This page is for the CEO, administrator or marketing lead of an orthopedic group who receives a monthly marketing report and still cannot say whether marketing produced surgical cases last month. It lays out a short dashboard, organized from the source of a patient to the case in your OR or ASC, and where each number comes from.
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When I reviewed the pages that rank for this topic, most were agency service pages and analytics software sales pages. Of the 11 I could open, none linked to a peer-reviewed study or to an MGMA, AAOS or CMS source, and the one orthopedic marketing benchmark I found was an agency describing results for its own clients. Searches for orthopedic practice benchmarks returned revenue cycle, physical therapy and compensation figures, not marketing ones.
Why the usual report misses the expensive problems
Most monthly marketing reports measure activity: impressions, clicks, sessions, rankings, cost per lead. Those numbers can all improve while surgical volume stays flat.
One orthopedic practice I audited is a good example. In the baseline month, 92% of its Google Ads spend went to a nationwide campaign that had produced zero appointments. The website’s appointment buttons led to a page with no form on it. Neither problem showed up in the monthly marketing report. Both showed up the moment a click was traced to an appointment.
The dashboard below follows one patient from first contact to case, so a broken step shows up as a number that drops.
The dashboard on one page
| KPI | What it measures | Where the number comes from | Why a CEO cares |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inquiries by source | New-patient calls and forms, split by ad, organic search, Google profile, referrer, existing patient | Call tracking, form tracking in GA4, intake question | Shows which channels produce demand at all |
| Answer rate and missed calls | Share of new-patient calls answered live, and missed calls not returned the same day | Phone system or call tracking logs | Paid demand that rings out is spend with nothing to show for it |
| Inquiry-to-appointment rate | Share of inquiries that become a scheduled, kept new-patient visit | PM system matched to call and form records | Separates a marketing problem from a scheduling problem |
| Appointment-to-surgical-consult rate | Share of new-patient visits that reach a surgeon for a surgical discussion | PM system, visit type and provider | Shows whether marketing is bringing operative or non-operative patients |
| Consult-to-case conversion, by service line | Share of surgical consults that become a scheduled case | PM system and surgical scheduling | The number that turns marketing into revenue |
| Cost per case, by source | Marketing and liaison spend for a source, divided by cases from it | Finance plus the rows above | Where the next dollar should go |
| Referrer activity | Who sent new patients this month, and who sent none after a steady history | PM referring-provider field | Referrals often decide volume and fade quietly |
| Reviews and visibility | New reviews, average rating, and local search presence for each office | Google Business Profile, review platform | What patients and referrers see before they call |
| Appointment-path health checks | Does every “request appointment” button and phone link work on phone and desktop | A monthly manual test, logged | Catches silent breaks like the one above |
Nine rows. If your current report cannot fill rows 3 to 6, the tracking is the first project, before any change to spend.
Inquiries and answer rate: the top of the chain
Count new-patient inquiries by source, not total calls, or existing patients calling about billing will swamp the number. Call tracking numbers per channel, a GA4 event on each form submission, and one intake question (“how did you hear about us?”) give you three views of the same patient. They will not always agree, and that is useful.
Answer rate is the KPI almost nobody puts on a marketing report. I have not found a peer-reviewed benchmark for missed new-patient calls in orthopedic practices, so I will not give you one. Your own baseline month is the benchmark. What matters to a CEO is the trend, and whether missed calls cluster at lunch, after 4 p.m., or on Monday mornings, because those are staffing decisions.
From inquiry to consult: where scheduling decides the outcome
An inquiry that does not become a kept appointment is lost, whatever the report says about lead volume.
Two things drive this step that marketing cannot fix alone. The first is payer policy. In a national mystery-caller study published in JAAOS in 2025, callers contacted 501 orthopaedic surgeons in 47 states; 37% of the included surgeons did not accept Medicaid, and Medicaid callers waited a mean of 24.9 business days for a new-patient appointment against 19.6 for Blue Cross Blue Shield callers (PubMed). If your group limits certain plans, your marketing should filter those inquiries out early, and your dashboard should show inquiry-to-appointment by payer so a policy outcome is not read as a marketing failure.
The second is no-shows. A study of every scheduled appointment in 2016 at one orthopedic multispecialty institution found an overall no-show rate of 11.5% (PubMed). At two academic centers, patients who used the electronic patient portal had a lower mean no-show rate than those who did not, 6.8% against 9.3% (PubMed). Those are single-system figures, so treat them as reference points, not targets.
