This article explains the Digital Marketing & Referrals dashboard — the six source charts and how to read them, the Google Ads campaign breakdown, and the cost and return figures at the bottom.
What it answers
Where your people come from, and what they cost.
The Practice Growth dashboard tells you how well you convert the inquiries you get. This one tells you where to get more of them, and which of the things you're already paying for is worth the money.
Set the date range first
The date range sits at the top right and governs every number on the page. Set it before you read anything.
Two kinds of source
The charts come in pairs, and the difference between the left and right columns matters more than anything else on this page.
Digital Marketing Source, on the left, is what ClinicMonk™ worked out for itself. When somebody arrives on your website, ClinicMonk™ can see how they got there — from a Google ad, from an unpaid search result, from a link on another site, by typing your address in directly. Nobody had to tell it anything.
Referral Source, on the right, is what people told you. It comes from the "how did you hear about us?" answer on your forms, or from your admin recording it after asking on the phone. That's the only way to capture the things no software can see — a friend recommending you, a physician's referral, a colleague passing your name on.
Neither is more accurate than the other. They're answering different questions: the left says how they arrived, the right says why they came. Somebody who hears about you from their doctor and then finds you by searching your name shows as direct or organic on the left, and as a physician referral on the right. Both are true.
The three levels
The same pair of charts is repeated three times, at three levels. Read them from the top.
New Clients by source is the one that matters. These are people who came from a channel and became paying clients. This is the row that should decide where your money and effort go.
Qualified Leads by source is next. Every lead counts as qualified until somebody marks them Not Qualified, so this row is your leads with the ones you can't help taken out.
That makes it far more useful than raw lead volume — and it's the reason marking leads Not Qualified is worth doing. A source sending you a stream of people wanting a specialty you don't offer will look productive until those leads are excluded from the count.
Leads by source is the widest net: everybody who got in touch. Useful for spotting a channel that's gone quiet, and for comparing against the row above it. A source with plenty of leads and very few clients is bringing you the wrong people, however impressive its lead count looks.
Google Ads
Beneath the source charts is a bar chart breaking your new clients down by Google Ads.
This is the chart that connects advertising to outcomes. Not clicks, not inquiries — actual clients, attributed to the specific advertising that produced them. If one topic consistently turns into clients and another consistently doesn't, that's the clearest instruction this dashboard gives you, and it's the thing to take to whoever manages your ads.
It's also worth using the other way round. The topics that convert best tell you what the people looking for help in your area are actually looking for, which is as useful for your blog, your newsletter and your service pages as it is for your ad budget.
Cost and return
The tiles at the bottom turn all of the above into money. They build on one another, so it's worth knowing what each one needs.
Tile | What it shows |
Total cost | What you spent on Google Ads over the selected period, pulled directly from your Google Ads account. |
Cost Per Lead | That spend divided by the leads it produced. What one inquiry costs you. |
Cost Per Client | That spend divided by the leads who became clients. What one client costs you — always the higher of the two, and the more meaningful. |
Total Revenue Generated | The clients those ads produced, valued using your average client lifetime value. |
ROAS | Return on ad spend — revenue divided by cost. A ROAS of 4 means every dollar spent returned four. |
Two of these depend on setup.
Total cost, Cost Per Lead and Cost Per Client need your Google Ads account connected. Until it is, those tiles will say so rather than showing a figure. There's nothing to fix on the dashboard itself — it's a connection that has to be made once.
Total Revenue Generated and ROAS need your average client lifetime value. That's the figure for what a typical client is worth to your practice across all the sessions they attend, and it's entered into ClinicMonk™ during setup. Without it there's no way to value a client, so there's no revenue figure and no return.
ROAS also needs your Google Ads company to add UTMs to your ads. Until they do, ROAS isn't live for your practice. Send them Connect Google Ads to ClinicMonk™: A Checklist for Your Google Ads Company.
If that number changes — your fees rise, or your average client stays longer than they used to — it's worth telling us, because every revenue and ROAS figure on this page is calculated from it.
The legend
The legend at the bottom of the dashboard defines each traffic source: Paid Search, Paid Social, Direct Traffic, Organic Search, Social Media, Referrals and Others.