Speaker 1: What's going on everybody, I've got Ryan Dobrin here. You know what? You know what's kind of interesting about media? You would think that clients, agencies would spend it well, but they really don't. They really don't. They just spend where they feel like there's room to grow, where they need more patients, but they don't actually look at why they need the patients or if there's access to care there. Everybody welcome Ryan Dobrin to Ignite.

Speaker 2: How's it going?

Speaker 1: That was the audience. That was the audience that did that. That's very good. Okay. Ryan, what's going on? So tell us the first thing about optimizing media budgets. You go in there, you do audits for our clients all the time. You take over accounts that have been struggling. You turn them around. This is, guys, this is the turnaround king here. What's the first thing when you're looking at media budgets that you're like, whoa.

Speaker 2: Obviously the first thing you want to look at is just the account structure and the settings and the setup. One of the kind of biggest mistakes we see people make is that they're not tracking the correct things. They're not spending money in the correct places and they may not be reporting on the actual results that they're getting. So a lot of times what we see is someone saying, we're struggling with our budgets and we're not getting any results when actually they are getting some results. It's just not attributing correctly or they are spending money in the wrong places. So we first want to kind of go through, make sure the account's set up correctly, make sure the conversion tracking is set up correctly, make sure the campaign targets and goals are set up correctly and just make sure they're, they're set up for success in the first place.

Speaker 1: I love it. You talked about tracking the right things. What are the right things? What do you tell a client? What should you be tracking?

Speaker 2: I mean, at the end of the day, you want to track money in your pocket, right? So you want to track new, you want to track actual patient acquisition. You want to track butts in seats. You want to track new students. You want to track what's going to actually put money in your pocket.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And if you can't track all the way through, it's getting a little tricky with pixels and GA4 and all this stuff. So we've got a lot, but we have vendors, partners, tech partners that help us track actual booked appointments and track all the way through. So would you say that's the right thing to track? That's as close to revenue as we can get.

Speaker 2: That's, I mean, if that's the, as close as you can get, then yes, that's, that's going to be the ideal action. We all know that some appointments book don't show up or cancel or things, but at the end of the day, we can only send the right traffic to the right places. And that's kind of the ideal action there. And at the end of the day, that's the right type of person that they're going to be wanting to target.

Speaker 1: Yeah. As close as you can and feed that information back to Google ads. The other thing that we've done that's been kind of successful is actually getting visit or patient data, not actual PII, but patient volume data by location, even though it will have no tie directionally. We can find out if advertising in Atlanta, Georgia is working because patient volumes going up. If they're spending 5k a month on that location, it's not going up. So sometimes just getting visit volume by location where you're advertising, that'll tell you something directionally, I suppose. So you're talking about tracking the right things and then ad structure. What do we, what do you look at there? Like, do we still break out campaigns per location or is there smarter ways with smart bidding?

Speaker 2: I don't, you know, teach us. Yeah. It really depends on your budget. Obviously, if someone has a hundred locations and a budget that's big enough to support all of those locations with specific landing pages, it's going to be more beneficial to target those. But some places we have one really good dedicated landing page with a location finder and we were able to target certain markets and kind of use a shared budget to land people there. And the benefit there, especially of a smaller budget, is that the campaigns with smart bidding, like you mentioned, are going to learn on all of those conversions that it's pulling. So the more conversions in a campaign, the more learning and the better that that Google algorithm or the Bing algorithm or meta algorithm is going to give you the right people for

Speaker 1: those. So actually breaking it up by location, by landing page can actually be counterproductive sometimes because you're not feeding enough conversion data back.

Speaker 2: It can if you don't have, if your budgets aren't big enough to support, if your budgets aren't big enough to support or your capacity needs aren't big enough to support a large amount of conversions coming.

Speaker 1: How do you know if your budget's big enough? Is that just impression share lost a budget? You need to be close to a certain percent. How do you know?

Speaker 2: Yeah, it depends. So it could be impression share if it's a totally new account. I mean, obviously it's kind of looking at what doing keyword research and seeing what kind of the average cost per click's there, seeing how many available impressions are in that area, seeing the competitive landscape. Like you mentioned Atlanta, Atlanta is going to be, if you want to target the center of Atlanta, it's going to be a lot more competitive for a certain type of office than if you're maybe in a more rural area. And so optimize the geographic location and really just do the research and competitive landscape there.

Speaker 1: A lot of clients used to just spread, I've got a hundred locations and a hundred K, well that means one K per location. That used to be the thing like a few years ago and we're trying to train clients out of it now. It's pick 15.

Speaker 2: It's either pick 15 or group those hundred into regions and markets and have them kind of learn against each other or with each other and kind of iron sharpens iron. If one office is doing well and it's learning what type of patient that that person's getting, it can kind of help the performance of those other offices as well.

Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. And let's talk more about that regional thing. So what do you do? You bucket the hundred locations into like low priority media. Are they like priorities and they get, how do you do that?

Speaker 2: It really depends. So one of the things we like to say here too is like we like to structure at the end of the day, the ideal setup is we like to structure the campaigns or that targeting how the company's targeted. So if your offices are set up on a regional, you have a regional sales manager there, we want to set it up and kind of, if we would do that in buckets for that region, however they identify a region, whether that's Northeast, whether that's New York, whether that's mid Atlantic, however that is, we want to bucket it that way. We also have people who internally, they do all of their systems based on priority tiers. So they call it, they do their high profit, high priority locations, their mid priority locations and that's how we'd want to bucket it that way with, with different budgets. So it's really, we want to kind of mirror what their internal goals are and what they're doing internally and how they're reporting out to their board or how they're doing that. And that's going to be the best way to kind of allocate that budget.

