Stop Wasting Leads: How to Diagnose Top of Funnel and Reduce Leakage

Written by Ryan Torresan, Chief Marketing Officer, Peak Dental Services

In my last article, Stop Wasting Leads: How to Fix Marketing Leaks and Convert More Patients, we explored why so many dental groups struggle to generate quality leads, convert them into patients, and track their effectiveness through the funnel.

Now, it’s time to diagnose the problem and pinpoint exactly where your funnel is leaking patients and revenue. Many dental groups unknowingly lose potential new patients due to flawed tracking, delayed response times, and scheduling inefficiencies.

This article will equip you with the tools and strategies to identify these breakdowns, fix them, and drive measurable growth in new patient acquisition. This article will help you:

Diagnose where your lead funnel is broken and stop wasting marketing dollars.
Fix tracking issues to improve reporting accuracy.
Optimize lead conversion rates by addressing phone handling and response times.
Understand cost per lead (CPL) and cost per scheduled appointment (CPS) to allocate budget effectively.
Leverage AI search tools like ChatGPT to stay ahead in digital marketing.
Benchmark your performance against industry standards to assess where you need to improve.

By implementing these strategies, dental groups can increase new patient conversion rates by 20-30% without increasing ad spend. Let’s dive in.

Focus on What Matters

In every board meeting I’ve attended, no one has ever asked about impressions or clicks—and if they did, they were just using buzzwords to sound informed. The real questions that matter:

How many new patients did we get?
What is our cost per lead (CPL)?
What is the cost per new patient?
What’s our show rate?
How do we improve efficiency and increase ROI?
What’s our return on marketing investment—based on revenue or margin?
How is organic doing versus pay per click (PPC)?

Many dental groups waste their marketing budget focusing on vanity metrics instead of conversion-driving strategies. If you’re running a marketing department, your priority should be identifying leaks in your funnel and fixing them immediately.

Case Study: How One Group Stopped Wasting Marketing Dollars

A 40-location dental group was spending roughly $1.2M annually on Google PPC ads, but their new patient acquisition numbers were flat. After diagnosing their lead funnel, they found:

28% of inbound calls were going unanswered.
Form fills took 8+ hours for a response—patients had already booked elsewhere.
40% of their digital marketing budget was targeting the wrong geographic areas.

Fixing these issues resulted in:

☑ 22% increase in new patient appointments without increasing ad spend.

☑ Cost per scheduled appointment dropped from $140 to $85.

☑ Approximately $300K in annual marketing savings by reallocating wasted PPC spend.

This is why diagnosing your lead funnel is crucial. Let’s explore how you can do the same.

Most Common Marketing Leak: Google PPC Leads

For most dental groups, the biggest marketing budget line item is Google PPC ads. These leads typically come in via:

Phone calls
Form fills
Chat/text
Direct online appointment bookings into your Practice Management Software (PMS)

Most dental groups fail to track, analyze, or optimize these channels effectively. And they forget to compliment it with “organic” marketing such as search engine optimization (SEO), online reputation management and social media.

Ensure Tracking Is Set Up Correctly

Before you can analyze performance or optimize your funnel, you need to ensure your tracking infrastructure is rock-solid. This means using:

☑ Tracking phone numbers to monitor calls by marketing source

☑ Unique tracking modules for online form fills

☑ Google Analytics & Tag Manager to track digital behaviors and conversions (paid and organic)

Real-World Mistake: One group I worked with discovered 31% of their PPC calls were routing to the wrong offices due to incorrect tracking numbers. That’s thousands of dollars wasted every month.

Your digital marketing vendor or in-house digital team should set this up for you, but the responsibility to test and verify it ultimately falls on you. That said, a strong digital marketing firm will go beyond just running Google campaigns. They take the extra step to advise on any website changes that should be made to help with leads, ensure tracking is correctly implemented, test it thoroughly, and verify that it can be accurately reported on via dashboards.

Here’s how to test your tracking setup:

Submit fake form fills—do they get logged correctly?
Call your tracking numbers—are they routing properly?
Check lead response times—90%+ of calls should be answered, and form fills should be responded to in under 3 minutes (great AI software out there can do it in 60 seconds).
A good digital agency will also make sure that the form fills and phone calls are accurately reporting into systems like Google Analytics and Google Ads in a HIPAA-compliant manner

Leverage AI-Driven Search: The Next Marketing Frontier

Many dental groups leak leads before they even enter the funnel by failing to optimize for AI-driven search tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and voice assistants. Patients are no longer just using Google—they’re asking AI chatbots for dental recommendations.

If your practice isn’t showing up in these searches, you’re losing patients to competitors who are adapting faster.

How AI Search Can Reduce Lead Leakage

Common Issue	How AI Search Fixes It
Patients ask AI tools for dentists but your practice isn’t mentioned.	Optimize Google Business Profile—ensure all details, services, and high-quality images are up to date.
Patients ask for “best All-on-4 dentist near me,” but AI chatbots don’t recommend you.	Create Q&A-style content on your website (e.g., “Where can I get All-on-4 in [city]?”).
Your ads aren’t appearing in AI-generated results.	Invest in AI-powered ad placements through Google Ads and Bing Ads, ensuring visibility.
AI models pull outdated or incorrect data about your practice.	Regularly update listings across Google, Healthgrades, Yelp, and other directories.

AI-driven search isn’t just a fad—it’s reshaping how people find services, including dental care. Ignoring it today means losing patients tomorrow. Optimizing for AI is one of the easiest ways to reduce lead leakage at the very top of the funnel.

Define What a Lead and New Patient Are

Before optimizing your funnel, you must clearly define what qualifies as a lead and what is a new patient—because if you can’t define it, you can’t measure or improve it.

