Y-O-Y Growth Achieved through Performance Marketing
How a leading Bangalore hospital scaled patient registrations 4× while cutting cost-per-registration by 87% — through three years of compounding optimisation.
75 → 309 on average
Up from 6.09% in 2021
Down from ₹10,686 in 2021
A hospital with a complex acquisition problem
A leading multi-speciality hospital in Bangalore delivering global standards of healthcare and surgical excellence — across oncology and a broad range of medical disciplines.
Patient acquisition in healthcare is inherently complex. The journey from digital inquiry to hospital visit involves multiple touchpoints, consideration cycles, and trust-building moments — making attribution deeply nuanced and performance marketing uniquely challenging.
When we began, there was no definitive correlation between digital leads and patient footfalls. A complex, multi-touchpoint attribution model made it difficult to isolate which campaigns were genuinely driving registrations versus generating vanity traffic.
Jan 2022 – Dec 2024
Three years. One direction. Consistent growth.
The same four-month window — September through December — compared three years apart. Apples to apples. The numbers speak for themselves.
(monthly avg)
(period avg)
(monthly avg)
(monthly avg)
(avg)
the door each month
at peak performance
achieved in Dec '24
dramatically better outcomes
Three years of compounding precision
Each year built on the last — eliminating waste, improving relevance, and expanding reach in ways that reinforced prior gains. No single tactic explains the result. The compounding does.
Lead-to-patient rate grew from 6.98% in January to 11.74% in December 2022 — a near-2× improvement over 12 months, entirely from cleaning up what already existed.
Patient registration trend — Jan '22 to Dec '22
Hyperlocal campaigns, purpose-built landing pages, and behaviour-based targeting combined to deliver strong conversion rates — with particularly strong momentum in mid-year and late Q4 2023.
Patient registration trend — Jan '23 to Dec '23
2024 was the year of precision. With a clean account structure from prior years, the team expanded into new service categories and eliminated remaining inefficiency — pushing lead-to-patient rate to a peak of 37.56% in December 2024.
Patient registration trend — Jan '24 to Dec '24
Sep – Dec: 2021 vs 2024
Month-by-month view of the same four-month window, three years apart.
| Month | Leads | Reg. | CPL (₹) | Cost/Reg (₹) | L→P |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep '21 | 1,231 | 75 | 694 | 10,686 | 6.09% |
| Oct '21 | 809 | 77 | 719 | 7,561 | 9.52% |
| Nov '21 | 863 | 80 | 671 | 7,244 | 9.27% |
| Dec '21 | 924 | 68 | 637 | 8,662 | 7.36% |
| Month | Leads | Reg. | CPL (₹) | Cost/Reg (₹) | L→P |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep '24 | 1,275 | 331 | 516 | 1,910 | 25.96% |
| Oct '24 | 1,124 | 289 | 500 | 1,883 | 25.71% |
| Nov '24 | 966 | 301 | 658 | 2,113 | 31.16% |
| Dec '24 | 836 | 314 | 508 | 1,354 | 37.56% |
Year-on-Year Growth
Three metrics that tell the full story of compounding performance across 2022, 2023, and 2024.
Patient Registrations
Lead to Patient Rate
Cost per Patient Registration
Performance marketing in healthcare isn't a one-quarter play
What this journey demonstrates is that sustainable patient acquisition is built through compounding precision, not bursts of spend. By treating each year as a layer on top of the last, the team turned a fragmented lead-gen operation into a predictable, scalable growth engine. The goal was 300 patient footfalls a month. What got built was a system that consistently crosses that mark — at a fraction of the original cost.
Ready to engineer your growth?
Common questions about performance marketing in healthcare
Success in healthcare performance marketing is measured not by leads alone, but by downstream outcomes — patient registrations, cost per registration, and the lead-to-patient conversion rate. Every metric should be tied back to a single business outcome (footfalls, revenue) rather than vanity numbers like impressions or click volume.
A high volume of irrelevant leads exhausts budget on clicks that will never convert and overloads patient coordination teams with unqualified inquiries. Improving lead quality — through tighter keyword targeting, hyperlocal campaigns, and a structured campaign architecture — directly improves the lead-to-patient rate, which is the metric that translates to actual revenue.
The first three to six months are typically about establishing baselines and eliminating obvious inefficiencies. Meaningful improvement in lead-to-patient rate usually becomes visible within the first year. Compounding gains come from sustained, year-over-year optimisation. Quick wins are possible; durable growth takes time.
Target CPA (TCPA) is a Smart Bidding strategy in Google Ads that uses machine learning to automatically optimise bids at each auction, aiming to achieve the most conversions at or below a defined target cost. For Non-Onco specialties in 2024, introducing TCPA brought cost per lead below ₹400 and cost per walk-in below ₹1,000 — giving a reliable, self-optimising foundation for newer service lines.
Yes. The fundamentals — eliminating wasteful keywords, tightening geographic targeting, creating dedicated landing pages, and linking every rupee of ad spend to a real patient outcome — apply at any scale. The underlying principle of outcome-first performance marketing is as relevant for a single-specialty clinic as it is for a multi-location hospital network.
Complex attribution is one of healthcare marketing's toughest challenges. The approach: campaign-specific landing pages with unique tracking numbers, UTM-based analytics, and cross-referencing digital data with offline registration records — building the most accurate picture of which channels are genuinely driving patients through the door.
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