Podcast #37

5 Keys to Effective Paid Search Strategies That Generate More Patients

Healthcare organizations need to move their paid search campaigns from an efficiency-based optimization strategy to an effectiveness-based optimization strategy.

Healthcare Marketing Insights At Your Fingertips

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Episode Highlights:

Nicholas Van Winkle

Nicholas Van Winkle: “As you enforce more and more quality in the system, the CPA or the CPL will come up, but the cost per new patient will come down. There’s an inverse relationship. It’s important to set that expectation for the clients, because we all get a bit cold feet sometimes when we see what superficially looks like less efficient performance.”

Alex Kemp

Alex Kemp: “At the heart of any account is the search terms, because if you’re not doing your keyword targeting right and if you’re not capturing the right search terms, you will not see good performance for your actual business.”

Related Resources

Read the Transcript

Announcer Welcome to the Ignite podcast. The only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week, Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Alex MemrbilloIn today’s fast-moving healthcare world, information is key, but so many voices out there who do you listen to? You can have the biggest impact on your marketing budget. Welcome to Ignite, hosted by thought leaders in digital marketing. This is a very special edition where our hosts discuss everything from smart bidding and AI to marketing psychology, and the advanced techniques, advanced, advanced, advanced techniques that yield the best results.

I’m excited about this. We don’t always do advance so this will be fun for some of you. Yes, it’s the best minds from Cardinal Digital Marketing here to give you the scoop on the strategies we usually only reserve for clients. Sneak peek, clients, they’ll get mad at us, but I heard they were planning a chat and decided to get you a front-row seat. You can be on the leading edge. Here they come now. Let’s listen in.

Nicholas Van WinkleMy name is Nicholas Van Winkle, I am the Director of Paid Media at Cardinal, and I am here with-

Alex KempAlex Kemp. Hi, I’m the Director of PPC here at Cardinal.

Nicholas: -we are having a very casual conversation on a bench in a park. Thanks for joining me. Let’s talk about the larger theme of this conversation. It’s in many ways, bid management strategies and the need for appropriate campaign structures that map onto those bidding strategies, because there are lots of ways that this can go right, and lots of ways that this could go wrong. What we want to talk about is all the ways in which we know they go, where they go wrong because we’ve been doing this a long time.

To start, let’s just tee it up with account structure. This is as it pertains to paid search right now that we can talk about this for all the channels, social programmatic display, video. We have a good discussion for each one of these channels, but I just want to make it very clear that this one is only in relation to paid search. Let’s talk about account structure and how bidding can map into those accounts structures based on the structures themselves.

Let me maybe for the purposes of this conversation, if I can be the generalist as I am, and you can be the specialist, so you please correct me when I go a foul. What we have in account structure best practice is essentially a spectrum. On one end is that of total segmentation. The other end, we have total consolidation, and both have trade-offs. There are pros and cons that live for each. On the segmented side what you get is absolute control.

You have location level control. I can fund the particulars of a location with almost perfect specificity. On this end I lose some of that control. What I trade up is that I get more access to essentially bidding technology. If that’s the lay of the land in terms of account structure, the first I characterize that right?

Alex: Yes. That’s how I think about it. It’s this sliding scale between segmentation and consolidation.

Nicholas: Tell me about segmentation and when it makes sense.

Alex: We’ve seen that segmentation really makes sense when you have these business constraints or business objectives, where for example, a lot of healthcare, multi-local organizations need to know how much they spent per location every month. That’s restraint or an objective that we have to think about that as we build the account, and as we structure the campaigns, because that’s a very different requests than we can let the spend go where it may, and we don’t need to know how much each location spent.

We also don’t need to emphasize, or even deemphasize certain locations as you move along this scale, and that there is a lot of different points in between the scale. As you move along that scale, it also translates to your probability of smart bidding working the best for you. The more consolidated you are, the higher chances of smart bidding working for you, versus highly segmented structure. It doesn’t mean it can’t work, but it’s just not going to work as many times as it would, if it was consolidated.

