Method
What counts as an enquiry
A first message from a person asking about treatment, through any channel: form, WhatsApp, email, phone or chat. Further messages in the same conversation belong to the same enquiry.
What counts as a reply
The first message, from a person at your clinic or from the intake agent, that answers what the patient asked. Automatic acknowledgements such as “we have received your message” don’t count. Response time runs from the moment the enquiry arrives to that reply.
The four costs
Cost per enquiry, per booked consultation, per showed consultation and per accepted treatment plan. Each is the spend in a period divided by the count in the same period.
Spend comes from the ad platforms and our invoice. Counts come from your booking system and the consult pipeline. If one of those sources is missing for a month, the report says so instead of estimating.
Sources
Every number we publish or report names its source and its date: your booking system, an ad platform, our own logs, or a published study. We cite published studies with authors, publication and year, and say what they measured and where.
Where no benchmark exists, we say so. None has been published for cross-border patient enquiries: the response-time figures that circulate come from B2B sales leads, and we could not trace them to a primary study we can cite. After ten audits we will publish our own measured number, with its sample size and date.
We make no claims about your clinic or your market that we haven’t measured.
What the Enquiry Teardown does
It reads up to 12 public pages of the site you name, and identifies itself as FirstLineTeardown when it does. It respects robots.txt, doesn’t run JavaScript, never submits a form and never contacts your clinic. It records which pages it read, when, and how long each took, and every finding cites the page it came from.
What the audit does
We run it only for a clinic that has commissioned it, so we measure your own funnel with your authorisation. We send enquiries as a prospective patient would, in English, German and Hungarian, through each channel your site offers, at different times of day, over five working days. Only you know the dates. Every enquiry stops before a booking is confirmed, so no chair time is lost, and the report lists every enquiry we sent, in which language, with timestamps.
Hungarian is the control. If your clinic answers a domestic enquiry in forty minutes and a German one the next afternoon, the gap is measured against your own best response rather than an industry average. Where your patients come mainly from Italy, Italian replaces English.