How to Successfully Track Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) for Healthcare
Is your healthcare organization pouring money into advertising campaigns without any clear insight into their effectiveness? It’s time to take control and learn how to successfully track your return on ad spend.
As healthcare continues to evolve, the market becomes increasingly crowded and competitive. To stand out, you need to set up a plan to differentiate your healthcare organization and connect with potential patients. One effective way to achieve this is through advertising campaigns that promote your services and unique value proposition. However, simply launching them isn’t enough. It’s equally important to track the success of your campaigns and determine Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
ROAS is an important metric that measures the amount of revenue generated from a particular ad campaign compared to the amount spent on that campaign. By tracking ROAS for healthcare, you can make informed decisions about where to allocate your advertising budget and ensure that your campaigns are producing a positive Return on Investment (ROI).
Importance of Tracking ROAS for Healthcare
Tracking ROAS for healthcare is essential to the long-term success of any healthcare group looking to grow their business and reach more patients. Just as medical tests provide valuable information on the progress of patient health, measuring ROAS provides important data on the success of a healthcare marketing ad campaign.
For example, if your healthcare organization spends $1,000 on a campaign promoting a new medical service and generates $10,000 in revenue from patients who used the service, the ROAS would be 10:1. This means that for every dollar spent on advertising, you generated $10 in revenue. Once you have this information, you can make informed decisions about future marketing efforts, such as whether to invest more or less in a particular channel or strategy.
In addition to helping you allocate your budget more effectively, tracking ROAS for healthcare can help you identify areas for improvement in ad campaigns. For example, if a campaign has a low ROAS, you can analyze data to identify ways to improve targeting, positioning, or ad content. Additionally, ROAS for healthcare can help you identify trends and provide insights into patient behavior, such as which services or procedures are most profitable, which patient demographics generate the highest revenue, and which geographic areas offer the greatest growth potential. By leveraging this information, you can optimize your advertising efforts, attract more patients, and actually grow your healthcare organization in meaningful ways instead of going by what your gut tells you.
Are Your Ads Worth It?
Paying for clicks to your healthcare website without a strong emphasis on data analytics can feel like buying a lottery ticket. You’re never quite sure if your advertising campaign will pay off or not. However, tracking ROAS in healthcare can help you estimate the success of your campaign and know what kind of ROI to expect.
Here are some of the steps you can take to determine whether your advertising efforts are profitable or if you need to adjust your strategy:
Define Your Conversion Goals
To track ROAS, you need to determine your conversion goals first. However, conversion goals in healthcare may be different than in other industries because your goals are focused on patient outcomes and healthcare services.
When you define your conversion goals, it allows you to set specific and measurable objectives, track the success of your ad campaigns, and make informed decisions about where to allocate your advertising budget.
For example, if your conversion goal is to increase the number of appointments scheduled, you can track the number of appointments made by patients who clicked on your ads. This can help you determine the effectiveness of your ad campaigns in driving patient engagement and ultimately increasing revenue. If your conversion goal is to increase the number of patients who sign up for a specific program, you can track the number of program sign-ups attributed to your advertising campaigns and measure your success in achieving specific healthcare-related outcomes.
Set up HIPAA-Compliant Conversion Tracking
Once you define your conversion goals, you need to set up conversion tracking. This involves adding a conversion tracking tag to your website’s code, which allows you to track user behavior and activity, such as appointments scheduled or requests for more information. Without conversion tracking, it can be difficult to determine which advertising campaigns or channels are driving patient engagement and which ones are not. For example, if you find that a particular campaign or channel is driving a high number of scheduled appointments, you may want to allocate more budget to that campaign or channel to further increase engagement.
At the same time, under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), you’re required to protect the privacy and security of patient information, including any PHI collected through ad campaigns. Conversion tracking involves collecting data on patient behavior and activity that may include PHI, so it’s critical that you handle it in a safe and confidential way. To achieve this, make sure that any conversion tracking tags or tools used to track patient data are HIPAA-compliant and that any patient data is collected and stored in a secure manner.
Determine the Revenue Generated by the Campaign
Calculating the revenue generated by your ad campaign based on your conversion goals is important when tracking ROAS in healthcare because it helps you determine the financial impact of your advertising efforts.
