Let's TalkLet's TalkA free exam brings volume through the door, and the practice is paid on a course of care nobody is measuring.
Send us a month of enquiries and access to your ad accounts. We come back with how many became first visits, how many became accepted care plans, how the free-exam offer is performing against the patients it attracts, and the three changes worth making first. Recorded walkthrough, no call required.
Four failures we see repeatedly in this vertical, and what each one actually costs.
Chiropractic economics rest on a course of care rather than a single appointment, so a campaign producing many first visits that never continue looks excellent and produces very little. The gap between first visit and accepted plan varies enormously by campaign and by offer, and a practice measuring only the door count cannot see which source is actually building anything.
It is the standard offer because it lowers the barrier, and it lowers it for everyone - including people with no intention of paying for care. Run without any qualifying step it fills the diary with appointments that cannot convert, which consumes the practitioner's time rather than the marketing budget, and that makes it invisible on every report anyone is looking at.
Someone whose back has gone is not comparing practitioners. They are calling until somebody picks up and offers an appointment today, and the practice that answers gets a patient who was never going to hear from the others. In a category where much of the demand is acute, response time and same-day availability do more than any message does.
An accident patient arrives through a different search, converts on a different timeline, often involves a third party and in some markets carries referral considerations of its own. Averaged into the same reporting as a cash-pay wellness patient, the economics of both become unreadable and the practice ends up managing neither deliberately.
Business outcomes rather than dashboard metrics. None of these is a guaranteed number - where we do guarantee something, it is written into the offer above.
The real deliverables, not a list written to make a proposal look thicker.
Not the general agency pitch. The reasons that only apply to this kind of business.
Counting first visits produces a bigger number and a share of those never become a course of care. Reporting plan acceptance lowers the headline figure we are judged on and shows which campaigns are genuinely building the practice. We would rather have the argument in month two than present a chart that flatters us for a year.
The offer is standard and effective. How it is advertised is what draws board attention - particularly billing a payer for a service advertised as free, and imaging offered free without stating it is taken only when medically necessary. Adjusting the wording keeps most of the conversion and removes the part that creates the exposure you carry.
Unqualified free exams cost hours rather than pounds, which is why they never appear on a marketing report and why most agencies never mention them. Adding a qualifying step reduces the enquiry count we are measured on and gives the practitioner back the afternoons, which is the part of the business that actually generates revenue.
Enquiries, first visits and accepted care plans, separately. The gap between the last two is the finding.
The free exam checked against how boards treat advertised free services and free imaging.
Enough to protect practitioner time without turning the offer into a barrier.
Cash-pay, insurance and personal-injury routed and reported separately from here on.
Immediate response and same-day availability, because pain-driven demand books with whoever answers.
Monthly, by campaign, so budget follows the plans rather than the door count.
The parts of this that come from having run it in this industry before rather than from running it well in general.
Two campaigns with the same cost per new patient can differ by half in what they are worth, because of who they attract and what they were promised. Measuring acceptance by source is what turns that into a budget decision, and almost no practice builds it.
Much of chiropractic demand is acute, and an acute patient books with whoever can see them today. Holding same-day capacity is therefore a marketing decision made in operations, and the two conversations almost never happen in the same room.
An enquiry naming where someone hurts is health information about an identified person, and the rules reaching it are not only HIPAA - state consumer-health-data law touches marketing sites independently, and some of it carries a private right of action. Collecting less is usually both the careful answer and the higher-converting one.
Patients who began a plan and drifted are easier to bring back than strangers are to acquire, and the reason they stopped is frequently scheduling rather than dissatisfaction. A structured reactivation sequence is the cheapest new-patient source most practices have and it is not running anywhere.
The nearest engagement we can show is a multi-state clinic network rather than a chiropractic practice, at 54,000+ leads with cost per lead down 57%. The comparable part is that the improvement came from qualifying and from the flow behind the enquiry rather than from cheaper media - the same argument here. The board-rule work on the free-exam offer comes from reading those rules, not from that engagement.
Read the full case studyAlmost always that the campaigns are producing first visits rather than care plans. Chiropractic runs on a course of care, so a single appointment is worth very little, and optimising toward appointment volume finds the cheapest possible first visits - which are also the least likely to continue. Measuring plan acceptance by campaign is what makes the difference visible.
Usually yes, with a qualifying step in front of it and the wording reviewed. It works because it lowers the barrier, and unqualified it lowers the barrier for people who will not proceed - a cost paid in practitioner hours rather than media spend, which is why it never shows up on a marketing report. Keep the offer and stop it consuming the diary.
It can be, and it is worth taking to your own advice. Boards have taken positions on advertising a service as free while billing a payer a higher charge for that same service, and on free imaging advertised without stating it is taken only when medically necessary. The offer is generally fine; the wording is where the exposure sits, and adjusting it costs very little conversion.
For acute pain, immediately, and that is most of the demand in this category. Someone whose back has gone is calling down a list until somebody answers and offers an appointment today - they are not comparing practitioners or reading your reviews. Response time and same-day availability decide more of this funnel than the messaging does.
Yes, entirely. They arrive through a different search, convert on a different timeline, usually involve a third-party payer and in some markets carry referral considerations of their own. Mixed into wellness reporting the economics of both become unreadable, and a practice cannot deliberately manage a mix it cannot see.
Contact them, which almost nobody does systematically. Patients who began a plan and drifted usually stopped for scheduling reasons rather than dissatisfaction, and they are far easier to bring back than a stranger is to acquire. A structured reactivation sequence is the cheapest new-patient source most practices already own.
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