In general healthcare, a new patient is typically defined as someone who has never been to the facility. That definition doesn’t quite work in dental. A more accurate approach is classifying a new patient as someone who hasn’t had an appointment in 18+ or 24+ months. This distinction is critical because retention cycles in dental are different from broader healthcare models.

A lead should include:

Online form submission
Phone call
Directly scheduled appointment via website
Chat engagement

Within this bucket, you want to be able to identify what is a:

New patient opportunity vs. existing patient
Conversion rates of new patient opportunities

How do you track this efficiently? The old-school approach involved manually listening to calls or relying on front desk staff to track new vs. existing patients—a method that is often inconsistent and inaccurate.

Today, AI-powered platforms like Peerlogic automate this process, offering:

Real-time call transcription and analysis
Automated classification of new patient opportunities vs. existing patients
Tracking of whether opportunities converted
Automated follow-ups and missed call scheduling via text

If you’re not leveraging AI for this, you’re leaving money on the table. It’s an easy-to-implement, cost-effective solution that any dental group can afford. And if you start reviewing call transcripts, you’ll likely be shocked at what’s being said to potential patients—conversations that may be driving them straight to your competitors.

Where Most Groups Have Leakage

A major issue in dental marketing is top of funnel lead leakage—meaning it happens before or during the scheduling process when potential patients express interest but don’t convert.

Here’s where many groups go wrong and these are the areas to investigate:

🔻 Website is broken (outdated, slow, or broken links).

🔻 Sending ads to the wrong content/landing page.

🔻 Marketing targeting is wrong (ads set for a 50-mile radius when 85% of patients come from within 7 miles).

🔻 Low answer rates on inbound calls (missed calls = lost revenue).

🔻 Slow response to form fills and chats (patients expect instant replies).

🔻 Ineffective phone scripting (patients drop off due to long-winded explanations).

Every one of these issues can kill conversion rates.

Measure Cost Per Lead and Cost Per Schedule

A common question I get: What is a good cost per lead? The answer depends on your marketing mix and city you are in. Simple way to put it:

Google PPC leads are more expensive but high-intent
Meta (Facebook/Instagram) leads are cheaper but lower intent
You’ll pay more for leads in Dallas than Jacksonville
Organic (SEO/reputation) can be cost effective but requires investment

First thing to do, track it by source after all this is why you setup the tracking right from the get go. What I mean is track Google PPC individually, track meta separately, identify organic traffic, etc.

If you blend these together, your overall cost per lead may look great, but you could be masking a poorly performing channel. Separate cost per lead by source to truly evaluate performance. You have to do this to rule out the ones that are performing well so you know where to focus on fixing the leak.

Yes, it is true that these marketing elements play together but for sake of justifying your marketing and fixing leaks separate them out.Look at individual channel performance and overall performance.

Not every channel will drive direct conversions, but that doesn’t mean it’s not working. Paid social often has a halo effect on downstream channels, where it won’t directly contribute to new leads but it’s improving Google Ads performance (better conversion rates, lower CPL).

Then, do the same for cost per scheduled appointment, which gives a more accurate measure of how effective each marketing tactic is at generating real patients. If your cost per lead is low but conversion is poor, your call handling or scheduling processes may be the problem—not marketing.

When it comes to market differences and what constitutes a good cost per lead, a simple rule of thumb applies: for general dentistry accepting most insurances, Google PPC leads should typically range from $70 to $100, while social media leads tend to fall between $20 and $30. However, location plays a significant role—expect costs to be on the higher end or above in markets like Los Angeles, whereas in Macomb, MI, they could be at the lower end of the range.

Go Beyond Scheduling: Show Rate, Cancellations, and Treatment Acceptance

Marketing doesn’t end when a lead books an appointment. You need to track:

Show rates (How many scheduled patients actually show up?)
Cancellations and reschedules (Are patients frequently canceling?)
Cancellations with NO reschedule (Lost revenue opportunity)
Treatment acceptance rates (The ultimate indicator of ROI)

We will get into these metrics and what to look for in future articles to see if you have leakage at these stages in the funnel.

Next Steps: How to Fix Your Funnel

🔲 Set up proper tracking (test form fills, tracking numbers, and analytics).

🔲 Define what a lead is (separate new patient opportunities from existing patients).

🔲 Analyze conversion rates (target rates vary).

🔲 Track cost per lead and cost per schedule by source (separate PPC, social, etc.).

🔲 Fix operational issues (answer rates, response times, scheduling process).

Key Takeaways

Most dental groups are wasting some of their marketing budget due to tracking errors, slow responses, and inefficient scheduling.
Benchmark your scheduling rate against industry standards based on your payor mix—if you’re below benchmark, fix the leaks immediately.
AI-driven search is changing patient acquisition—optimize for AI.
Even small funnel improvements can drastically improve your revenue.

Stay tuned for my next article.

If you have questions or need help diagnosing your funnel, email me at ryantorresan@gmail.com or connect on LinkedIn

Ryan Torresan is considered one of the leading marketing minds in dental and healthcare on what’s next in marketing, relevance, marketing that actually impacts DSOs and can be measured. With more than 10 years of DSO experience, Ryan is a marketing executive who steered a very successful career to reach the executive level at three of the largest dental support organizations (DSOs) in the US.

During his tenures, he earned promotions and awards after tremendous success in the digital marketing and social media space. He is also known to have transformed event, CRM and content marketing into lead generation. He has repositioned brands, navigated crisis public relations and driven incremental sales through office designs. He played a crucial role on executive teams that sold DSOs to private equity firms.