A woman sees your teeth whitening ad on Instagram on a Tuesday night. She likes the result, taps the button and lands on your homepage, which takes a while to load and says nothing about whitening. She looks up your practice on Google: three reviews, the latest from two years ago, and no opening hours. She sends a message through your website and hears nothing until the next afternoon. By then she has booked somewhere else.
The ad did its job: it brought you someone who was genuinely interested. What failed came after. The ad brings in the patient, but what they find after they tap decides the appointment: your website, how fast you answer their message, and your Google Business Profile. If those fail, you pay for the ad and lose the patient.
What a patient checks before booking
Nobody trusts their teeth, their skin or their back to someone they just saw in a ten second ad. Before reaching out, people check. They almost always look for four things:
- Reviews. In a rater8 survey of more than a thousand U.S. patients (rater8 is a reputation company for medical practices), 84% said they check online reviews before choosing a new provider (Medical Economics, Feb 18, 2025). In the 2026 edition, three in four said they won't book with a doctor rated below 4.0 stars (Medical Economics, Aug 13, 2026).
- Who will treat them. The provider's name, specialty, training and a real photo. A practice with no faces leaves that question open.
- Where you are. The address, how to get there and where to park.
- How to book. A clear button, visible hours and some confidence that someone will actually reply.
If any of the four is missing or half done, doubt wins. And doubt rarely writes in to ask. It scrolls on to the next ad.
The four failures that cost the most patients
1. The website doesn't exist or won't load on a phone
Some practices run ads while their Instagram bio has nothing but a phone number. Someone who wants to check you out before calling searches your name and finds nothing of yours, or an old site with a different number.
The other case is the site that exists but drags. The ad is seen on a phone, so your site opens on a phone, often on cellular data. Google analyzed millions of page loads and found that when a site meets its recommended thresholds for speed and stability, people are 24% less likely to leave before anything shows up on screen (Chromium Blog, May 21, 2020). The most common cause of a slow site is heavy photos, and we cover how to fix them in heavy photos and slow websites.
2. The ad sends people to the homepage
The ad is about dental implants and the link goes to the homepage: a slider with every service, the history of the practice and a generic contact form. The patient has to hunt again for what they just saw, and many won't bother.
Every ad should lead to a page about the same thing the ad promised: the treatment, who performs it, what's included and how to book. When a dedicated page pays off and when the service page is enough is in one landing page per campaign.
3. Nobody answers
This is the most expensive failure, because it happens at the very end, when the person has already decided to reach out. Whether they call, text, send a WhatsApp message or fill in a form, a message sent at 8 p.m. and answered at 11 the next morning is competing with practices that replied first.
The minimum: hours posted wherever people can message you, an automatic reply that says when you'll get back to them, and one person whose job is to answer. Why the first few minutes matter so much is in the five minute window.
4. The Google Business Profile is half finished
Your profile is what shows up when someone searches your name or "dermatologist near me". No hours, old photos, unanswered reviews or the wrong category all tell the patient nobody is looking after it. Google says so in its own help center: businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local results, and replying to reviews shows you value the feedback (Google Business Profile Help).
Privacy is a trust signal too
A patient who feels your website is asking for too much will leave, even if they can't say why. In healthcare it weighs more, and two rules handle most of it.
- Keep medical details out of your contact form. No symptoms, history, medications or photos. A web form usually lands in a shared inbox or on the front desk phone, not in your records system, and clinical questions belong in the visit. Ask for a name, how to reach them and which treatment they're interested in, and add a line that says "please don't include medical information". If your practice is covered by HIPAA, run anything clinical you collect online past whoever handles your compliance.
- Track only with permission. If you use the Meta pixel (the snippet that tells Meta what ad visitors do on your site) or Google Analytics to see which ad brings in patients, don't load them until the visitor agrees. This is not a technicality: in 2023 the Federal Trade Commission fined GoodRx $1.5 million for sharing users' health information with Facebook and Google for advertising (FTC, Feb 1, 2023).
Done this way, the patient sees a website that protects them before they've even met you, and that counts too when they decide where to book.
Check your own practice today, in ten minutes
Do it on your phone, the way a patient would:
- Tap your own ad. Do you land on a page about the same thing the ad shows, or on the homepage?
- Count the seconds until the page is fully visible, on cellular data, not the office wifi.
- Search your practice name on Google. Does your profile show hours, recent photos and replies to reviews?
- Look for who treats patients. Are the provider's name and photo on the website?
- Message your practice from another number at 7 p.m. and see how long it takes to get an answer, and what it says.
- Open your contact form. If it asks for anything medical, remove it today.
If you fail two or more, the problem isn't the ad. Raising the budget would only send more patients to the same place where you're already losing them.
If you'd like to start with the website, try the automatic review on our homepage. It's free: in a few seconds we read up to four pages of your site from the outside and show you what we find on security, speed, titles and ways to contact you.