CHART · THE JOURNEY · How a patient actually arrives
A new patient doesn't appear out of a single ad. They circle for weeks — search, map, reviews, a friend, a second search — before they ever dial. The question isn't whether the journey happened. It's whether your attribution can see it, or hands all the credit to the last door they walked through.
One prospective patient. Nine touches across four weeks. Some you paid for, some you earned, some you'll never see in a dashboard. Every one of them moved the decision — but only the last one leaves an obvious fingerprint.
Illustrative. The nine touches and the four-week span are a composite drawn from patterns we see on intake, not a client's journey and not an industry average. We have not found a nameable published source that credibly counts touches before a healthcare booking — the numbers in circulation trace to marketing vendors with no disclosed sample, which is exactly the kind of figure we refuse to cite. Nine is used here because it is enough touches to show the mechanism. The argument does not depend on the count being right; it depends on the count being greater than one.
Same patient. Same $6,200 of lifetime revenue. Two ledgers. On the left, last-click attribution — the default in most dashboards — hands the whole sum to whoever was standing closest to the finish line. On the right, correct attribution traces the revenue back through every touch that earned it. The gap between these two ledgers is where marketing budgets get set wrong.
Illustrative. The $6,200 and both sets of percentages are a composite drawn from patterns we see on intake, not a client's numbers and not an industry average. Lifetime revenue is not a published benchmark at any tier we would cite — it is derived per practice, from that practice's own revenue per patient, retained years and contribution margin, with the arithmetic shown. The split between the two ledgers is drawn to make the mechanism legible; the finding is the gap, not the digits. Where this site publishes measured figures rather than illustrations, every one is read in its primary source and carries that source in the row — the reference ranges at /benchmarks, and the register, including which sources we refuse to use and why, at /sources.
This is not a philosophical difference. It is the same $6,200, assigned two different ways, producing two opposite budgets. One setup teaches you to buy more of your best acquisition channels. The other teaches you to pay to reach people who were already coming — which is exactly the failure the next chart dissects.