---
title: The eight numbers that explain why your ABA practice is not growing.
url: "https://carelu.com/resources/aba-intake-metrics"
description: "Speed to first contact, answer rate, qualified rate, packet completion, verification turnaround, inquiry-to-start and cost per started client — what to measure in an ABA practice, where each number hides, and how to review it weekly."
updated: 2026-09-17
---

# The eight numbers that explain why your ABA practice is not growing.

**Short answer:** Track eight: inquiries by channel, answer rate, speed to first contact, after-hours share, qualified rate with reasons, intake completion, verification turnaround, and inquiry to started with days to start, plus cost per started client. Start with answer rate and speed to contact; many practices convert only 15–60% of inquiries, while well-run funnels reach 80%+.

"We get plenty of leads, they just do not convert" is the most common sentence in ABA growth conversations and the least useful, because it contains no number. Plenty compared with what? Do not convert at which step?

Almost every practice that says this has a specific, findable leak, and almost none of them can point to it, because the funnel is measured at the ends — inquiries at the top, starts at the bottom — and not at the joints in between.

Eight numbers will locate the leak. None require new software to start counting, and the first two usually end the argument by themselves.

## The eight

Track these monthly at minimum, weekly if you are actively fixing something. Segment every one of them by channel, because averages hide the channel that is quietly failing.

| Metric | What it actually means | Where it hides |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Inquiries by channel | Every first contact, on every channel, including calls that rang out | Calls that never became a record; the true denominator is always larger than the CRM says |
| Answer rate | Share of inbound contacts that reached a human or a real response | Phone system reports, not the CRM. Missed calls leave no CRM trace at all |
| Speed to first contact | Median and 90th percentile time to a real response, not an autoresponder | The median flatters you; the 90th percentile is where lost families live |
| After-hours share | Contacts arriving outside business hours | Timestamps. In our cohort this ran at 48% of family contacts |
| Qualified rate, and why not | Share that fit area, payer, age and diagnosis rules — with reasons recorded | Disqualification reasons are usually not captured, so nobody can see the pattern |
| Intake completion | Share of started packets that get finished | Stalls partway through; the abandoned step tells you which question is killing it |
| Verification turnaround | Hours from first contact to a benefits answer | Queues in another team’s inbox, invisible to intake |
| Inquiry to started, and days to start | The number that pays the bills, plus how long it took | Requires connecting first contact to a scheduled first session — the link most systems break |

Add one financial metric on top: cost per started client by channel. Cost per lead is the number that makes weak channels look strong.

## The two nobody tracks

First: who picks up. Answer rate by person and by hour is uncomfortable to look at and enormously informative. It is rarely a performance problem and almost always a coverage problem — a single coordinator cannot answer a call while on another call, and the pattern shows up as a hole at the same hours every week.

Second: what happened to the families you never reached. In most practices this is the largest cohort in the funnel and the least examined. They are not lost causes; they are people who were called once at a bad moment. Counting them is what makes the case for a real follow-up sequence.

## Telling a lead-quality problem from an intake problem

Every practice with weak conversion eventually argues about this, and the argument is settled by two numbers rather than by opinion.

Bad qualification — the wrong families arriving at all — is real, and it comes from the channel: geography set wider than you can serve, keywords that attract the curious rather than the ready, creative that speaks to no one in particular. But it is usually not the biggest thing wrong, and diagnosing it when the truth is a slow phone call sends a practice off to rebuild ad campaigns while the actual leak keeps running.

It has a distinctive signature. You call within minutes of the inquiry, and still very few families respond at all — and of the ones who do, very few turn out to be in your service area, on a payer you take, or in your age band. Both halves have to be true. If families answer when you call promptly, the channel is doing its job. If they qualify once you reach them, the channel is doing its job. Either one on its own points back at operations.

When the signature is genuinely there, the fix is in the channel and nowhere else: tighten geography to the area you can actually serve, cut the search terms that bring browsers, rebuild lookalikes from families who started care rather than from everyone who filled a form, and say the payers and ages you take out loud in the creative so families self-select before they ever contact you.

## Connect the ad channels or you are optimizing blind

If your ad platforms only know about form submissions, they will optimize toward people who submit forms. Feeding the later outcomes back — qualified, intake completed, started care — retrains delivery toward families who become clients, and it is the highest-leverage change most ABA advertisers have never made.

Three practical requirements. Keep the source on the record from first contact through to start, so a started client can be traced to a keyword or a campaign. Track calls, because in this category most paid conversions are phone calls and they are invisible by default. And account for lag: an ABA family sourced in March may start in May, so a 30-day window will tell you to switch off the channel that is working.

## Read the funnel as a multiplication

Write your own numbers in a row and multiply them. Answer 70% of inquiries, qualify 80% of those, complete packets with 75%, and start 80% of the remainder, and you are admitting about a third of the families who wanted you.

Now raise each of those to 95% and the same inquiry volume produces more than double the admissions, with no additional marketing spend. This is why intake, not lead generation, is usually the cheapest growth lever available — and why the multiplication is worth doing on a whiteboard in front of the whole team once a quarter.

