Based on a PracticeCare® podcast conversation, Dr. Heather Levites on How to Measure Marketing Strategies Well, with Dr. Heather Levites, board-certified plastic surgeon and founder of Levity Lifts in North Carolina.
Why do so many practice owners struggle to know if their marketing is working?
Because they’re measuring the wrong things. Clicks, impressions, phone calls over 45 seconds — these are the metrics marketing vendors love to report. They’re easy to produce and they look impressive. But none of them tell you whether you’re making money.
Dr. Levites learned this firsthand working with her Google ad agency. They’d come to monthly meetings showing lead counts and click-through rates. Her response: that’s not what matters to me. What matters is how many patients booked a procedure and what they spent.
Until you define success that way — revenue in versus money spent to get it — you’re just guessing.
What’s the right metric for evaluating a marketing channel?
Customer acquisition cost — how much did you spend to get one patient who actually booked and paid?
For Dr. Levites, a customer acquisition cost around $1,000 means the channel is working. That number comes from her average surgery revenue, cost of goods, overhead, and a target margin of around 50% for an established practice. The right number will be different for every practice, but the principle is the same: tie your marketing spend back to real revenue, not activity.
What did paid social media actually deliver, and how did you figure that out?
The leads came in, but the quality was poor. Paid Facebook and Instagram ads reach people passively — they may have searched something related to plastic surgery, or they may have just been in the right zip code. About one in 10 leads would acknowledge filling out the form at all. Of those, roughly one in three would actually come in for a consult. So out of 30 leads, you might get one patient through the door.
Run that math against what you’re spending on ads and management fees, and the channel looks a lot less attractive. Dr. Levites says if she were starting over, paid social wouldn’t be where she’d go first.
What channel has worked best, and what does it cost?
Google Ads. Dr. Levites spends between $12,000 and $15,000 a month on ad spend and management fees combined, and she’s seeing a three to four times return on that investment. For a practice less than two years old, that’s a good result.
The key is staying actively involved. She has weekly meetings with her ad management team, reviews which keywords are converting, and cuts spend on procedures where the acquisition cost doesn’t make financial sense. A lip filler patient acquired at $500 for an $800 appointment, with low likelihood of returning for bigger procedures, isn’t worth the spend. A facelift patient is a different calculation entirely.
How do you keep your ad agency accountable to the right numbers?
Two things. First, agree upfront on what “conversion” means. For Dr. Levites, it means a patient who books a procedure — not a phone call that lasted more than 45 seconds, not a form submission, not a website visit. Get that definition in writing before you start.
Second, send them your revenue data. Dr. Levites gives her Google team weekly updates on what actually came in from the ads. She’s training them to care about what she cares about. If your agency isn’t willing to be measured that way, find one that is.
One more thing: keep management fees and ad spend separate. Pay the ad spend directly to Google on your own card. Some agencies bundle everything into one number, which makes it harder to know how your budget is actually being allocated — and you lose the ability to verify it.
How do you track which marketing channel a new patient came from?
A few layers working together. The most reliable is the intake form: a simple dropdown asking how they found you. Keep the options short — five or six at most, with an “other” option. Open text fields produce noise. Dropdowns produce data.
Train your staff to ask too. When a patient gets roomed, a quick “Hey, how did you find Dr. Levites?” sometimes surfaces a more specific answer than what’s on the form.
For digital channels, use unique booking links. Dr. Levites has a separate link in her TikTok bio so she can tell when a booking originated there. The same approach works with phone numbers — call tracking services assign a unique number to each channel so you know where inbound calls are coming from. Just make sure any tool you use is HIPAA compliant, because a patient’s name combined with their contact information is protected health information.
How important is planning ahead to being able to measure results?
It’s the whole game. If you’re posting content or running promotions without a plan, there’s nothing to measure against. You can look back at what happened, but you can’t know whether it worked because you never defined what working would look like.
Dr. Levites coordinates her marketing calendar across every channel. If there’s a promotion running one month, the email goes out, the Google ads reflect it, and the social posts carry the same message. Every channel is saying the same thing at the same time. That coordination makes it possible to actually measure whether the push moved the needle.
What’s the right way to think about customer lifetime value?
A new patient is worth more than their first procedure. They may come back for additional services. They may refer a family member. In some specialties, a patient acquired through one channel goes on to spend many times that initial amount over the years.
The practical approach is to pick a blended number and use it consistently. Trying to track every downstream referral and follow-on procedure for every patient will drive you crazy. Instead, look at your data, estimate a reasonable average, and use that as your benchmark when evaluating what you’re willing to spend to acquire a patient. For different procedure types that attract very different patients, you may need a separate number for each.
Does influencer marketing work for a local practice?
Dr. Levites has tried it and doesn’t recommend it as a primary channel. She’s worked with influencers who have tens of thousands of followers and gotten one patient, or none. The math is hard to make work: an influencer’s audience is distributed geographically, and for a local practice, the fraction of their followers who live within a reasonable driving distance is small.
It’s not that it can never help — a patient who’s on the fence might book after seeing someone they follow had a procedure done there. But it’s not where Dr. Levites would put money in the early stages of building a practice. Get the foundational channels working first.
Where should a practice start if they want to get better at measuring their marketing?
Start with your intake form. Add a simple “how did you find us” question if you don’t already have one. Give people a short list to choose from. Assign someone on your staff to tally the results every month and put them in a shared spreadsheet. That’s it. No expensive software required.
From there, look at what your EMR already offers. Most practice management systems have some tracking functionality that practices aren’t using. Check what’s available before buying anything new.
And get your team involved. When staff understand why tracking matters — when they can see that TikTok brought in two patients this month but nothing last month — they start paying attention. That buy-in is what keeps the data clean and current.
A final note
There’s an old joke in marketing: I know half of my marketing is working, I just don’t know which half. It’s still funny because it’s still true for a lot of practices. It doesn’t have to be. You don’t need a finance background or a dedicated marketing team to start measuring what matters. You need a clear definition of what a conversion is, a way to ask new patients how they found you, and someone responsible for tallying the numbers. Whatever kind of practice you own, that’s a place anyone can start.