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Podiatry · conversion tracking

A booked appointment is not a conversion until you know who is paying for it.

Podiatry is the clearest case in allied health for value based conversion tracking, and the hardest to implement, because the practice management systems were never built to send money back to Google.

The problem stated plainly

Google is optimising towards your worst patients.

If every booking reports back to Google as one identical conversion, the bidding algorithm will chase whichever bookings are cheapest and most plentiful. In podiatry that is almost always the low value, high urgency, one visit cohort. The account gets better at the thing you least want more of, and the reporting says it is improving.

Fixing that means sending Google something other than a count. It means sending a value, and in podiatry the value is set by the funding pathway, not by the treatment.

The chain

What has to happen for a podiatry conversion to carry a value.

Every link here breaks silently. That is the reason so many clinics believe their tracking works when it does not.

  1. 01

    Capture the click identifier

    The GCLID has to be caught on landing and carried through to the booking. If your booking widget hands the patient off to a page on the software vendor's own domain, this is where it is lost, and nothing downstream can recover it.

  2. 02

    Store it against the patient

    In Cliniko this is a patient custom field. In Splose there is a dedicated custom fields resource. In Nookal it can ride in the booking notes, which works but is inelegant. The identifier has to survive until the appointment actually happens.

  3. 03

    Wait for attendance, not booking

    Upload the conversion when the patient arrives, not when they book. Cliniko exposes patient_arrived and did_not_arrive on the appointment, which lets you suppress no shows instead of teaching Google to buy them.

  4. 04

    Attach the funding pathway as the value

    This is the step that makes the rest worthwhile. A DVA appointment and a chronic condition appointment are recorded at what they are actually worth, so the bidding can tell them apart.

  5. 05

    Upload, then reconcile

    Offline conversion imports go back to Google against the stored identifier. Then check them against the practice management system monthly, because a silent break here looks exactly like a downturn in demand.

What the software can actually do

Practice management systems, honestly assessed.

This matters before anyone quotes you for tracking work. The build is completely different depending on what is already installed.

SystemOnline bookingAPIWebhooks
ClinikoHosted page and embedYes, open and well documentedNone. The request is nine years old and the repository was archived in May 2025
HalaxyCustom links and embedYes, FHIR basedYes. Appointment create, update and delete
NookalYesYesNot documented
SploseLink and embedYes, with a custom fields resourceNot documented
Zanda, formerly Power DiaryClient portalListed by the vendor as coming soonNot documented
Front DeskNot documentedNot documentedNo. The vendor describes it as a desktop system

Checked against each vendor's own developer documentation. Halaxy is the only system in this set with native documented webhooks, which makes it the cleanest architecture available in Australian allied health for this purpose.

Check this before you pay anyone for tracking
Cliniko, Splose and Halaxy each offer both a hosted booking page on the vendor's domain and an embeddable widget. If your clinic uses the hosted version, the click identifier does not survive the hop between domains and GCLID based conversion imports cannot work at all. There is a workable alternative in that case, matching on hashed email and phone rather than the click identifier, but anyone quoting you for offline conversion imports without first checking which of the two you have deployed does not know whether the work is possible.
Straight answers

Questions clinic owners actually ask

Why do my podiatry online bookings show as Direct traffic?
Almost always because the booking completes on a different domain from your website. Most Australian allied health systems, Cliniko and Halaxy included, offer a hosted booking page that lives on the software vendor's domain. When the patient crosses from your site to theirs, the original referral information is dropped unless cross domain tracking has been configured deliberately, so the booking is recorded as if the patient arrived out of nowhere. It is a measurement fault, not an advertising one, and the advertising usually looks broken until it is fixed.
Can Cliniko send conversions back to Google Ads?
Not on its own, but it can be made to. Cliniko has an open, well documented API with patient custom fields, which can hold the Google click identifier, and appointment level patient_arrived and did_not_arrive flags, which let you upload only appointments the patient actually attended. What it does not have is webhooks, so the integration has to poll rather than be notified. A nine year old request for webhooks sits in a repository that was archived in May 2025, so it is reasonable to assume they are not coming.
Should a podiatry clinic use value based bidding?
Yes, more than almost any other allied health vertical, because the value spread is so wide. A Medicare chronic condition appointment returns a benefit of $63.40 and a DVA appointment in rooms pays $97.10, while the Australian Podiatry Association publishes an NDIS rate of $188.99 an hour. Add a custom orthotic prescription at published Australian prices of roughly $400 to $850 a pair and the range across a single day's bookings is enormous. Counting all of those as one conversion throws away the only information that would let the bidding improve.
What should count as a conversion for a podiatry clinic?
An attended appointment, valued by funding pathway. Failing that, a phone call over about 60 seconds from a first time caller, a completed online booking, or a form submission. What should not count are link taps, button clicks, page views or calls that ring out, all of which inflate the numbers and teach the bidding algorithm to buy the wrong thing. Google's own automatically created conversion actions are a common source of this problem and are usually best demoted to secondary.
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