Most marketing reports are designed to be impressive rather than read. They open with the biggest available number, which is almost always the least meaningful one.
Here is how to read one in about two minutes.
The numbers that go up on their own
Impressions means the number of times something of yours appeared on a screen. Not was read. Not was noticed. Appeared. This number is enormous, always rises, and can be increased by showing your ad to people who will never be your patients.
Reach is the number of separate people that happened to. Slightly better, still not evidence of anything.
Sessions is how many times somebody arrived at your website. A session counts a person who left after two seconds exactly the same as one who read three pages and called you.
None of these are lies. They are simply not answers to the question you are actually asking, which is whether this work is producing patients.
The question worth asking about any number
Who published this figure, and could they have made it bigger without doing anything useful?
If a number comes from the same company selling you the advertising, it deserves to be read carefully. That is not an accusation of dishonesty; it is just that impressions are the easiest thing in the world to increase, and the increase costs them nothing.
The number that is hard to fake
Did an inquiry become an appointment.
Nobody can inflate this from the outside. It cannot be produced by broadening a keyword or widening a geographic radius. It happens when somebody at your front desk marks that a real person, who arrived through a specific channel, ended up in your schedule.
That is the number a monthly report should be built on. Everything above it is context.
What an honest report looks like
Two halves, never mixed in the same table.
The first half is what the platforms say. Impressions on your profile, taps on the call button, ad spend, clicks. These are published by Google and Meta about your practice. Nobody outside those companies can audit them, and any agency claiming otherwise is overreaching. Report them as theirs.
The second half is what was actually watched. Inquiries that arrived, tied to the source that produced them, and what each one became. Fewer numbers. Much harder to inflate. This is the half that answers your question.
A report that blends the two is how a bad month gets made to look like a good one without anybody technically lying.
Three questions to ask your current vendor
- How many appointments came from this work last month? If the answer is a click count, they are not measuring outcomes.
- Which of these numbers did you produce and which came from Google? A vendor who cannot separate those is not reading their own report carefully.
- What did you change because of these numbers? A report that produces no decision is a receipt, not a report.
If the answers are uncomfortable, that is information. A number nobody acts on was never worth collecting.