2026-10-01
Cost per booked appointment, and why it beats every other metric
Most marketing reports are full of numbers that cannot be spent. Cost per booked appointment is the one that connects what you paid to something that can turn into money.
How to calculate it
Take everything you paid to advertise in a period, including the agency fee, and divide it by the number of named people who hold a specific time on your calendar as a result. Not form fills. Not conversations. Appointments.
Do the same for kept visits, because the gap between the two is where most of the loss lives. A business with a healthy cost per booking and a quarter of its appointments not showing up does not have a marketing problem, it has a reminder problem, and the two have different fixes.
What it replaces
Cost per lead rewards whoever can produce the most form fills, which is easy to do badly. Drop the qualifying questions, promise something vague, and the number improves while the calendar stays empty.
Cost per click and impressions tell you about the auction, not about your business. They are useful to the person managing the account and nearly useless to the person paying for it.
What a good number looks like
There is no industry figure worth copying, because it depends on what one client is worth to you. A roofing company can pay several hundred dollars for a booked inspection and still do well. A clinic selling a two hundred dollar treatment cannot.
Work out your own ceiling first: the revenue from a client over a year, multiplied by the share you are willing to spend to win them. Everything above the ceiling is losing money no matter how good the report looks, and everything comfortably under it is a reason to spend more.
Measuring it honestly
The number only works if every enquiry is counted, including the calls. A business measuring forms while most of its enquiries come by phone is reporting on a fraction of itself and does not know which half of the budget works.
Use a tracking number so calls are attributed to the campaign that produced them, keep the calendar as the source of truth for bookings, and reconcile the two every week. The work is twenty minutes and it changes how the budget is spent.
See where your bookings leak. The audit is free.
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