New clients up 37%once the account could tella new client from a regular.
All Ears Veterinary is an independent clinic in Brooklyn treating cats, dogs and exotic animals. Its advertising was a single Google Ads search campaign, set up by a platform representative in March 2022 and never segmented since, collecting clicks on phrases like "puppy list" and "dog grooming". Below is what changed after the measurement was rebuilt, and the one figure in the source that does not reconcile with the rest.
- +37%
- increase in new customer acquisition
- 4.9 to 5.9
- average new clients a day
- +4,500
- impressions on brand-related keywords
- +900
- clicks year over year
The tracking stopped one step before the booking.
A campaign the platform set up and nobody segmented
Marketing was one Google Ads search campaign, built by a Google representative in March 2022 and left without segmentation or optimisation. The traffic it bought came mainly from brand phrases or from searches with nothing to do with the clinic, such as "puppy list" and "dog grooming". An account in that state looks busy in the interface while most of the money reaches people who were never going to book.
Tracking stopped one step before the booking
The only thing conversion tracking could see was a click on the "Book an appointment" button. The booking itself happened in Vetstoria, an external scheduling platform that was never connected to the ad accounts. When your conversion is the step before the conversion, every bid the platform places is a guess wearing the costume of a decision.
Self-optimisation on top of panel recommendations
The clinic owner ran both the practice and the account. His own optimisation attempts did not move the result, and applying the suggestions the Google Ads panel kept offering added disorder on top of it. Those recommendations are written for an average advertiser, and a single-location clinic competing on local searches is not one.
Measurement first. Media after.
Every real step on the site became an event
Before a campaign was touched, full tracking went onto the website: clicks on the email button, clicks on the phone number, and the whole appointment-booking path. Each of those events was registered as a conversion in both the Google Ads and the Meta Ads account. Nothing further down this list would have been measurable without it.
One search campaign split into brand and prospecting
Separating the two made the budgets separable, which is the only way to see what new demand costs. The brand campaign stayed on a low budget. The prospecting campaign was built around "near me" searches, "vet", "animal clinic" and the exact names of the services the clinic offers. A Performance Max campaign was tested in 2024 with creatives that had already worked on Meta, and when it delivered below the standard search ads after a few weeks it was switched off rather than defended.
A Meta account built from zero, then kept fed
A traffic campaign running on photographs taken at the clinic warmed the algorithm up until there was enough data to optimise for appointment bookings. A sole proprietor then ran out of time to supply fresh photographs, frequency climbed and results fell, so AI-generated images built from the real ones took over the rotation. Campaigns for the newly added exotic species, birds, reptiles and rodents, started two weeks before the services themselves did.
The definition of a conversion changed to "new client"
A list of existing clients went in as an exclusion across every live campaign on both platforms. Working with Vetstoria, a URL parameter turned out to mark a booking made by somebody new, which made "new client" a countable event in Google Analytics 4 and in both ad platforms. At the end of February the optimisation goal on every campaign moved to that event, so the budget was only ever bidding for people the clinic had not treated before.
Two second halves, one year apart.
The study compares the second half of 2024, with the full scope of the work running, against the second half of 2023. The figure it measures across those two windows is the average number of new clients the clinic acquired per day.
Those two bars are the whole measurement: one clinic, the same half of the year, a year apart, with no extra channel bought to produce the difference. The source calls that step a 37% increase, and you should know before you quote it that 4.9 and 5.9 do not produce 37% between them. The gap is too wide to be rounding, so the 37% is counting something these two daily averages are not: a different denominator, a different segment of clients, or a different window. You will find it among the opening figures, in the source’s own words. Drawn beside these bars it would present the three figures as one calculation, which the source never does. The 4,500 extra impressions on brand keywords and the 900 extra clicks are off the chart for a plainer reason. The source measures them across three months, not across the half-year the client figures cover, and impressions are not an outcome: they tell you more people typed the clinic name into a search box, not that any of them walked in.
“MTA explained their methodologies and strategies in a way that I could understand, which gave me confidence that we were heading in the right direction.”Joey Kleindienst, CEO, All Ears Veterinary
The work that paid here never shows up in a screenshot.
Order of operations carries this one. The tracking was fixed before the campaigns were, and the definition of a conversion was fixed before the bidding was. Reverse that and you pay to teach a system to find you the wrong people: when the platform optimises towards a click that sits one step before the booking, better creative and a bigger budget each buy more of the wrong thing, faster. The curve itself does not transfer. One clinic in one borough has a ceiling your business may not share, and somebody typing "vet near me" is already halfway to booking, which flatters every channel that touches them.
The second half is the exclusion list, and that is the part that costs nerve rather than money. Most accounts selling a repeatable service count returning customers as conversions and report the total as growth. Upload your existing customers as an exclusion, find the parameter your booking system almost certainly already passes, and your reported cost per conversion gets worse the same week. That is the number being honest for the first time. Finding somebody new always cost that much. The returning bookings were paying for the illusion that it did not.
This work was delivered by MTA Group, which Zero Fluff Digital is part of, by the same specialists who would work on your account. Every figure here comes from the case study MTA published, republished here with their consent. The reviews behind it are public and verified on Clutch, where clients rate the work rather than the agency describing itself.
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