Open day planner · by The Fresh
The Fresh · Open day planning tool
A free open day still needs a big enough audience to fill it
Set your booking goal, your awareness goal and the Meta population estimate for your area. This works out the ad budget, how many weeks you should be running for, and whether there are enough people in the radius for the day to fill at all.
1 Your goals for the day
The open day is free, so the goals are bookings in the diary and local awareness — not revenue.
2 The catchment
Pull the audience size straight from Meta Ads Manager — set your radius around the practice and read off the estimated audience size.
3 Is the population big enough?
The single question worth answering before anything else gets booked.
4 The runway
How long before the open day you plan to start advertising.
5 What it takes
Budget to land the bookings and hit the awareness goal alongside them.
| Phase | Share | Spend |
|---|
6 What on target looks like while it runs
Check against these each week. If bookings are more than 20% behind the line, widen the radius or lift the budget — don't wait for the final week.
| Week | Spend to date | Bookings to date | Frequency |
|---|
7 What the free day is worth afterwards
The open day costs the patient nothing — the return comes from the treatment booked off the back of it.
8 What the awareness is worth on top
The people who see the campaign and don't book still know the practice exists. This estimates what that's worth over the following year.
The assumptions behind the numbers
- Meta population estimate is used as the reachable audience directly — it already counts active accounts, so no further discount is applied.
- Show rate 65%. Free bookings no-show heavily. Book to roughly 1.5× your slot count, and confirm by SMS the day before.
- £15 per cold booking is used as the benchmark for a free, date-limited open day slot. Warm audiences cost around 40% of that.
- 0.5% of reached cold users book a free slot. Conservative for a no-cost offer with a date attached.
- Awareness is costed at a £9 CPM at frequency 2.5, and only charged where the reach goal exceeds what the booking campaign already delivers.
- Minimum daily spend of £25 per campaign. Below that ad sets never leave the learning phase.
- Runway changes the total, not just the daily. A one-week sprint runs about 45% more expensive — the spend is forced into a small audience at high frequency. Beyond six weeks it climbs again as early bookings decay and need re-engaging.
- Four weeks is the default runway. Shorter and there's no time to warm anyone up; much longer and early bookings decay before the date.
- Frequency is modelled at a £14 delivery CPM against the reach the campaign needs. Green under 4, amber to 5, red above — that's where creative fatigue and rising costs start.
- Booking pace assumes 12% of bookings land during awareness, 58% during the push, 30% in the final week. Most people book close to the date.
- Awareness revenue applies the delayed enquiry rate to the people reached beyond the booking requirement, valued at the same treatment figure. It is a modelled halo, not a tracked conversion — treat it as the argument for awareness spend, not as a forecast.
- Retargetable pool assumes 2% of those reached engage enough to be retargeted later.
- Estimates for planning conversations, not a guarantee of results.