer acquisition costs (if needed) and can see if you’re behind, on top of, or ahead of your conversion goals.

Conversion Rate (Consultation Attended to Treatment Started)

As we know, the buyer’s journey does not end at the conversion point. A prospect may attend a consultation, but that does not necessarily mean they will take up the treatment at your practice.

This is the importance of nurturing – and the importance of monitoring lead behaviour from after they have attended their consultation and whether or not they proceed with treatment (if not, why?)

Reasons For Not Proceeding With Treatment

As a dental practice, you’re likely already aware that it is important to understand why a prospect is unwilling to proceed with a treatment. There can be a number of reasons (cost, fear/anxiety around dental treatment, etc), so having a firm grasp on reoccurring patterns for refusing treatment can help you implement plans to put in place to encourage the patient to undergo their treatment with your practice.

Patient Acquisition Cost

Monitoring your patient acquisition cost can help a practice understand how its marketing budget is being spent and can divulge where opportunities to increase your return-on-investment may lie. This goes beyond just calculating your ad spend, because your patient acquisition cost includes other financial factors that need to be taken into account. When a practice is familiar with calculating their PAC, this will help them with directing their future marketing budgets in a more cost effective way.

Conclusion

We get it – it’s a lot to keep track of!

It can be time-consuming keeping track of all of these KPIs – but it is a worthwhile use of your time and crucial to know your numbers and get a handle on business performance.

If you’re worried about how to achieve all of this, and if there’s even enough hours in the day to monitor all twelve of these factors – good news; there is!

At DenGro, we provide dental businesses with CRM and marketing automation software that helps your team(s) capture, nurture and convert more of your prospective patients into new patients. Our technology is simple and easy to use for all users, and our automated workflow and PMS integrations relieves the pressure on teams so they have more time to do what matters; talk to and look after potential and existing patients. For more information on how DenGro can help your dental business thrive, click here.