For example, if your goal is to increase the number of appointments scheduled, you can calculate the total revenue generated from those appointments. This could include the cost of the appointment as well as any additional services or treatments provided during the appointment.
This data can help you accurately measure the ROI of your advertising spend and improve the overall effectiveness of your advertising strategy. You can even go one step further and calculate the value of any treatment options that were proposed for the future, which helps you identify patients by the amount of treatment they need and how much potential revenue they represent.
Calculate the Cost of the Campaign
Another important step when tracking ROAS in healthcare involves determining the profitability of your advertising efforts. Comparing the cost of the advertising campaign to the revenue generated helps you identify which ad campaigns or channels are most cost-effective and which ones are not performing as well.
Calculating the cost of a campaign includes not only the cost of the ads themselves but also any other expenses related to the campaign. For example, if you spent $10,000 on a Google Ads campaign, the cost would include not only the cost of the ads but also any fees paid to a creative agency to develop the ads or fees paid to a digital marketing agency to manage the campaign. By accurately calculating the cost of the campaign, you can better decide where to allocate your advertising budget for optimal ROI.
Set the Foundation Before Using Paid Search to Augment Your Growth Needs
Tracking ROAS for healthcare enables you to evaluate which of your ad campaigns are profitable, and which campaigns cost more than they bring in. With this data, you’re able to retarget and optimize them to make sure your digital ad spend is really helping to meet your goals. However, to lay a strong foundation for long-term success, you must first focus on dominating the local SERP organically and tracking ROI. After your organic dominance matures, you should consider taking the next step with paid search and tracking ROAS for healthcare.
By developing a long-term plan to dominate local SERP organically, you can establish your healthcare organization as a credible and authoritative source of information and care within your community. This leads to increased online visibility, higher search engine rankings, and ultimately, greater patient acquisition and revenue. Focusing on organic SEO efforts, such as creating high-quality content and optimizing website pages for the right keywords, can significantly improve your online presence and attract more organic traffic to your website.
Furthermore, tracking ROI on each strategy you use to dominate local SERP helps you understand the effectiveness of your overall strategy, identify areas for improvement, and justify the resources and budget allocated to your marketing efforts.
Let’s say a local dental clinic wants to improve its online presence and attract more patients. They begin by auditing their online presence, then working towards optimizing their website for search engines and creating valuable content related to their services. This includes keyword research and incorporation, optimizing meta tags and descriptions, creating blog posts, and ensuring their website is mobile-friendly and easy to navigate. Additionally, the clinic establishes itself on online directories and review sites, such as Google Business Profile and Apple Business Connect, to improve its online reputation and credibility.
Next, the clinic tracks the ROI of its organic SERP efforts by analyzing website traffic, user engagement, and conversion rates. They also track the performance of their content and keywords and monitor their online reputation on review sites. Based on this data, they identify the most effective strategies and tactics for improving online presence and attracting new patients.
Once they establish the foundation, they can supplement organic efforts with paid search advertising to increase online visibility, attract more patients, and generate a positive ROI, so they start using paid search to target potential patients searching for dental services. They create targeted ads using high-performing keywords and bid on ad placements at the top of the SERP.
They also track the ROAS to the patient, and revenue for paid search to evaluate the effectiveness of their campaigns. For instance, they track the number of clicks on the ad, the number of appointments scheduled, and the revenue generated from those appointments. With the help of ROAS for healthcare, they can further adjust marketing efforts, optimize their ad spend accordingly, and improve ROI.
Keep Your ROI and ROAS High
Calculating ROAS for any kind of advertising can be complex and tracking ROAS for healthcare where volume is unpredictable and patient privacy is essential may seem downright impossible.
The good news is that while it’s complex, tracking ROAS for healthcare is entirely achievable. SocialClimb’s platform provides you with a range of easy-to-use, HIPAA-compliant features to improve your online presence and increase patient acquisition, but also track ROI and ROAS.
The platform allows you to track patient acquisition by source, including organic search, paid search, social media, postcards, and more. This way, you can better understand which marketing channels are driving the most patient traffic and which channels are providing the best ROI. In addition to this, you can get detailed data on your ad spend and revenue by channel, but also track your advertising data over time, providing insights into long-term trends and changes in patient behavior.