Nicholas: Can you tell me what smart bidding is please? It seems like we should probably get that on the table.

Alex: Yes, absolutely. Smart bidding is essentially Google’s product in which that it basically sets all of your bids for you. You can have some levers and some inputs, and to say, “I don’t want to spend more than this per click, or spend less than this per click,” but it’s essentially letting Google have the rains when it comes to bid management.

Saying, “Not only are we going to set the keyword bid, but we’re also going to set all these other adjustments based on millions and millions of data points that they have in their system that we don’t have,” if you’re doing manual. For most advertisers that leads to better success, better performance and better quality.

Nicholas: Okay, I’m a healthcare advertiser. I’ve got 150 locations. I want to use both a very segmented model. I want to fund each location specifically as I have specific location level goals that I have to meet, and I want to use smart bidding. Why can’t that work?

Alex: Essentially what it comes down to is all about the campaign level data, Google Ads is structured around the campaign. This is how everything is segmented, and the way that campaign learnings work is for each campaign you have conversion data for that campaign, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that for another campaign is going to share that data. Essentially, if you have 150 locations and you’re saying, “I need 150 campaigns,” you’re limiting the amount of data that each campaign can get.

If the daily budget is $10 a day, because you have 150 campaigns, obviously it’s going to take more time for that campaign to learn, and to know works and how to set bids. Whereas if it was one campaign with a much higher daily budget, the learnings are so much faster.

Nicholas: The other end of the spectrum. A sheer consolidated model, I’m the same healthcare advertiser, I have on 150 locations. I have a single campaign with all of those locations grouped, and I use, I now have smart bidding available to me. Tell me about some of the advantages here and then the disadvantages.

Alex: The advantage is obviously that you’re essentially setting up the machines for success. You’re doing your due diligence. Another thing that we’ll talk about a lot today is AI plus humans is always going to be better than just AI. If you can direct the algorithm in a way and give them a head start versus inhibiting that algorithm, that that’s always going to be a benefit. The benefit here is that you have one campaign, it has all these learnings, and it’s going to get out of that learning phase much faster.

It’s going to scale much faster as well. One of the disadvantages are the downsides of it is that obviously you lose some control there. When I had 150 campaigns, I can change daily budget for every single location. and set it how I want, but now it’s a little bit different where we’re essentially telling Google, “Hey, I don’t care where the money goes. I just want to get the best performance across the board.”

Obviously there’s going to be some loss of control there. There are certain things you can do, certain structure you can use there to have a little bit more control. That’s where we are moving down the scale again, to more of a right in the middle, what we call it a hybrid model.

Nicholas: Well, that sounds fascinating to me. What is a hybrid model actually look like? Am I asking too many questions?

Alex: No, no, I think this is great. I think it can look like a lot of different things. There are happy mediums in between consolidation and a totally fragmented structure. One of the ones that we’ve found that works very well is having a tier-based solution where you’re saying, “Okay, I have this group of locations that really need more attention than the other locations. These are my problem childs, they’re the squeaky wheels, that are always struggling. How can we make sure we’re performing as best as we can for those locations?”

Then you have this other group of locations, that’s saying, “These are well-established. These are not so much the squeaky wheels. These are the ones that I’m not really prioritizing.” Essentially what we say is, “Okay, we will take that information and structure the account based on that.” You have a tier one campaign and a tier two campaign. The idea is that with a tier two campaign or basically the tier that is the focus locations, the priority locations, you can still have automated bidding.

You can also have a little bit more control in terms of saying, “Okay, I’m going to, I’m going to bid upon this location within this campaign, because we’re actually struggling here, versus actually this location is doing very well. It’s getting a lot of spend and we can pull back.” Depending on what bidding strategy you’re using, that’s where you can have a little bit more control, and not go on either in to the spectrum, and really strike a balance there.

