Unlock Marketing ROI
California Skin Institute Unlocks Marketing ROI with Data Integrations from Two Octobers
California Skin Institute is an innovative and growing dermatology practice, and one of the largest physician-owned dermatology groups in the US. From its early beginnings as a solo dermatologic surgery practice, over 90 providers now see patients at more than 45 locations.
True business impact from ads was impossible to measure.
The challenge
California Skin Institute has long relied on digital marketing to connect with patients looking for care. Despite engaging with a succession of vendors and in-house professionals, a lingering question remained: What was the true ROI of their digital marketing investment? Google Ads reported conversions, and receptionists reported incoming phone calls and booked appointments. But it was hard to justify digital advertising investment without having a clearer understanding of the outcomes.
We connected the website, calls, appointments, and even one step further: customer data.
The solution
While beginning to manage Google Ads campaigns, Two Octobers identified an urgent need to improve existing tracking. We started with an audit of the website to understand all relevant calls to action and conversions, including those directly related to acquiring new patients and scheduling appointments and those demonstrating other types of interest in the practice.
We recommended adding a HIPAA-compliant call tracking vendor to understand the pace of phone calls from the website. Lack of understanding of what tracking is appropriate for health care organizations can stymie marketing teams and make it hard for them to demonstrate the ROI of marketing efforts to upper management. The technical concepts inherent in website tracking can be hard for marketing and IT teams to communicate about. Two Octobers’ experience with other health care providers provided a clear roadmap for HIPAA compliant tracking and helped the marketing team advocate for the changes.
Online appointments are another key website conversion that wasn’t fully tracked. So another step was integrating Google Analytics tracking with California Skin Institute’s online appointment system, NextPatient. Two Octobers’ analytics team set up tracking for successful appointments, providing yet another direct view into digital marketing’s impact.
Still, California Skin Institute’s marketing team suspected the cost per call and appointment wasn’t telling the whole story of digital marketing’s ROI. Was there a way to connect website conversion data with customer revenue data? To tie together online and offline data, Two Octobers architected a solution which used secure, hashed data from Google Analytics to match back to internal systems. This resulted in a view of the digital marketing channel which generated a prospective patient’s first touchpoint with the practice and their resulting lifetime revenue. Two Octobers provided tools and processes for the IT team to be able to run this analysis going forward, keeping all personal information and revenue data inside California Skin Institute.
A full data picture drove directly to lower cost per customer acquired.
The results
The marketing team had the data they needed to understand the value of each digital marketing channel. End-to-end marketing-to-patient tracking was the foundation for lifetime value analysis which demonstrated that search advertising generated great ROI. With an understanding of this channel’s value for the practice, the marketing team gained consensus to invest more in this valuable channel.
Olga Taber, California Skin Institute’s VP of Marketing, reflected on the project. “We’ve always known search marketing was valuable, but we had trouble calculating the exact ROI. The data integrations that Two Octobers put together for us really changed how we could talk about what we’re doing and the impact it’s having for California Skin Institute. The entire team is confident that this investment in search marketing is worth it–and we can back it up with real data.”
With better tracking, Two Octobers was able to drive growth in new patients at the best cost per appointment, and cost per conversion in search ads dropped by 50% in the first four months and a further 50% in the next year.
