Conversion rate
The share of enquiries that reach the next step: a booking, a visit or payment for treatment. In a clinic it is measured stage by stage, so you can see exactly where patients drop off.
≈ conversion · conversions · conversion rates · booking conversion
What it means for a private clinic
Conversion rate shows what share of people move from one stage to the next. A private clinic needs several conversion rates, not one: enquiry to booking, booking to visit, first consultation to an agreed treatment plan, plan to payment. The overall figure — how many enquiries became patients — is useful, but it does not tell you where the problem sits.
A low conversion rate is rarely fixed with more advertising. If patients are lost at the first reply or after the consultation, new enquiries will be lost in exactly the same place.
How to measure it and common mistakes
The formula is simple: divide the number of people who reached the next stage by the number at the previous stage over the same period, and express it as a percentage. Conversion to booking is bookings divided by all enquiries. For the figure to be honest, log every enquiry: calls, including missed ones, messages on social media and messenger apps, and website forms.
- Counting only people who got through to reception and ignoring missed calls and unanswered messages.
- Mixing new and returning patients in one figure.
- Comparing months without splitting the data by channel and source.
- Blaming the ads when the patient was actually lost at the front desk.
What to do: break the patient journey into stages, calculate conversion for each one every week and start with the stage where the drop is most visible. You can estimate what these losses cost your clinic in the loss calculator.