Nicholas: What I would want to know as a healthcare advertiser is, look, I have a Birmingham location and at that location, I can’t seem to attract, I have a lot of opportunity here. I have a lot of essentially empty seats that I need to fill. I have, let’s say a Memphis location where I have essentially I’m at total capacity. I have availability as a problem that I want digital marketing to solve. How does the capacity at each location? How can that work within either a consolidated segment or a hybrid approach?

Alex: That’s another situation where you need to have a little bit more control, not just for the spend of location, but you’re talking about like the revenue potential or the capacity of a certain location. That’s where we’ve also used a tier system where we say we group locations into similar buckets know locations that are highly efficient, but actually don’t need that much more support because they’re doing well organically, or through other channels, or maybe be another tier of this location’s very inefficient on digital, but it is a very high priority location.

How can we again align our bidding strategies with that information? If it is a very inefficient location that we need to scale and prioritize, what bidding strategy do we use there, and what makes most sense? That’s another way that you can just strategically group locations based on what those needs are for the location, and then choose the right bidding strategy in the daily budgets, and all that things, all that good stuff in terms of dialing in on certain locations that need priority versus other ones that are, that are less priority.

Nicholas: I find myself wanting to talk about a real-world example, because this is not just theory. We do this all day and for particular clients, they pushed us into a more control, a more segmented model because we had to map onto the demands of their business and performance did suffer for them as a result. Now, we were able to shunt more dollars to each one of these locations per the segmented model that worked.

We traded off in terms of conversions and efficiency rather mightily, right? You offered up a solution to it’s like, all right what happens when we actually take that really segmented approach that does map onto your business and experiment with a consolidated approach, and just see what happens in terms of the total number of dollars flow into each location, and then the conversions flowing into each location.

What we saw was something rather remarkable. It’s like, we didn’t actually give much away in terms of how funded each location was. We did lose control, but there was a pretty impressive, or let’s say equal distribution that looked similar to that of a segmented model, but we got to fuse all of the capabilities with that of smart bidding. We got a lot of this segmented at a location level in terms of budget spend, but we got the conversions along the way. Now I hope I didn’t just explain the whole story but is that true?

Alex: Yes, that’s how I would describe it. In 100% of situations, it’s always going to happen that way, but I think in that specific scenario, it’s the a classic example of trying to take more control over the account and taking control away from Google. It’s a constant balance between how much you’re giving to Google, and how much you want to keep for yourself. I think that was an example where even when we try to take more control, and be more strategic, and be more nuanced with our account structure and our strategy, it came back to bite us.

We were stepping in the way of Google saying, “Actually, I know how to allocate these dollars, and this is the way I want to do it.” What turns out is, like you said when we go to a consolidated structure, we really didn’t lose out on much in terms of the funding of each location, and the performance the cost per lead the conversion rate were much better. I think again, it’s just the, where you want to strike that balance of how much control you need and how much control you’re willing to give away for better performance.

Nicholas: Yes I think there theoretical or hypothetical cases for pure segmentation. I can find them, but they’re becoming less frequent. Even the pure case for segmentation is becoming as coming truly rare, given what’s possible with smart bidding right now. That’s only to plant the flag on, or make the points that segmentation pure segmentation this far end of the spectrum is becoming less and less frequent in the industry. I don’t expect that to change.

Alex: Yes, 100% agree.

Nicholas: Now we talked about the hybrid approach, the tier-based solutions that we can bring to bear, and those tiers can be made of anything. Geography, that’s obvious, we can do it based on revenue potential at the location, capacity, all of the intersection of all those things they’re in can essentially make a tier-based solution. It really depends on your business, the way it’s structured, and then take that information and nest it into what is a digital marketing structure, or a paid search structure.

All right. The pace of consolidation within the healthcare industry is accelerating Alex. Organizations are growing across states to dozens, if not hundreds of locations. Now is a good question, how that makes media management more difficult?

