The Dental Marketing Mix · 2026-04-30 · 12 min
Is your marketing agency sending you reports full of green numbers every month - while your new patient count tells a completely different story? In this episode of the Dental Marketing Mix, DentalScapes co-founder Dan Brian breaks down the vanity metric trap that quietly undermines how dental practices evaluate their marketing. He explains what vanity metrics are, why they dominate agency reporting, and why the data that's easiest to put in a slide deck is often the least connected to what practice owners actually care about - new patients and revenue. Dan walks through the only two numbers a practice owner or office manager should anchor their marketing decisions to: new patients and cost per acquired patient (CPA). He breaks down how to use CPA as a lens for comparing channels and making smarter budget decisions, and digs into why keyword rankings - long considered the gold standard of SEO performance - are increasingly inaccurate, incomplete, and disconnected from how patients are actually finding dental practices today. If you're spending money on marketing and not sure whether it's actually working, this episode will give you the framework to find out.
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