What 1,000 Clicks Is Actually Worth to an Invisalign Practice

Somebody sells you traffic. More people will find you, more people will call, more cases will start. Nobody ever does the arithmetic out loud, because the arithmetic is unflattering and the last step is the one nobody is selling.

Here is the whole chain, one link at a time, with a source on every number and the two places the money actually leaks.

The funnel, run on published numbers

A thousand clicks, because at a hundred the last row is a fraction of a person.

Clicks to your site

1000

Contact the practice

43

Reach an actual person

30

Book the consult

19

Say yes to treatment

9

Nine cases from a thousand clicks. Not because any single step is broken, but because five steps at four in ten each is what multiplication does.

Where each link comes from

Contacting the practice is the weakest-sourced step, so treat it as a range rather than a number. Unbounce's 2024 benchmark report, across more than 41,000 landing pages and 464 million visitors, put the median for dental services at 4.3 percent, with half of pages between 2 and 8.3 percent. Dental was the lowest subcategory in its own healthcare group.

That figure is measured on purpose-built campaign pages fed mostly by paid traffic, not on a practice website reached through organic search. Ruler Analytics, tracking 110 million sessions, puts health and social care websites at 2.3 percent overall. So the honest read is somewhere between 2 and 4 in a hundred, and I have used the optimistic end.

Reaching a person is where it gets interesting, and it is the best-evidenced link in the chain.

31%of calls to dental practices never reach a human being at all.

That is Patient Prism's dental patient access data, and CallRail puts the healthcare industry at a comparable 32 percent missed. Independent secret-shopper studies run by state health agencies find between 12 and 16 percent of practices cannot be reached after three separate attempts.

Booking the consult, once a real new patient does reach a person, runs at roughly 62 percent in the Patient Prism data. Say yes to treatment uses Henry Schein One's 2026 Catalyst Index, which puts average treatment plan acceptance at 45 percent, and the top ten percent of practices at 75 percent.

What a case is actually worth

The number most often quoted to me is five thousand dollars. That holds up, with a caveat.

The American Dental Association's fee survey puts a general practitioner's comprehensive adult orthodontic fee at a median of $5,035. Orthodontic specialists charge more: the 2023 JCO practice study puts their mean adult case at $6,529. Shorter aligner cases, the ones a general practice does most of, run lower, from about $3,500.

So five thousand is fair for a comprehensive case and optimistic for the average general-practice case.

Where the five thousand goes

This is the part that surprised me, and it comes straight from Align's own filings rather than from anybody's estimate.

Align's cut

25%

Running the practice

58%

What is left

17%

Align Technology's 2025 annual report discloses revenue of $1,245 per case shipment. On a five thousand dollar case that is a quarter of the fee, gone before a single other cost. At US list price for a comprehensive case it reaches 38 percent.

The 58 percent is the ADA's 2026 Survey of Dental Practice figure for general practice overhead as a share of billings, before the owner pays themselves anything.

So the honest fully-loaded margin is nearer 17 percent than 30. About $850 on a five thousand dollar case.

Why thirty percent is not wrong either

It depends entirely on whether the chair was going to sit empty.

If you fill a slot that would otherwise have been idle, the only real extra cost is Align's fee and a little staff time, and the margin is 50 to 63 percent. If you displace other production to do it, you carry the full overhead and it is 7 to 20 percent.

Aligners help here more than most people realise. A controlled comparison found clear aligner treatment needed 93.4 fewer chair minutes and about four fewer visits than conventional braces, with a routine aligner visit taking a median of 9.9 minutes.

That is the real case for aligners in a general practice, and it has nothing to do with marketing.

The reality check nobody puts in a pitch deck

Before anyone promises you a flood of cases, here is what a trained doctor actually does.

20.1Invisalign cases per doctor per year, worldwide, which is about one and a half a month.

That is Align's own 2025 annual report. Split by type it is starker: North American orthodontists ship 95 cases a year, general dentists 14.3. A general practice going from 14 cases to 20 is a 40 percent increase and it is six extra cases.

Nine cases from a thousand clicks suddenly looks less like a disappointment and more like most of a good year.

The two leaks, and what they cost

Look back at the funnel. Between reaching a person and saying yes, two steps throw away more than the whole top of the funnel is worth.

Fix the phone and you are not paying anyone. If 31 percent of calls never reach a person and you close that to 15, the funnel goes from 9 cases to 11 on the same thousand clicks. At five thousand dollars a case that is ten thousand dollars of billings for answering the phone.

Move case acceptance from the 45 percent average toward the 75 percent that the top decile manages, and 9 cases becomes 15.

Do both and a thousand clicks is worth 18 cases instead of 9. Doubling the traffic instead gets you to 18 as well, and costs money every month.

What to do this week

1. Call your own practice at 11am on a Tuesday from a number nobody recognises and count the rings. Then do it at lunchtime, which is when most practices miss.
2. Ask your front desk what happens to a call that comes in while both of them are with a patient. If the answer is voicemail, that is your 31 percent.
3. Pull last month's new-patient calls and count how many were asked for an appointment before the call ended.
4. Only then look at traffic. It is the most expensive lever and the slowest.

None of the first three cost anything. That is rather the point.