Because that’s where a lot of marketing money gets lost. Ads can do their job and still lose the customer at the front desk. Answer rate, booking rate and the reason each person didn’t book belong in the marketing report, right next to the lead count.
Nearly half the leads don’t book
Liine’s 2024 benchmark looked at more than 630,000 specialty healthcare leads. Only 54.3% of new patient inquiries became a scheduled appointment. [1] Liine also points out that many practices don’t track every new patient call, so a big share of leads never reach the patient record at all. If your report starts at “new patient,” you’re missing the ones who called and left.
The top reasons are fixable
The two most common reasons people didn’t book were that the caller put it off (22.6%) or staff took a message (12.1%). Those are the reasons a team can do the most about. Staff booking rates in the study ranged from 12.5% to 91.1%. [1] That’s a training opportunity, not a marketing budget problem.
What it looked like in practice
At a four-location oral surgery group, calls were up 15%, but the answer rate had dropped from 91% to 79% and abandoned calls had more than doubled. After we moved call tracking to Liine and rebuilt the phone tree, we could see every new-patient call and form. In the first month, 66% booked on the first contact. For context, Liine’s oral surgery benchmark found 52.9% of inquiries booked. [2] The #1 reason the rest didn’t book was insurance. You can’t fix that with more ads.
At a 14-office dental group, Liine counted each person once, no matter how many times they called, filled out a form or sent a message. That stopped us from over-counting leads, a problem Google’s own lead stages are designed to separate out. [3]
My rule: If marketing pays for the call, marketing should know what happened on it.