Speaker 1: So run your media, run your advertising, like your business runs, right? Yep. Yep. Yep. And first things first, would you say that like when you get a new client, do you hold them back? I'm like seeding the answer. I suppose. Do you hold them back? If the tracking's not right before they're increasing spend, or do you get right in a media allocation? You're like, this will be fine. Let's do this until track. I'm like, what, what's first?

Speaker 2: In a perfect world, we don't want to spend a client's money or we don't want to kind of showcase ourselves or our expertise if we're not tracking things correctly, or if the landing pages aren't optimized in the right way, because again, they're, they're going to be maybe wasting spend on driving the wrong people to the wrong places. You kind of dig yourself a hole and we're not going to be the right place. So in an ideal world, you want to be tracking the right things. You want to be tracking everything as far down the funnel as you can. But there are instances where it's like, Hey, all we care about is clicks and traffic and we really want to get top of the funnel and we need to get our brand out there. And in those cases we can kind of phase it out and do a stair-step approach. But ideally we would at least get some of that in place before we start.

Speaker 1: We've talked about media allocation for a lot of lower funnel. We went right into search. What about upper funnel? We've got an engagement right now that's pinging us actually on recruitment, but let's talk patient acquisition. Where do you like to spend, what do you, when you're doing a media allocation for upper funnel stuff, awareness is the name of the game. Hopefully it draws more efficient patients six months down the road. What do you look at? What are your favorite platforms?

Speaker 2: How do you divide it up? Yeah. I mean, again, that goes into the full funnel approach and I'm going to say it a million times and, but the more funnel segments that you have and the more channels that you're on, the more important that tracking is and the more important the internal data is. But some of the, like the DSPs, like StackAdapt we use or meta ads is becoming really prevalent, especially in certain segments to kind of really target and find people. YouTube is becoming kind of a big place to target people. It works within the same Google ecosystem and kind of learns across a lot of what you're doing in paid search and other places on Google. So those are kind of the high funnel areas where we get places. We've dabbled in some OTT and different things like that, but the targeting is way different there. The tracking is different there. So you're not necessarily going to need to track actual appointments booked in those higher funnel areas. You can just track, Hey, did these people land on my page and they not exit exactly and kind of utilize that as a, as a branding play, filling the funnel and kind of the bot, what we've seen as the bottom of the funnel, the paid search, the retargeting, all of that works better when you're doing kind of that full omni channel approach.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And you have the tracking in place to feed the information back, right? Passing no PII and no pixels, no pixels, no pixels, unless you have a CDP and you sort it out.

Speaker 2: So you can pass back the offline commercials as much as you can. And one of the beauties of those things. So for example, in meta ads, if you're running top of the funnel video ads, say you can't retarget people from your website, you can retarget people who saw your video ads and engaged with that on there. So there's, there's a way to kind of offsite retargeting. So if you're running a certain DSPs and run on top of the funnel videos kind of natively across the web, you can utilize those impression audiences and serve them back into meta or other funnels there without violating PII or doing anything on your website.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It stays on the platform and they see like whether they were served, how much of the video, and then you just keep, we're going over time, but we're having fun. So this is good. When you look at clients, when do you tell them to start investing in full funnel? When you have like certain amount of impressions here, appointments are booking, you know, like when do you tell them to start incorporating that typically awareness channel?

Speaker 2: Yeah. With clients where we're doing bottom of the funnel or patient acquisition only at the bottom. If we're getting to a point where we're seeing really good results and we're not limited by budget in a lot of areas, that's when we'll start running. We can run small tests. One of the beauties of kind of the upper funnel places is it's cheaper costs per impression and kind of cheaper cost per clicks and cheap's not always better, but you can utilize a smaller budget to do kind of a bigger test in those areas. But we do like to make sure, especially if we're seeing good actual ROI based results in the lower funnel, we do like to maximize that share before we start getting into kind of the different channels.

Speaker 1: When we're talking about commercial and maximizing media budget, something you mentioned, landing pages play in, but also like appointment availability for those that have online booking, kudos to those that do. But that's a big gotcha that we see is like no one on their side checks the damn thing to make sure there's an appointment within a week.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And that, I mean, that crushes our results and that goes to just, that goes to communication, having location trackers with people, having those capacity numbers regularly. That's that's something that if you just have good communication and a lot of internal teams, they don't know that either. So we're always, always like bringing that up saying, Hey, this location is doing worse. And we saw that when you go to that page, capacity's full. Do we need to move that budget somewhere else where we only have 50% capacity and we need to raise that? So it's just a matter of kind of just making sure you have a good, a good grasp on what you're doing there and just having good communication with the client.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the client's doing their part. That's important. Anything else that comes to mind, you think how you allocate media, big gotchas, yahoos, wahoos?

Speaker 2: Yeah. I'd say just, again, make sure all your, what is it? All your T's are dotted. It's all your IRs. Yeah. One of those things. Yeah. Just, um, just make sure that you're, that you're targeting the right people. Make sure you're doing the, don't lose sight of the basics in the platforms you're doing. Don't stop doing your search query result analysis. Don't stop. Don't stop testing. Always test new bid strategies or match types, refresh, add creative based on kind of what, what you're seeing is working really well. So the biggest mistakes I see is just people kind of losing sight of the basics and getting bogged down and kind of just making sure like budgets are good places. You want to make sure you're doing the right optimizations regularly and kind of tracking results there and test and always testing.

Speaker 1: Update copy, update creative. It's not just the PBC stuff, guys. You want great results. Look at your landing pages. Look at your copy, your creative and their appointment availability. Ryan, thanks for joining us on Ignite.

Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.