Check your capacitybefore you spend on ads

What you will have at the end.

A capacity figure per service category, a heat map of which hours never fill, and a written rule linking each campaign's budget to the schedule.

Every clinic that has ever run a successful campaign has had the same week: the ads worked, the phone rang, and the first available appointment was five weeks out. The enquiries went to the clinic down the street, you paid for all of them, and the campaign gets blamed.

Measuring what you can actually take

1. Count real available hours, not scheduled ones

   Start from the hours each practitioner is genuinely available for patients, then subtract everything that is real and never in the plan.

   —Total clinic hours per practitioner per week.

   —Subtract administrative time, meetings, and the hour that disappears every week to something.

   —Subtract planned absence, averaged over the year rather than treated as an exception.

   —Subtract the buffer you need for emergencies or overruns, if you hold one.

   —What remains is treatable hours.

2. Convert treatable hours into new patients per week

   Not all of your capacity is available to new patients. Returning patients have a prior claim on it, and in most clinics they take the majority.

   —Divide treatable hours by the average appointment length for that category.

   —Subtract the slots already committed to returning patients and recalls.

   —What remains is new patient capacity per week, per category.

   —Multiply by four and a third for a monthly figure.

   In practice

   Do this per category. A clinic with two spare hours a week in one service and twelve in another does not have fourteen hours of capacity, it has two campaigns with very different budgets.

3. Sanity check against reality

   Compare the number you just calculated against the number of new patients you actually took last month. If your calculation says twenty and you took thirty-one, your assumptions are wrong somewhere. If it says twenty and you took six, you have far more room than you thought and the constraint is demand, not capacity.

Where the gaps actually are

1. Build the heat map

   Export three months of appointments. Build a grid: days of the week down one side, hours across the top, and the fill rate in each cell.

   The pattern is always uneven and it is always the same shape for a given clinic. Once you see it, you stop advertising generically.

   —The first slot of the day and the last are usually the extremes, in opposite directions.

   —Mid-afternoon on a weekday is empty in most clinics and full in none.

   —The slot right after lunch is its own problem in almost every schedule.

   —Friday afternoon and the first appointment on Monday fill differently from everything else.

2. Advertise the gap, not the clinic

   Once you know the empty hours, the campaign changes. Instead of advertising your service to everybody, you advertise the specific availability to the people who can use it.

   —Empty mid-morning weekday: aim at people who are not at a desk. Shift workers, retired patients, parents after drop-off, people who work from home.

   —Empty early evening: aim at people who are, and say the hours in the ad.

   —Empty specific day: run the campaign on the days before it, not throughout the week.

   —Name the hours in the ad text. It is the most concrete thing you can offer and it qualifies the audience for free.

   In practice

   Ad scheduling is not the same as filling a gap. Showing your ads on Tuesday morning does not fill Tuesday morning. The ad has to say Tuesday morning.

3. Watch the time to next appointment

   This one number, per category, is the best live indicator of whether you should be spending. It is easier to read than fill rate and it updates itself.

   —Under one week: you have room. Spend.

   —One to two weeks: healthy. Hold the budget steady.

   —Two to four weeks: you are approaching the limit. Stop increasing.

   —Over four weeks: stop spending on that category. You are paying for enquiries that will go elsewhere.

Tying the budget to the schedule

1. Write the rule down so it is not a judgment call

   A written rule survives a busy week. A judgment call does not, and the judgment always errs toward leaving the campaign running.

   —If time to next appointment in a category exceeds four weeks, the campaign pauses. Not reduced, paused.

   —If it drops below one week, the campaign resumes at its planned budget.

   —Check weekly, at the same time as the rest of the review.

   —Nobody has to ask permission to apply the rule. That is what makes it a rule.

2. Record why a campaign was paused

   A campaign paused because the schedule was full and a campaign paused because it was not working look identical in the account three months later. One of them should come back.

   —Note it in the campaign name or in a shared log: paused, capacity, with the date.

   —Set a reminder to check whether the condition still holds.

   —Never delete a campaign that was paused for capacity. You will rebuild it worse.

3. Consider the other lever before you cut the budget

   A full schedule is not only a reason to stop spending. It is sometimes a reason to change what you are selling.

   —Shift the mix. Advertise the category with room instead of the one that is full.

   —Price. A category booked out five weeks ahead is a category priced below what the market will bear.

   —Hours. An extra evening covers the gap at a known cost, which you can compare against the campaign you were about to pause.

   —The waitlist. A cancellation list that is actually called is capacity you already have.

When it goes sideways