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 LevityLifts.
What are the core building blocks of a new practice’s marketing plan?
Branding first, before any ad spend. Dr. Levites brought in a branding expert to nail down colors, fonts, the practice name, and the mission before anything else launched. She wanted the same story told the same way across every channel.
That discipline is rare. Most practices skip it and end up saying something slightly different every time they talk about themselves.
Once branding was locked, she built out, in order: a website, organic social channels (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube), then paid social, then paid search and SEO.
Is paid social advertising worth it for a private practice?
Not necessarily, according to Dr. Levites. It generates leads, but the quality is low. Plenty of people who fill out a form after seeing a passive ad don’t even remember doing it.
Her numbers: out of 30 leads from paid social, about one becomes a patient in the door. If she started over, paid social wouldn’t be first on her list.
Paid search performs far better for her. Google Ads is her most successful channel today.
What’s the right way to measure whether marketing is actually working?
Not leads. Not website traffic. Customer acquisition cost — what you spent to get one patient who actually booked and paid.
Dr. Levites’ target: keep acquisition cost under $1,000 per marketing channel. That number comes from her average surgery cost, cost of goods, and roughly 50% overhead margin on an established practice.
She checks this constantly against what her paid channels report. Ad agencies love to report clicks and impressions. None of that matters if it doesn’t turn into a booked surgery.
How do you stop your ad agency from grading its own homework?
Agree on what a conversion means before you sign anything. Dr. Levites had to draw a hard line with her Google Ads team early on — a 45-second phone call is not a conversion. A booked surgery is.
Send them your own numbers regularly. She sends her Google team weekly updates on actual revenue booked from their ads, not clicks or calls, so they know what she’s judging them on.
Keep the ad spend and the management fee as two separate payments. If it’s all bundled into one number, an agency can shift dollars around and you’d never know.
How do you find out where your patients are actually coming from?
Put it on the intake form — how did you hear about us — with a short dropdown list, not an open text field. Open fields get you answers like “I saw you on TV,” which isn’t even true.
Use unique booking links for each channel. Dr. Levites can put a different link in her TikTok bio than on her website, so her records show exactly which channel drove the booking.
It won’t be perfect. Some patients browse TikTok, then book through the website, and the form and the link will disagree. Dr. Levites puts her own accuracy here at around 80%.
What’s the biggest lesson about getting staff on board with tracking all this?
Involve them, and be transparent about why it matters. Dr. Levites makes it a shared project at team meetings rather than another task handed down. Front desk staff track lead sources in a shared spreadsheet, and everyone reviews it together at the end of the month.
Clinical staff aren’t used to thinking about the business side. Turning tracking into something the team gets excited about — “we got another one from Google” — makes it stick.
Do you need a big tech stack to track this well?
No. Dr. Levites runs most of it through a small set of tools:
- Her electronic medical record, for bookings and unique channel links
- Sendgrid and Twilio, for email and text messaging
- A paid-social dashboard tool, for lead alerts and follow-up reminders
Everything else lives in Excel and encrypted Google Sheets, tallied by hand by a designated staff member every week. Simple works, as long as someone owns it and updates it consistently.
Is influencer marketing worth pursuing?
Dr. Levites doesn’t think so, and she’s tried it. Even influencers with 50,000 followers have produced, at best, one patient. Most of those followers aren’t local, and follower counts rarely come with location data.
It can add credibility once a patient is already curious about you. It shouldn’t be an early marketing lever for a private practice.
Where should a practice owner start if none of this exists yet?
Tighten the brand before spending on anything else. If the name, message, and visual identity aren’t locked down first, every dollar spent afterward tells a slightly different story.
On the measurement side: check what your EMR can already track, fix the intake form so it captures how patients found you, and put one staff member in charge of a weekly tracking sheet. None of that requires new software — it requires someone who owns it.
A final note
Heather set this up before she had a real marketing budget, which is exactly why it worked once the budget arrived. Most practices measure whatever’s easy to measure — leads, clicks, likes — instead of the one number that matters: whether a marketing dollar in came back as a booked patient. Pick a number that connects spend to revenue, agree on what counts before you argue about it later, and get your team bought in early. The tools don’t need to be fancy. They need to be used every week.
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