What a dental marketing report should show

What belongs in the report

The report follows the patient, stage by stage, from spend to treatment. Each stage has one number and one source.

A sample layout, with placeholders where your figures would go:

Two further views make the report honest:

• A cohort view. A cohort is a group of patients who first enquired in the same month. Following each month's cohort forward shows treatment that starts weeks or months later, instead of crediting it to whichever month it happened to land in.
• A data-gaps section. Every report should say what it could not measure: calls that weren't tracked, bookings with no source recorded, consent refusals, treatment that started after Google Ads' 90-day offline import limit¹. It's the section that keeps the rest honest.

Each row needs a written definition that stays the same from month to month. "Enquiries" should say what was removed: spam, existing patients, job applicants, duplicate calls from the same number. "Consultations booked" should say whether rebooked appointments count. If a definition changes, the report should say so in the month it changed, because otherwise an apparent improvement may be nothing but a new way of counting.

Every report also needs a short written commentary, a few sentences at the top: what changed this month, the likely reason, and what is being done about it. Numbers without that are left for the owner to interpret alone, which is the job the report was meant to do.

Finally, the owner should have access to the dashboard and to the accounts behind it: the ad accounts, analytics and tag manager, all in the practice's name. A report you can't check against its source is a claim, not a report.

The dashboard itself can be built in Data Studio, Google's free reporting tool (called Looker Studio until April 2026),² which reads from Google Ads, GA4 and a spreadsheet exported from the practice system. The tool matters less than the stages.

What does not

Some numbers belong in the working files of whoever runs the campaigns, not in the owner's report.

None of these are banned. They sit in an appendix for the person doing the work. The owner's page should be short enough to read between patients.

Cadence

Monthly is the right rhythm for decisions. Weekly numbers in a practice are usually too small to separate signal from noise, and treatment for high-value cases arrives too late for a weekly view to show it.

Red flags

These are the signs that a report is built to reassure rather than inform. They are also good material for questions to ask a marketer before hiring.

A good report makes the marketer's weak months visible. That is what it's for. The full method behind each stage is in measuring marketing against booked revenue.

To test the report you get now, put the questions to ask a dental marketer to whoever sends it. For a free first look at what it's missing, email [email protected].