Alex: Yes. I think one of the inherent concerns when you’re adding in new locations is the unknown, right? Just because certain markets or certain locations perform a certain way for the same keywords. You may not know the certain nuances of this location, and it also does pose an issue just in terms of, how do we fit this into our current structure? What makes the most sense? How are we going to set up this location?

A lot of times when new locations launch, it’s actually a very prioritized effort it’s not just like, “Hey, just add this into the bill.” It’s like, “Hey, we have a new location, It’s brand new. We need to really ramp it up. What can we do?” That’s where you have to make those decisions in terms of how do we want to integrate this into our account? Going back to the consolidated segmented conversation. Sometimes what we’ve seen is launching it straight into the consolidated campaign.

If you have a consolidated structure, that’s really the ideal situation, because you’re essentially just giving Google a new input and saying, “Okay, I was targeting all these other places and now I’m targeting this other place,” it’s going to learn. I think that’s the quickest way to scale that location efficiently, versus what some people tend to go to is saying, “I’m going to launch a specific location or a specific campaign for this location,” and not saying that’s never going to work, but what we’ve seen is that you’re essentially creating a brand new campaign with no learnings, no conversion data.

Google can make some assumptions about maybe some of your other campaigns or some of your other conversions, but it still comes down to the fact that you’re introducing a brand new campaign to the system, and it’s going to take time to learn. Sometimes that learning period, it takes place better when it’s in that consolidated campaign, versus if it’s broken out. Again it has to go through that learning phase.

Nicholas: We learned this the hard way, kind of. It’s not right or wrong, but this segmenting new locations, incubating them within their own campaign and then transferring them when they mature into the consolidated model. It strikes me as a logical story, and it could work, but there are some technical hang-ups here, and namely is the data that we learn from the segmented campaign doesn’t actually translate in.

It doesn’t move into the consolidated campaign. Essentially, although it could still work, because maybe just, it learned quickly within the consolidated model, but the point I wanted to make is that there’s no transfer of knowledge from one right to the other, and that’s important.

Alex: Yes, that’s another inherent flaw in that strategy of like you said, incubating a location. You’re introducing the location twice. It’s making a redundancy of saying, “Here’s a new location with a brand new campaign,” and let’s say it ramps up it scales and it gets some conversions. Now you’re saying, “Okay, I think it makes sense now to put this into the consolidated campaign,” you’re essentially doing that same thing again that you just did, because like you said, the conversion data, the learnings from that specific market or that location doesn’t necessarily inform the consolidated campaign.

That’s where we’ve seen sometimes it’s just better to start it off in a consolidated campaign and see how it performs if it needs to get more attention, we can always break it out if you need to, but to by default force, the market or the location to go into two learning periods is proactively lengthening your ramp-up time and learnings for that location.

Nicholas: All right. If I had to rank order for paid search, what the most important elements were, let’s call number one, the structure. Choosing the structure that fits the healthcare marketer’s business, number one. Everything flows from it. If you get it wrong, consequences are real, so working through that question together is paramount. Number two I would say, is the conversion. The conversion that we’re actually bringing into the system.

Then I would say number three is the actual optimization mechanism by which we use to drive these conversions, but conversions themselves are crucial. What I would say here is what’s important about conversions is essentially how rich the data is that you can bring into the system. There’s surface-level data that most often marketers use as their primary conversion type, and let’s say that can be phone calls or form submits on a site, which we can guard.

We can try and steer the thing to more and more quality, but ultimately it drops off because we don’t know. If we can integrate a conversion type that actually has all of the quality indicators inside it, and then optimized to that, it’s an absolute game-changer. Then of course we can use the smart bidding technologies to find more and more that look like that really qualified lead. The quality of lead that we’re optimizing to is so important.