## The systems being connected is itself a signal

One finding from our own fleet is worth stating carefully, because it is the strongest association in the dataset and the easiest to over-read. Across 117 ABA providers over 13 months, those whose intake fed their CRM grew about 6.5% per month, against 0.9% for those whose intake did not — roughly a sevenfold difference.

That is observational, and correlation is not causation: practices organized enough to connect their systems tend to do many other things well, and the connection is probably as much a symptom of discipline as a cause of growth. It is still the clearest line in the data, and the mechanism is not mysterious. When intake, phones and ads all write to the same record, every number on this page can actually be computed — and a practice that can see its funnel fixes it.

## The weekly twenty minutes

A short standing review beats a beautiful dashboard nobody opens. Four questions: how many inquiries came in and from where; how many did we fail to answer; which families are stuck and on what; and what is the single biggest fall between two adjacent steps.

Then fix one thing. Practices that review weekly and change one process a month outperform practices that commission a quarterly analysis, every time.

## Benchmarks, honestly

Published drop-off between first inquiry and first appointment commonly runs 40–85%, and many practices convert only 15–60% of inquiries into started clients. Well-run funnels — instant response, fast verification, digital paperwork, managed waitlists — reach 80%+.

Treat these as orientation, not as a target. Your own trend line month over month is worth more than any industry average, because it is the only comparison that controls for your market, your payers, and your capacity.

[Download the free ABA intake checklist (PDF)](https://carelu.com/downloads/aba-intake-checklist.pdf): Walk your funnel stage by stage and write your own numbers next to each step.

## Frequently asked questions

### What is a good intake conversion rate for an ABA practice?

Many practices convert 15–60% of inquiries into started clients, and drop-off between first inquiry and first session commonly runs 40–85%. Well-run funnels reach 80%+. Your own month-over-month trend matters more than any benchmark, because it controls for your market and capacity.

### What should we measure first?

Answer rate and median time to first human contact, segmented by hour of day. They are the cheapest to fix, they multiply every other stage, and in most practices the first honest look at them settles the debate about where the problem is.

### Is our problem lead quality or our intake?

Run one test: call within minutes for two weeks. If families answer and most of them qualify, the channel is fine and the problem is downstream. It is genuinely a lead-quality problem only when both halves fail — very few respond even to an immediate call, and very few of those who do are in your service area, on a payer you take, or in your age band. That is the less common case, and the fix for it lives in channel targeting rather than in intake.

### How do I track which ad channel produced a client?

Keep the source attached to the lead record from first contact through to first session, use call tracking so phone conversions are attributable, and feed the downstream events back to the ad platforms. Allow for the lag between inquiry and start when judging a channel.

### Why do missed calls not show up in our CRM?

Because a call that rang out never created a record. The CRM can only count families who reached someone, which is why answer rate has to come from the phone system and why most practices underestimate their true inquiry volume.

### Cost per lead or cost per started client?

Cost per started client, always. Cost per lead rewards channels that produce volume regardless of whether those families can be served or ever start, and it is the main reason practices keep funding channels that lose money.

## How Carelu measures your intake funnel for you

Most of the eight numbers on this page are hard to get for one reason: phones, forms, intake and the CRM were never connected, so the joints of the funnel go unmeasured. With Carelu, first contact, qualification, intake and verification all happen in one place, so the numbers come straight from the work.

Reading the numbers, and choosing the one thing to fix this month, is still your team’s weekly twenty minutes. Carelu makes sure the numbers are there when you sit down.

- **Answer rate and speed to contact:** Measured across phone, website chat, text and web forms, because Carelu is the first response on all of them.
- **Qualification on the record:** Service area, payer, age and diagnosis status are captured in the first conversation, so qualification is written down, not remembered.
- **Completion, conversion and cost:** Intake completion, conversion and cost per started client by channel and source, with Google Ads, Meta Ads and CallRail connected.
- **A clean denominator:** Job seekers are separated from families on your website, and they make up 40% of captured website leads, so they don’t inflate your inquiry count.
- **Your systems connected:** Leads and status flow into CentralReach, Rethink, Aloha, Salesforce, HubSpot or Zoho, or anywhere else by webhook.

## Knowing your numbers, by hand and with Carelu

Most of these metrics are not hard to compute. They are hard to compute repeatedly, from systems that were never connected to each other.

| Step | Doing it manually | With Carelu |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Counting inquiries | CRM records only; missed calls invisible | Every call, chat, form and fax counted, answered or not |
| Speed to contact | Not measured | Median and 90th percentile, by channel and by hour |
| Disqualification reasons | Rarely recorded | Captured in the conversation and reportable |
| Attribution | Breaks between ad click and first session | Source carried from first contact to started client |
| Reporting effort | A manual export and a spreadsheet each month | Live, and answerable in plain language |

## Keep reading

- [The full growth playbook](https://carelu.com/resources/how-to-grow-an-aba-practice): The equation these numbers describe.
- [Where families disappear](https://carelu.com/resources/aba-intake-drop-off): The four leaks behind a bad number.
- [Google Ads for ABA](https://carelu.com/resources/google-ads-for-aba): Feeding these events back into the auction.
- [After-hours coverage](https://carelu.com/resources/after-hours-intake-coverage): The hours behind your worst answer rate.

Source: Carelu — https://carelu.com/resources/aba-intake-metrics. Free to cite with attribution.