Complex data sources, privacy regulations, and extended patient conversion cycles are just a few challenges you face in marketing your health organization. Factor in the need to track performance and deliver success across multiple locations, and your task becomes even more formidable — especially as you look to demonstrate ROI from your efforts.
Your board and stakeholders demand results, and your success hinges on providing metrics that illustrate how each marketing initiative is impacting patient acquisition and appointment goals. But how can you show the ROI from your efforts without accurate visibility into your marketing performance?
By leveraging the right tools and frameworks, you can showcase the tangible value of critical investments such as website development, SEO, and PPC advertising. Plus, you’ll have the benefit of insights that empower you to make data-driven decisions in refining each tactic in a way that serves your goals.
How to Define ROI for Your Health Organization’s Marketing
For the purposes of your health organization, marketing ROI extends beyond attributable revenue. It encompasses patient engagement, retention, and outcomes — metrics that reflect the health of each location and their connection with the community.
Revamping your organization’s marketing requires investment to be effective, and you’re under considerable stakeholder pressure to demonstrate results. But very often, the data sources you inherit are a mess. Each location may have its own website with a separate analytics account. You may have siloed EHR or EMR systems that track appointments or manage patient portals. Your organization may use a separate system to track phone appointments. And if your multi-location organization is advertising on Google and/or social media, those platforms constitute more data sources to monitor.
The first step is to streamline these data sources and gain more visibility into your marketing success. You need to develop what we call an analytics measurement plan (AMP) — one that’s tailored to your multi-location health organization. We’ll talk through the key aspects of developing an AMP, including the goals and objectives you need to ensure that the metrics you track align with the information your stakeholders need to see.
KPIs for Measuring Healthcare Marketing ROI
To demonstrate your marketing efforts’ ROI, you first need to develop a way to track the source and attribution data for conversions up to the point a patient books an appointment. Then, you need to get that data back to your marketing team to illustrate which campaigns are performing well and generating patients, value, and revenue for your organization. Most often, those key performance indicators (KPIs) include the following:
Patient Engagement Metrics
Form submissions, appointment bookings, and call tracking are vital indicators of how well each of your locations are attracting and engaging patients. Useful metrics include:
- Form submission rates.
- Phone call volume.
- Clicks on call-to-action buttons.
- Results created by mapping tools to guide users to locations.
The definition of a successful conversion may vary depending on the perspective of your organization. For instance, some may consider any click on a link to a phone number a conversion, while others might only consider calls that last over 90 seconds.
Digital Metrics
Website: Pay attention to the following site metrics to gauge how well your content is connecting with your audience.
- Bounce rates
- Time on page
- Conversion rates
SEO: Understanding how prospective patients search for your services and find you online.
- Organic traffic
- Keywords rankings
- Local search visibility in each market
Pay per click (PPC): Like SEO, when you can trace ad spend directly to booked appointments, you can demonstrate true ROI. This level of attribution provides a compelling narrative for stakeholders.
- Return on ad spend (ROAS).
- Cost per click (CPC).
- Cost per lead (CPL).
Overcoming Challenges in ROI Measurement
Many health organizations struggle with accurate tracking, often due to technical issues or flawed measurement approaches. For example, health organizations often track conversions through a “thank you” page that appears upon form completion. It’s a flawed metric because it’s only a page view.
That same “thank you” page could be shared across multiple locations, be refreshed by the user, or show up in search results and generate inaccurate data. To prevent false positives (and negatives) in your data, you should tie conversion data to an actual custom event that confirms successful form submissions.
In comparison with clicks on phone numbers, which on your website can happen by user error, rich call tracking tools like CallRail and WhatConverts provide more valuable conversion data. Along with tracking when users connect with a location, these tools monitor a call’s length, whether it was from a new or repeat user, and other information.
It’s worth noting that while tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) offer powerful insights, they can be challenging to use. GA4’s reports are difficult to customize, requiring a deeper understanding of backend settings to interpret data. More importantly, Google’s analytics tools raise significant legal questions about patient privacy.
Navigating HIPAA Compliance
HIPAA guidelines protect sensitive patient data from being disclosed without their consent, which complicates data collection for your marketing efforts.
For instance, Google Analytics is not HIPAA compliant. Even seemingly innocuous actions, such as a website user visiting a page about a specific medical condition, could potentially be seen as sharing patient information. Even viewing a map could constitute a privacy issue with personalization.
Call tracking also introduces potential compliance issues. WhatConverts supports HIPAA guidelines at no extra charge if your organization fills out a Business Associate Agreement (BAA). CallRail offers similar support after setting up a BAA and a specialized healthcare account.
Ultimately, HIPAA compliance is a legal function. Your marketing team should work closely with your legal team to determine what practices and tools your organization can use safely and legally. We’ve demoed different companies such as Freshpaint that promise to act as an intermediary with your website’s data collection.
Tackling Marketing Challenges Across Multiple Locations
Multi-location health organizations often struggle with attribution due to complex patient journeys. Prospective patients may interact with several touchpoints, including ads, websites, and user reviews before booking an appointment. With so many variables, it’s difficult to attribute conversions to a single specific marketing initiative.
Implement an attribution model that accounts for these touchpoints. This typically involves applying advanced analytics tools and customer relationship management (CRM) systems that can track interactions across channels.
Your effort to navigate this complexity is also impacted by having to monitor performance across the country. Each of your locations may have unique characteristics impacting marketing outcomes, such as local competition, demographics, or service offerings.
In some cases, the people managing your locations may not have similar backgrounds in marketing. Building out the technology and processes to access information from each booking system and calendar will present its own challenge.
Effective Strategies for ROI Reporting to Stakeholders
Once you’ve tackled the complexities of data collection, the next step is effectively communicating the ROI from your efforts to stakeholders. While a dashboard enabling you to visualize key metrics may have value, HIPAA compliance guidelines once again present real challenges in sharing patient data.
Your goal is to balance sensitive information like appointment bookings, revenue from those bookings, and lifetime patient value from repeat bookings. From there, you can build an ROI story around those details.
For example, if you’re getting a $20 or $30 cost per conversion in Google Ads, but only 1 in 50 results in a new appointment, that may not be as good a return as it seems. In contrast, depending on your organization’s focus, a single new patient could be worth thousands in lifetime value.
Establish Meaningful Benchmarks from Past Performance
Benchmarks based on your organization’s prior campaigns provide a loose idea of your marketing success. As you gather data about your ad performance and other KPIs over time, you can create more relevant benchmarks that reflect your specific goals and challenges.
These benchmarks demonstrate progress and identify areas for improvement. If you’re surpassing the figures you’ve reached in the past, you’re proving that your marketing is making a positive impact on your business.
Empower Your Health Organization’s Marketing with Data-Driven Insights
Fundamentally, your ability to effectively gather accurate data from your marketing is crucial to demonstrating the value of your efforts. Defining and reporting results from metrics that align with patient acquisition goals provides a real advantage when illustrating the value of each investment in your organization’s website, display ads, and SEO.
The solution lies in utilizing the right tools and frameworks to address the complexity of marketing in the healthcare sector. From navigating HIPAA compliance to tackling attribution difficulties, the right partner can provide vital insights into determining the right path for collecting and compiling data about your marketing across multiple locations.Does this sound like a process that will shed light on the value of your marketing initiatives? Get in touch with GLIDE and let’s talk about what’s next.