Now, I’m going to ask you, talk to me about phone calls and forms that don’t have all of the, let’s say CRM based quality enforcement that we might like, how do we use those conversions, and where do we ultimately want to take all of our clients too, in terms of more and more quality leads?

Alex: Yes, so I think that’s one of the bigger mistakes that most advertisers make nowadays is they’re telling the machines, the system, the algorithm that all I want are forms and calls. As I think a lot of people here listening might know is that not all forms are of the same quality. Not all the same calls or of the same quality, and that’s one of the bigger things I think some people are missing on is that they’re wondering why they’re not getting more new patients or more appointments or whatever it may be.

A lot of the times, the way you can get more nuanced and a better optimization scheme is when you’re actually informing the algorithm what actually happened to those calls and forms. Really it comes down to the user themselves. What happened to that user? Did they not end up becoming a patient because of X, Y, and Z? I think that’s where there’s just a mismatch between what we actually want, which is not calls and forms.

What we actually want is patients, and so when there’s a mismatch between what you want, and what you’re telling the algorithm that you want, there’s going to be inherent flaws in that optimization scheme. The way we want all of our clients moving towards is a system where we are not only telling the algorithm, “Hey, these people did what, the first action that we wanted them to do, which was to contact us, but they also ended up becoming a patient.”

Can we feed any offline CRM data back into the system, and not only say, “These people can make this action, and they also did the ultimate goal for me, which has become a patient.” That just, again, goes back to richer data, better insights for the algorithm, and usually better performance, because like you said, it’s just using pattern recognition to see this person become a patient. What are all the things that make up this user, and how can we go and find more users like them?

I think that’s a newer era I think a paid search strategy here where you’re not just counting calls and forms, you’re counting the patients in the system.

Nicholas: I find that critical, and so many marketers, I think are still relying on efficiency before effectiveness, and we stand up systems that enforce efficiency. Then we report back as if we’re winning the day, like look at we’re driving all of these phone calls and form fills, but not with strong regard for their actual quality, what’s the likelihood that they actually became a patient. It’s really important to bring more and more quality information into the system and optimize against it.

I don’t know if anyone would ever disagree agree with this, but the slow migration from us generally in the agency space, and in paid search specifically are migrating from an efficiency-based optimization view to an effectiveness-based optimization view. Here at Cardinal, we’re making this the cornerstone, the foundation of our approach.

Alex: Yes, and I think another thing worth noting there too, is a lot of times what we found is that and it really, it makes sense. It’s intuitive when you think about it, that the higher quality leads are actually more expensive, which we’ve seen accounts where we don’t integrate that lower funnel, offline data, and the algorithm is really good at finding the type of conversions that you’re telling it to find, and that could be a low-quality conversion.

When we started integrating we made some adjustments and started integrating that CRM data into the system, the way that the campaign was serving across keywords, across demographics and devices and everything, they just completely shifted, because we weren’t telling it to go find the cheapest conversion possible, we were telling it to go find the most quality conversion at a cost that we are okay with.

Versus, as I said, if you are telling the system that you want any call, doesn’t matter if it’s from the website or from an ad, then they’re really good at that, but again, it goes back to giving this machine, the right inputs, because if you’re not giving them those inputs that matter, you’re not guiding it in the direction that you need to.

Nicholas: I think what you said is exactly right, and actually when it comes to cost per lead, cost per acquisition, the more quality lead that you actually eventually integrate back into the system, you will pay more. The CPA, however you name it, will by dent of this come up. This puts a bit of a scare sometimes into marketers because they feel as if they’re becoming less efficient, but when you track to the cost per new patient, not just cost per lead, you see that coming down.

As you enforce more and more quality in the system, the CPA, the CPL will come up, but because it’s frankly more expensive, it always will be, but the cost per new patient will come down, so there’s an inverse relationship. It’s important to set that expectation, I think, for the clients, because we all get a bit cold feet sometimes when we see what superficially looks like less efficient performance.

