Tracking Referral Sources: A Vital System in Your Dental Practice

We frequently hear that practices want new patients. Every dentist desires a consistent, predictable flow of new patients every month. What is not so common is the number of dentists who are trying to understand where the new patients come from. This is vital information that allows you to spend your marketing dollars in a strategic and intentional way. The good news is that it is also information that you can gather with a few simple systems in place.

Step 1: Set Up your Practice Management Software (PMS) for Success:

Nearly every practice management software (PMS) has a system for tracking New Patient referral sources. The more you utilize your software by inputting the right data, the more it will do for you. Set up predefined referral source options within your program. Ensure that there are specific categories for traditional marketing as well as any other community or unique initiatives your practice is involved in. We’ve put together some of our most common referral sources, but don’t hesitate to add one that you hear in your practice:

• Google Ads
• Google Organic Search
• Facebook / Instagram
• Radio
• TV
• Newspaper
• Exterior Signage/Location (patients drove by)
• Direct mail
• Community sponsorships
• Clinical / Professional Referrals

• General dentists (by name)
• Specialists (by name)
• Medical offices
• Community partners
• Staff Member

For specialists, tracking which general dentists send you patients is critical. It shows who your strongest referral partners are—and who might need more follow-up, education, or relationship-building.

Remember, all new marketing initiatives should be added as a referral source into your PMS. This is your foundation to being able to pull and analyze good data.

Step 2: The New Patient Phone Call:

The New Patient phone call is the ideal time to ask for the patient’s referral source. Asking “Who can we thank for referring you?” or “How did you hear about our office?” is an easy way to gather this information at the very beginning. Your admin team is already gathering the patient’s name, contact information and more, so it makes sense to add this to the call, and it gives the patient the best chance at remembering how it is they did hear about you. It’s an early, small step with big rewards later. 

Step 3: Review the Data:

Once the referral sources are properly set up and your team is collecting and inputting the data, your PMS becomes a powerful reporting tool. We recommend spending a few minutes each month analyzing your most recent data.

Key Performance Indicators to look at monthly:

Number of New Patients

Number Referred by Existing Patients

How Many in Each Category of your Additional Referral Sources

Assess what marketing efforts are working and what might need to be adjusted. Remember that while we recommend reviewing this data monthly, a month is typically not long enough for marketing results to occur. That is why we should repeat this monthly so that we can view quarterly or bi-annual trends.

Step 4: Dig Deeper, Quality vs. Quantity:

Now you know where patients are finding you, which is great! The next step would be to dig into the numbers further to know what your Return On Investment (ROI) is from your marketing efforts. For starters, how much are you spending in those categories to get those new patients into your practice? If you spent $1000 on an ad campaign that brought in 5 New Patients, you could say you spent $200/patient. This is what we call our Acquisition Cost or how much we spend to get one patient in the door. In order to maintain a good financial balance, the ROI of new patient acquisition should be evaluated.

To get to this information, you can pull reports (from some PMS systems) or use a 3^rd party analytics software (such as Dental Intelligence) to analyze how valuable those patients are and what kind of production they created. For example, if you spent $1000 on a campaign, and the 5 newly acquired patients completed a total of $5000 worth of treatment, you’ve gained a net of $4000, and your ROI would be 400%. Conversely, if you ran a Google Ads campaign that brought in 25 patients, but they repeatedly canceled or accepted minimal treatment, ROI may be low. A thriving practice should aim for a ROI of at least 3:1. This insight may take a few more steps of analysis, but it leads to truly smart marketing investments in the future.

We recommend that you evaluate your ROI on a quarterly or bi-annual basis. Monthly is usually too soon and doesn’t allow your marketing efforts to fully flourish, while waiting until the end of the year will not allow you to be nimble and make positive strategic spending decisions during the year.

Why it Matters:

The reality is that if we don’t know what is working, we can’t know where to put our marketing dollars. Every major brand uses this system to be able to know what’s working and allocate future budgeted dollars. Your dental practice should be no different. Track your referral sources, analyze what is working and what is not, and curate your spending to maximize your ROI. With this system, you can feel confident in your decisions being data-driven and eliminate wasted marketing dollars. While asking “Who can we thank for referring you?” may seem like a simple question, tracking referral sources is a foundational business system that you should implement and review regularly in your dental practice. Ultimately, it will increase your profitability and allow you peace of mind as a business owner.: