Speaker 1: What's going on everybody. We're going to have fun today. This is going to be some next level shit today. Okay. We've got a lot of high growth healthcare groups that are coming to us when they're high growth, but they're still small and they're wondering where do I start with my marketing? And then the next evolution of the building blocks after I get my website, SEO search, Facebook guides, all that stuff is how do I track results and what are the results I need to track? We're going to be talking about that for the next 15 minutes. Everybody welcome Rich Briddick to the show today. He's our SVP of performance, marketing, media strategy, and innovation. I don't know what his title is anymore, but welcome Rich. Thanks for having me Alex. You've heard his beautiful voice before. He leads a lot of our thought leadership around media and where things are going for high growth healthcare groups. He's head up our analytics department. He's been with me almost a decade at this point. So super brilliant and an awesome accent. So you'll think he's smarter than he is, but he actually is that smart besides the accent. Okay, let's get rolling here. To start rich when we're looking at metrics to track and KPIs before we get into advanced stuff, which I'm excited to talk about, you know, I don't like to talk about basic, basic shit for too long, but let's talk basic shit. You're just getting a marketing director comes in. She just got funding. What are like the basic things you want to see them set up? We get on these discovery calls often and the basics aren't done. Let's go through the basics quick and then we'll evolve from there. What are the things you like to see? Yeah. So in order

Speaker 2: to essentially manage and optimize campaigns effectively, you're going to want to have at least the bottom line lead tracking from the website, right? So the stuff that you're trying to drive initially, once that person gets the landing page or gets to the website and you should do that across all your channels. So I think a lot of people just say, Oh, I'm setting up a PPC campaign. Let me set up call tracking for PPC. And then SEO gets completely neglected over here on the other side. And you don't set up the same tracking. You should

Speaker 1: have tracking for your organic leads foot. You should have phone. You should have call tracking for your organic, correct? But you don't get keyword level data. You don't get

Speaker 2: keyword level data, but you'll get landing page level data. You'll, you will get some insight onto, you know, what content people are consuming before they're calling you. What pages essentially you need to rank because which pages are driving the phone calls. Okay. So there's definitely some value and it'll tell you organic net new leads, right? And it will tell you, you know, if I'm paying, you know, $10,000 a month for my organic program, is it generating enough revenue to cover, cover itself essentially? Yeah. So that's super important. Okay. And call tracking is usually the most important piece of tracking for our clients, right? Because most of our clients, it's phone calls. You get online appointments, you do get form submissions, you do get live chat appointments, but the majority is going to be phone calls. And you want to, you don't want to sort of scrimp on this. You want to go for a proper, you know, high end call tracking provider. They're not incredibly expensive, but we would recommend Corel, they're HIPAA compliant. So that's massively important, right? You obviously need to be HIPAA compliant. And they give us a ton of flexibility with call tracking to understand the nature of the phone calls. So not just the number of phone calls that are being tracked, but also what's happening in those calls, what people are calling about. You can do call listening. You can tag calls if they're at a new patient appointment, if they're an existing patient appointment.

Speaker 1: Do you have to listen to it to tag it or will it automatically listen for it? It'll listen

Speaker 2: for keywords and tag it. Yeah. You can set up. So if you say, schedule my appointment as a phrase and they say that in the call, you can tag it as an appointment call. Okay. Any other vendor we suggest? That's primarily it. The other vendor that is also HIPAA compliant is Invoker. Okay. So you could also use Invoker. I think there's a number of others out there, obviously. A lot of our clients are using Callbox. Callbox. Yeah. What do they have

Speaker 1: that's special? There's something with the call center. What was it? Oh, agent. You can

Speaker 2: evaluate the agents or something. So yeah, Callbox has this thing where it can evaluate agent performance and it does have like a sentiment analysis of each phone call. Okay. And then it has a human listening component as well. So if you want human verified calls and human verified call categorization, Callbox actually listens to every single call that

Speaker 1: it tracks. That's pretty good. I want to make sure we shout it out to everybody because I need them to sponsor our conference next year. That's a good point. Okay. We are compensated

Speaker 2: for these mentions. Yes. So all call tracking providers are fantastic and we love them all.

Speaker 1: The main thing is that you use one. Yeah. CallRail was in Atlanta, so that's near and dear to our heart. ATL. Oh, okay. And other than CallRail, other than call tracking, what are the other things you like to see? A lot of these groups don't have other basic stuff.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So I mean, you know, essentially if there's any way for someone to become a lead through the website that should be tracked. So if I can submit a form and become a lead, if I can do a live chat with you and become a lead, if I can book an appointment online through either a first party or a third party online appointment scheduling system, that should all be tracked. Even if it's ZocDoc, can something like a ZocDoc, can you get any visibility? You have to work with ZocDoc on that. So it's not something that they're just going to give to you, but we've worked with ZocDoc in the past to get it set up. It's a bit of a pain, but it's worth the effort. Yeah. That was also like the biggest group

Speaker 1: in the country. So they were incented to do it. That's true. Call scheduling happens through EPIC, through the EHRs or the schedule an appointment online. Is that happening through the EHR systems or who are the usual providers of the appointment scheduling systems? There's

Speaker 2: a bunch of third party providers. I mean, obviously you mentioned ZocDoc, there's LocalMed I believe is another big one. There are some healthcare CRMs like Advanced MD that offer

Speaker 1: it as part of their CRM solution. And they'll let you see how many came through digital?

Speaker 2: Yeah, there's some sourcing, but it's not the primary effort of what they're doing. So it's better that we're able to independently track it on our end. And then because it's the signal that the campaigns need. So on Facebook side and Google ad side, if you don't have these conversion signals, you can't optimize to them. Right. And if you can't optimize to them, you can't drive performance. You don't know what campaigns are working. Yeah, exactly. You just kind of blind it and optimizing in the dark. So, and then I think the other key thing about tracking web leads is it's also important to try and understand even

Speaker 1: directionally the value of those leads. We'll get into that in a second. Don't skip ahead. I've got very strict instructions on how to narrate this thing. Okay. You can't buy it and sell it Rich. Okay. Before we get into that, which is what I'm excited about. We've got some pretty cool tech we've been working on for like half a damn decade. Um, there's other basic stuff I like to see an SEO rankings are still important. Rankings are still important. A lot of clients aren't actually tracking the rankings for all their locations. Just do it for your locations plus service line. Yeah. Waco, Texas dermatologists, Atlanta dental implants, like just track location for all your locations plus your service. Track those rankings. They still matter. The rankings lead to traffic. The traffic leads to organic leads. And since you don't have keyword level data ranking still important. So I just want to throw that out there. That is very important for SEO. Yeah. Search Facebook, any other main key and Google analytics. Good enough for private. You want to make sure they have that. Do they need to do data studio? Do they need fun? I'll be quick. All these

Speaker 2: fancy things we use or no. Google analytics is sort of the cornerstone of understanding what's going on with your website. Okay. Right. And for 99% of clients, it is, it will give you everything that you need. Where we come in is layering in more of a holistic view of what's happening with your digital program. Okay. Let's talk about that now.

Speaker 1: So what are we doing? We're piping in every channel into this thing. Doesn't Google analytics

Speaker 2: do that? No. Okay. Tell me. So, so Google analytics will capture a user once they come to the website and they will have limited information about where that user has come from. Right. So they'll typically know the source and the medium. Right. I've come from being PPC, but if it's not a Google product, they won't know anything more. Uh, good thing. No one comes from being, but yeah. Right. Right. But, but in terms of Facebook, they won't know the ad that, that, that, that user clicked on. Okay. Unless you're using very advanced kind of UTM parameters and you're sending that data into Google analytics, which most people don't do. We do that. We do it, but we use it for other purposes, which we'll get onto later in this podcast. Okay. So I guess long story short, Google analytics will only give you a partial picture of what drove the traffic there and some of the data it won't capture at all. So things like on Facebook where we're trying to nurture the top of the funnel through video view campaigns, um, to educate, you know, the prospective patient on the service or the practice, none of that information will exist in Google analytics because it's a video view that happened on the Facebook platform and Google analytics will not see it. But we will report out on that in addition to the Google analytics data in our reporting solution to you. And our reporting solution is what that's aggregating all of this. So we use funnel, which is a sort of, you know, the data connectivity solution that sits behind the scenes, which I think most of our clients probably won't be that interested in. And then we use Google data studio, which is Google's sort of BI tool to visualize through dashboards. So funnel combines all the Facebook and we have SEO

Speaker 1: information rankings traffic. Where's that coming? It's coming out of SEM rush or advanced web rankings. If it's local and that's piping into funnel or funnel. Okay. Yep. Our clients, we do this for them, but there's a lot of in-house teams that may try to attempt this

Speaker 2: themselves. Can they, anything is possible, but it's, it's a lift, right? So, you know, we have essentially a tech stack that is this ETL solution funnel, which is pretty expensive. Then we have a big query data warehouse layer that sits on top of that. So we send all the information into a data warehouse. So it's stored. And so our clients can access it if they want to run ad hoc queries. And also so that if there's any issues with API connections with funnel that the dashboard, their dashboard doesn't go down, they still have access to it. They can still access the data. So it's kind of a redundancy. And then we have the BI solution as well. So you've got a pretty robust tech stack that you would have to recreate, not to mention all the connections in all the customization that our analytics team does to the data to transform it. So it would be a lot of work if you, if you want to sort of spin this up yourself. Okay. We have clients that have BI teams that do do this, but they're

