If your bookings all say “Direct”, your ads may be working and your reporting is lying.

Cliniko's embedded online booking widget does not run on your website. It runs in an iframe served from cliniko.com, which the browser treats as a separate context. Referrer information does not pass through it.

The practical consequence is that a patient can click your ad, land on your site, book an appointment, and have that booking recorded as Direct traffic. The revenue arrives. The attribution does not. Cliniko's own help documentation is candid about the limit, noting that while it is possible to track visitor sessions and report conversions, it is difficult to keep the source of each session.

We have seen this convince clinic owners to switch off campaigns that were profitable. It is worth checking before you conclude anything about your advertising, and it is the first thing we look at on a physio account.

Phone calls are where most physio conversion data goes wrong in the other direction, by counting far too much.

A booked appointment that nobody attends is not a patient. Once the click to booking chain is intact, the next step is importing the outcome back from your practice management system so the campaign learns which clicks produced patients who actually turned up and paid.

This is where physio has an advantage over most industries: the practice management system already holds attendance and billing. The work is joining it back to the click, and it is worth doing before you spend heavily, because bidding trained on bookings alone will happily buy you a diary full of no shows.