The screening was free. The care plan is two thousand dollars.

Free or near-free screenings, posture checks and community-event assessments are the standard front end of this field, and nearly every channel uses one.

That makes the first transaction a measure of the offer rather than of the patient, and every source looks similar at that point.

The separation happens when the patient is presented with a plan of care and either accepts it or does not, which is weeks later and invisible to any advertising platform.

Collections per acquired patient over a year is the number that survives, and it routinely reorders a ranking built on new-patient counts.

It also puts a value on the report-of-findings conversation, which is where most of the variation actually lives.

A patient who accepts a course of care is worth many times one who comes twice and stops, and acceptance is strongly influenced by why the patient came.

Somebody in acute pain from a search advert behaves differently from somebody who filled in a form at a community stand, even when both attend.

Because the report reads a year of collections, acceptance shows up as revenue rather than as a rate somebody has to compute separately.

That makes it comparable across channels without any extra reporting discipline in the practice.

The result is often that the cheapest new patient is the most expensive one to convert, which changes the offer rather than the channel.

Where insurance pays, the amount, the timing and the number of covered visits are decided elsewhere and vary by plan.

Cash care plans are priced by the practice and collected up front or on a schedule the practice controls.

Blended, a channel producing insured patients is ranked as though it produced cash ones and the average describes neither.

Splitting them where the export allows gives two honest rankings, and most practices find the sources feeding each differ more than expected.

It also matters for timing: insurance collections arrive months after the visit, which a naive date-based match will attribute to the wrong period.

A weekend at a health fair costs staff time, equipment and a stand fee, and it produces leads that arrive with no digital trace whatsoever.

Left out, the digital channels are judged as though they were the entire acquisition effort, which they usually are not in this field.

A source code on the leads captured at an event puts it into the same comparison on the same collected revenue.

Practices that run this often find events produce fewer patients at higher plan acceptance, which is the opposite of what the volume numbers suggested. A weekend that yields eight patients who all accept care is worth more than a campaign that yields forty who do not, and only the collections file can tell you which happened.