Speaker 1: the biggest groups in the country. Okay. The small and mids, it doesn't make sense. They should just pay us a bunch of money to do it. Tons of money. This has been fun, Rich. We've talked about all the basic stuff people need to get going on their analytics, KPIs through Google analytics and piping and different types of information. Cool. Those are all the basics you like to see. Next level, our PE backed high growth healthcare groups all want to get to a point of understanding their costs per acquired patient. Some people in other industries call it CAC, cost per acquired customer. We call it cost per acquired patient, right? How do we get to that point to where we know for the money we spent on our digital advertising, we didn't just drive this many leads, but we drove this many patients. How do

Speaker 2: we get to that point? Yeah, it's a bit of a long and arduous journey. Okay. Give us like the 90 second journey. Yeah, I will. So we've been working on trying to solve this problem as you alluded to for some time now, I think three or four years, too long, five. And not that you're counting. And, um, essentially, you know, what we're finding is more and more healthcare groups have either a CRM system or some equivalency of a CRM system, whether it be a patient management system or an EHR system, where they are keeping patient information and outcomes and revenue associated with those patients. And we have essentially been able to take disparate technologies and put them together in order to understand from an initial ad exposure, click through to the website, and then a web lead, what then happens to that lead in the CRM, and then crucially, pass that information back to the ad platforms and back to Google Analytics to say, this phone call that I drove from my rehab clinic became an admin on August 23, 2022. And it was from a Google ad, this was the keyword, you know, alcohol rehab near me. And so we're able to pass that data back to Google Ads, back to Google Analytics, back to Bing ads, so that those platforms know that that keyword drove that end patient. And so that we can then report out on the cost per acquired patient in your in your reporting, but also you have that data in your platform.

Speaker 1: Will Google Ads then do something with it? Or we have to do we just bid up like crazy and show 100 like, because we know that that drives actual patients, we go crazy on it? It depends on the number of patients you're driving, right? It's a short answer. If it's one, it's not enough data.

Speaker 2: Yeah, if you're driving sort of 10 incredibly high value patients a month, it's more of a directional play. So we'll look at that data and say, okay, medical detox as an ad group tends to drive a lot of admins, the people who come through there as leads tend to be much more likely to become an admin, maybe their need is a lot more acute, because they need to detox. So we'll say, okay, we're going to bid up on that, because we know that if we can get a phone call on that ad group, there's a much higher likelihood that there's going to be an admin that results from it. But it's not algorithmic based. But if you're like a primary care physician, or urgent care, and you have 1000s of patients a day, or hundreds of patients a day, and you're passing that information back into Google, then you can bid against it using smart bidding techniques.

Speaker 1: Okay, let's go back to the basics of setting up this foundation. Do you have to have a CRM to make this work?

Speaker 2: You don't have to have a CRM, but you have to have some way of passing patient data back to us. So it could be a patient management system, it could be a CRM, it could be just a database that you

Speaker 1: EHR is usually where these go into, and nobody has anything outside of that. Does the EHR work? Or you need a spreadsheet, like autonomously passing?

Speaker 2: You have to be able to schedule data out of that EHR and send it to us on a regular basis in the format that we need.

Speaker 1: With no PII, total anonymous stuff in it.

Speaker 2: Yeah, you shouldn't be including PII. We will give you certain pieces of information, and then you will need to be able to store that and send it back.

Speaker 1: And that comes back into a tool or Google Analytics or what?

Speaker 2: It comes back into a data platform. What's the platform? The platform is called Ruler Analytics. Ruler Analytics, everybody. And then Ruler Analytics will send the information to the marketing platform. So it will send it to Google Analytics, it will send it to Google Ads, it will send it to Facebook Ads, Bing Ads, etc. Yeah. And Ruler also integrates with our reporting solution. So we are able to report out on here's what happened.

Speaker 1: Our dashboard will contain all of that information where you know the traffic, the leads and piped in the CRM stuff from Ruler into the dashboard, one complete solution. Okay, so let's talk about best case scenario here. It sounds like a pain in the ass if it's coming from your PMS or your EHR. Best CRM, you really need a CRM to make this scalable, right? So get a CRM early. What's the best one for healthcare?

Speaker 2: Salesforce is the best one.

Speaker 1: Because?

Speaker 2: It's HIPAA compliant. They have a healthcare specific product. They have the richest feature set. It's super easy to integrate. It integrates with everything. They have a huge amount of infrastructure around it. They have great implementation partners. I could go on.