Alex: Yes, and I think goes back to what you’re saying of a lot of people look at it purely from efficiency. Like, “We drove the lowest CPA we ever driven this month,” but it just makes more sense for it to be geared towards effectiveness, because like I said, you can drive a lot of low-quality leads and make it work if you have like the sheer volume of those low-quality leads. At some point, as we’ve talked about sometimes quantity is quality.

If you’re not getting that type of volume, then it doesn’t matter if the cost lead is X percent higher for the more qualified lead, because at the rate at which that lead is going to convert to a patient, it doesn’t matter about how cheap it was. The other low-quality lead was. At the end of the day, it’s about effectiveness over efficiency.

Obviously, we want to be effective and efficient, but I think a lot of times people and advertisers are too focused on efficiency and not thinking about what’s actually happening to those conversions after they call, or after they fill out a form.

Nicholas: Well said, all right, what else should we cover on this topic? I think we’ve talked about maybe even to death, the campaign structure and its importance, we’ve talked about the importance of quality conversions, the quality of conversion and the bidding strategies there in that can enforce that quality conversion, but what’s really important. Maybe they aren’t cornerstones, but they should be addressed because they’re significant is some of the details about the campaign structure, namely that our funnel-based approach.

Now when you’re in the healthcare space, as we primarily are, we have essentially it’s called lower funnel programs. We have a lot of intent in the marketplace, often looking for the solution that our healthcare markers provide. Often they don’t need to be, let’s say sometimes they don’t need to be nurtured. Simply their intention is ready, they’re ready to become a patient. We, in many ways design systems, they grab and capture them.

Often that intentionality isn’t as high and so there are research aspects they’re bringing to bear. They’re not ready to become a patient yet, so how do we structure some of our paid search accounts to accommodate people that are still discovering and researching and essentially looking for the right solution, and they’re not yet certain of it?

Alex: Yes, what we’ve found is that a lot of the times, like you were saying, those lower funnel, high intent keywords are like you said they don’t really need a lot of nurturing. They’re already basically telling you, “Hey, I’m looking for this thing, do you have it?” Versus some more upper-funnel keywords where it’s more in the healthcare space, more symptom around symptoms, or about just researching topics versus saying, “I’m looking for a solution.”

That’s where we look at it as a three funnel stage if you would want to refer to them there, so a problem aware which has got the most upper funnel, like I was saying, the user knows they have a problem. They’re doing research about a topic, they’re asking questions, but they’re not really looking for solutions just yet. Then you have the solution aware, where that’s as a name suggests, people are actually saying, “Okay, I already know I have this problem. I’m actually looking for a solution now through a search query.”

Then your very lower funnel product aware, and product in this sense really just means your brand. They’ve gone through the problem aware, the solution aware, and maybe they’ve been to your website, or seen your ad and say, “Okay, I’m specifically looking for this brand.” Really what we’ve seen is the best approach is to go back to the system, not limiting the algorithm and saying, “You can serve on all these keywords,” and the system will calibrate to which keywords are driving conversions.

It will naturally do that just because again you’re telling the system to drive as many conversions as possible or at a certain cost, and then another layer there where we see it work really well is when you add in data-driven attrition, or any non-last-click attribution model, because you can just think about this as a user going through this journey of, they did some queries about their problem, they did some queries about their solution, and then eventually landed on your website.

That’s maybe their first interaction with you like I said, was with that problem query, when they actually clicked through the website, and maybe read an article or whatever it was, but if you have a non-last click, or a last-click attribution model, the keyword that drove that conversion is going to get 100% of the credit for that conversion, where in reality, maybe they came in through a problem where keyword, and we’re not crediting that stage of the funnel correctly.

You could potentially allocate budget in the wrong areas if you do that. That’s where we see a full-funnel strategy plus non-last click attribution, which is where you can really live in all stages of the funnel, and properly fund each stage of the funnel as well, based on each specific user. That’s how we think about the full-funnel strategy.