Appointment-to-surgical-consult is the step that tells you whether a channel is bringing you patients your surgeons can operate on. A campaign full of cheap visits for conditions you manage non-operatively will look strong on cost per lead and weak here.
Cases and cost per case: the bottom line
Consult-to-case conversion belongs to your surgeons and your service lines, so track it by service line and treat it as context, not a marketing target. Cost per case by source is the figure that should drive budget. I wrote a longer piece on how to measure orthopedic patient acquisition cost, including why a blended number misleads, and a separate one on what orthopedic practice marketing costs once you add media, projects and internal time.
Referrers: who sent patients, and who went quiet
The referring-provider field in your PM system is a marketing report waiting to be run. One study of a new orthopedic practice surveyed its first 300 new patients. Traditional and online advertising took 92% of the marketing budget and brought in 18.7% of them. A marketing liaison, at 8% of the budget, brought in 42.7%, with 26.7% coming from physician referrals (Cureus, 2021). That was one start-up practice in its first six months, so it is a direction, not a benchmark.
The useful monthly view is short: top referrers this month, and any referrer who sent patients steadily and then sent none for 60 days. The second list is the one a liaison should work first. If the referral line has been slipping, I wrote about why orthopedic physician referrals decline.
Reviews, visibility and the appointment path
Track new reviews per office per month and the rating, and check that each office appears for its main procedure and location searches. This is what a patient sees after a referrer gives them a surgeon’s name.
The appointment-path check is short. Once a month, someone taps every “request appointment” button and phone link on the site from a phone and a desktop, submits a test form, and confirms it arrived. Log the result as pass or fail. It is the cheapest row on the dashboard, and it is the row that would have caught the broken buttons in the practice I audited.
The 90-day setup
- Days 1 to 15, baseline. Pull last month’s new-patient visits by source, surgical consults and cases by service line from the PM system. Record answer rate from the phone system. Run the appointment-path check. Write the numbers down before anything changes.
- Days 16 to 45, build tracking. A tracking number per channel, a GA4 event on each form, the intake question in the PM system, and a monthly referrer report. Match calls and forms to PM records so rows 3 to 6 can be filled.
- Days 46 to 90, review cadence. A 30-minute review every two weeks with the marketing lead and the practice administrator, and the full dashboard to the CEO monthly. One decision per review, written down.
Stop point. Decide it before day 1. For example: if by day 90 a paid channel has produced no tracked surgical cases while referral-sourced cases held steady, that channel’s budget moves to referral work or is paused before any new spend is added. Write the threshold and the date into the plan.
For the ad account itself, see my notes on Google Ads for orthopedic surgeons. For an ASC joint program, see marketing total joint replacement in your ASC.
Some facts, side by side
In one start-up orthopedic practice, 92% of the marketing budget went to advertising, which brought in 18.7% of the first 300 new patients.
In the practice I audited, 92% of the Google Ads spend in the baseline month went to a campaign that produced zero appointments.
In one orthopedic institution, 11.5% of scheduled appointments in a year were no-shows.
In a national study, 37% of included orthopaedic surgeons did not accept Medicaid.
In the practice I audited, the appointment buttons led to a page with no form. Neither that nor the campaign showed up in the monthly marketing report.
If you want a second opinion on what your current report is measuring, book a 30-minute call. I will look at your site and your market before we talk.
Frequently asked questions
What marketing KPIs should an orthopedic practice track? Inquiries by source, answer rate, inquiry-to-appointment rate, appointment-to-surgical-consult rate, consult-to-case conversion by service line, cost per case by source, referrer activity, reviews and visibility, and a monthly appointment-path check.
What is a good conversion rate for orthopedic marketing? I have not found a published, independent benchmark I trust for orthopedic marketing conversion rates. Measure your own baseline month and track the trend by source and service line.
Where does the data for an orthopedic marketing dashboard come from? Mostly from your practice management system, matched to call tracking and GA4 form events. The PM system holds appointments, consults, cases and referring providers; marketing tools only hold the first contact.
How often should a CEO review marketing numbers? Monthly for the full dashboard, with a shorter operational review every two weeks.
What kind of problem can a marketing dashboard reveal? In the practice I audited, it was a step that had silently stopped working: most of the ad spend going to a campaign with zero appointments, and appointment buttons that led to a page with no form. Neither showed up until a click was traced to an appointment.