Speaker 1: I got, and they have an awesome conference. And they have a great conference. I've gotten pushback on Salesforce in the last few calls I've been on and it's because it was expensive. It is the most expensive. And, uh, but these groups were trying to use it for like call center and intake. So they were going the service cloud route and stuff like that. Like try to at least just get the CRM if you're serious about marketing and then just.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And there's other leads into there. There's other, you know, just as we should, you know, said there are other call tracking providers available. It's the same with CRMs, right? So if you don't want to go full bore, HubSpot's fine, Zoho's fine, just fine. Okay. All fine. So I would say any, are they HIPAA compliant?

Speaker 1: Zoho, HubSpot? Yes. Okay. Ooh, Salesforce, you got competition. When we were at Dreamforce two years, it shows before the pandemic, it could be eight years ago at this point. I feel like I lost my hair and my damn sense of time. Um, they said financial services was Salesforce. Number one, vertical healthcare. Number two. So they care a lot about the vertical, the innovation. Yeah. Huge push. Meaning the products will continue to get better, more APIs, more piping and of shit. So, okay. That's good. CRM's ideal. And you mentioned some of this stuff with the admin. So are you saying that we have an actual cost per patient and we can track it back to a digital campaign currently for clients?

Speaker 2: That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 1: All right. Very cool. So it is possible. And what do you call this innovative solution, Rich? We are calling it patient stream. Oh shit. It's like, I didn't know that was going to be announced today. Yeah. Yeah. We call it patient stream. We've been working on a long time and it's an amalgamation of a lot of different technologies. Okay. So you don't have to do anything extremely proprietary. It sounds like it's the combination of a lot of disparate technologies, putting them into one thing that helps improve marketing.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, I think that's what a lot of analytics is, right? Is taking data from different places and making it and connecting it with one another and making it tell a story. And essentially this is just kind of the ultimate step in making that data connected.

Speaker 1: What have we learned since we've gotten some clients and we know cost per patient on some digital campaigns? What have we done with that information? Have you, have you seen any like tangible changes in the way we approach media since we've learned that?

Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, definitely in terms of, especially on the more directional side, because I mean, a lot of the clients that we work with have pretty high value patients, so it's, it's lower volume, but high value. And so for those clients, it's some of the directional changes that we've taken is we'll be, we'll fund different channels. We'll fund channels differently now. So before, as an example for one client, we were spending quite a lot on social because the front end lead acquisition costs on social were really strong compared to search. And then when we got the downstream data, it was obvious that search was actually driving the vast majority of all the downstream activity and social was not really contributing as much. So we pulled back a little bit on social and funded more into search because that was ultimately driving that bottom line and the ROI.

Speaker 1: But if you were just looking at vanity metrics, traffic impressions, it seemed like social was driving better quality lead or good quality leads. But downstream, it was total that it was obvious that paid social was driving shit leads. Yeah. Leads that just were basically dying on the client. So guys, paid social is no longer a lead acquisition. That's for the next podcast. We'll talk about demand generation versus demand capture. But paid social is a damn billboard. It's a billboard at this point. And it's a really good one, but it's a billboard.

Speaker 2: But you could take that analogy and apply it to anything. Okay. So you may see the same. You may have the same observation inside one channel, but you're looking at an ad group that has an amazing CPA on the front end. It's great at driving phone calls. Yeah, great at driving actual patients. Yeah, but in terms of like the actual quality of those patients, like maybe the solution that they're actually looking for is tangential to what you offer, but it's not exactly what you offer. And so even though it's a great front end CPA, because they're not educated at that point, they're not then becoming the patient that you want them to become. Bam.

Speaker 1: Bam. You connect it on, you learn a lot more and you probably stop bidding on that keyword. This was a lot of fun, everybody. I'm really passionate about analytics and tracking and getting further along. These healthcare has always been so far behind and it's marketing and we are really moving things quickly now and full funnel attribution and getting to a cost per acquired patient, piping that back into marketing. So thank you, Rich. Thanks for sharing your insight. This is really fun. And I think you just got a lot of marketers wondering how the hell can I get this going? Both from the basic stuff all the way to like, I want to see RM, let's get it going. So thank you, Rich. Thank you to our four listeners that we have out there. I really appreciate y'all tuning in. This was fun. Listen, you got to subscribe and I want you to leave a review, but I'm going to get your review. If it's anything but five stars, just fucking hang up and never listen again. These things come out every week. So please keep listening. Let me know if you enjoy it. Shoot me a note on LinkedIn. I've had two people in the last few years say they love it. So this is very exciting feedback. So let us know if we can do anything to improve five stars or get out of here. Okay. So thank you so much for listening. Keep coming back.