Case Study · Meta Ads · Healthcare · NYC
How a new NYC dental practice replaced $450 Zocdoc leads with $80 appointments.
Three weeks from a Zocdoc-dependent, unprofitable launch to a Meta Ads engine delivering $80 patient acquisitions and a scalable budget.
$450 → $80
Cost per new patient appointment
3 weeks
From Meta Ads launch to stable $80 CPA
5.6×
Reduction in cost per acquisition
The Challenge
A great clinician trapped on a lead marketplace.
A new NYC dental practice launched with everything a modern clinic should want — experienced team, modern equipment, a well-located office, and real credentials. The one thing they didn't have was a steady patient pipeline. So like most new practices, they signed up with Zocdoc, which started delivering leads at roughly $450 per new patient acquisition.
At their average patient LTV, $450 CPA was underwater. Scaling meant losing more money per patient, not less. And the Zocdoc lead was never owned — the next week, that same patient could get booked with a competitor through the same platform. The clinic needed an owned acquisition channel. Fast.
What We Did
Rebuild the Meta account around patient acquisition, not awareness.
Week 1: proper CAPI setup, event match score verified above 8.0, Patient Lead and Appointment Booked events wired as the two primary optimization targets. Landing page restructured to prioritize the appointment booking flow with a 2-minute form instead of a 7-minute consultation call.
Week 2: creative testing engine launched with 18 ad variations — testimonial videos from the first patients, before/after photos (with consent), new-patient-special offer, trust-building reels featuring the lead clinician. Dedicated prospecting campaigns for the local service area within a 3-mile radius, retargeting campaigns for website visitors who didn't book. Week 3: Advantage+ Audience launched on top of the structured campaigns for incremental lift.
The Result
$80 per new patient. Scalable budget. Owned channel.
By end of week 3, cost per booked appointment stabilized at $80 — a 5.6x reduction from the Zocdoc baseline. More importantly: these were patients the practice owned, not leads rented from a marketplace. The scaling runway opened up immediately.
Six months later, the practice is running Meta at scale alongside Google Local Service Ads, has sunset Zocdoc entirely, and is booking more new patients per week than they could handle before. The patient acquisition engine finally compounds instead of leaking.
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