Nicholas: Okay. Paired with a non-last-click attribution model. That’s the only way to successfully enforce a funnel-based paid search strategy, and most marketers are already out of the last click game. Anyway, we certainly are here using either a position-based, or Google’s more newfangled data, DDA data-driven attribution, which essentially just pattern detects customer journeys based on keywords, and essentially finds more and more relevant journeys that eventually lead to conversions.

I think we have five things on the table now as to what’s really important in healthcare, marketing for paid search, that was campaign structure, quality of conversion, there was the bidding that you use, and now we have the funnel based strategy is contained within the structure and the attribution profile that you use to enforce the funnel. Five big things that are essentially you have to get right if you’re going to get paid search right, right now.

Let me ask you, let me be rather rude and ask you a question. Now, if you had to give the healthcare marketer advice, if someone out there is watching this and wondering, he’s like, “Well that was a little weeds-y for me,” and apologies if that’s true, we’ve been doing this a while. How would you help someone out? How would you put them on the right footing, given the five things that we just laid out? I’m sorry for asking you this question, that’s a big one.

Alex: Yes. First, like we were talking about really more so your business objectives, your business constraints are going to dictate your structure, so knowing what your business constraints or your business objectives are, that is obviously going to help inform you. I think we always default to, if you don’t have these constraints that require a segmented structure, we 100% recommend consolidating.

I think it starts there with saying, “Okay, what are my actual business needs? How can I translate that into paid search?”

I would say another big thing that maybe we didn’t cover in that five that maybe is intertwined in the funnel strategy, but I think at the heart of any account is the search terms, because if you’re not doing your keyword targeting right, if you’re not capturing the right search terms, you can be doing all five of those things that we talked about. You could be doing all of those perfectly, and you will still not see good performance for your actual business.

You might be driving some conversions, but if they’re irrelevant search terms, they’re probably not going to turn into patients. I think that’s another very key piece of any paid search account is you have to get that bare minimum core thing down of getting those right search term into your account. I would also say that’s like a big focus for anyone starting an account or running an account.

Then really, I think at the end of the day, to just a limit it to three things here, really leaning in to machine learning, and being able to test and give away some control, because at the end of the day, humans should not be doing what machines do better than humans. Maybe that’s not true for every single scenario, but in the case of bidding, in the case of AB testing, copy, things like that.

Technology just advanced enough to where that’s not something humans really need to be doing anymore, and they can focus their attention on other big picture things, and really leaning into to automation and machine learning is it’s about allowing machines to do what they’re best at, and allowing humans to do what they’re best at. I would say those three things I think is maybe high level enough to be useful.

Nicholas: I think so, it made perfect sense to me or pretty close to it. Anything to conclude here?

Alex: No, I think for anyone who needs to maybe figure out what their business, maybe they don’t know what those business constraints are for healthcare marketers and directors where they’re saying do we really need to know how much location Jeeps, location span, or really do we really need to have control over every single location?

Posing that question of saying just reevaluating your internal operations and saying, “If this is an absolute need, then there’s really no way to get around that,” but if there are things you can shift around and maybe it’s not, maybe you don’t need to know every single little detail, but you can still basically know how each location is performing. I think that’s another way that you can pitch that is just saying just re-evaluating your actual business constraints, and how that relates to paid search.

Nicholas: Yes. There are many things here we didn’t just have time to touch on, creative landing pages, how all that weaves into the performance, but I think we covered the high points for sure. What can I say? Thank you for meeting me in the park to discuss paid search marketing for healthcare advertisers, and dare I say, we did a real good job.

Alex: Thank you.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to this episode of Ignite, interested in keeping up with the latest trends in healthcare marketing, subscribe to our podcast, and leave a rating and review. For more healthcare marketing tips, visit our blog at cardinaldigitalmarketing.com.

 

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