Conversion tracking for clinics, with health data kept out of it

The complaint we hear from practice managers: Google Ads reports plenty of calls, and the front desk can name almost no new patients from it. A primary care clinic's phone is busy with established patients asking for refills, lab results and their annual physical, and many of them find the number by searching the clinic's name and tapping the ad. The default call conversion counts every one. Add insurance shoppers who hang up when they hear you're out of network, and callers wanting a doctor who takes new patients when your panels are closed, and the reported number has little to do with new patients. Bidding learns that brand searches and refill calls are cheap conversions and buys more of them, while the non-brand campaigns meant to fill open panels never get judged on what they actually do.

The ten-minute check: export two weeks of call details from Google Ads and have the front desk mark each call new patient, established patient, insurance mismatch or spam. Then ask which providers are accepting new patients today, and whether your ads say so. Last, follow your own website's scheduling button. athenahealth and healow scheduling links open vendor-hosted pages, Phreesia's click-to-schedule link leaves your site, and Zocdoc bookings happen on Zocdoc, so a booking from any of them reaches your tags only if something carries the source across. Never add tags inside the patient portal: it's an authenticated page and the wrong place for any pixel.

Fixed looks like this: a kept new-patient first visit as the primary conversion, sent from the clinic side with no visit reason or provider specialty attached, established-patient calls kept as a secondary action, brand reported apart from non-brand, and budget paced to the providers with open panels. Health is a sensitive interest category in Google's personalized ads policy, so excluding an uploaded patient list isn't an option, and the new-patient flag in the practice system is what separates the two groups. The free audit checks the call rule, the scheduling path and what leaves the site.