Stated simply, its not enough to generate a conversion, more important then this is generating the right kind of conversion. In healthcare or any industry with limited capacity bringing in the right customer is the difference between loosing money and making money. In healthcare, provider schedules can be clogged with well worried patients who don’t qualify for a surgery. I try to put filters, or guided decision trees in place to help direct people where appropriate. For bariatric surgery for example, one must be a certain BMI, and not smoke. This can be assessed through a few simple questions before sending off the appointment request.
The Problem
My team was in charge of generating conversions while clinical marketing would bring people to the front door (aka the website). The local market for Rehabilitation (traumatic brain and spinal cord injury) was being challenged by competition out of state and a new building had required significant donor investment for state of the art equipment providing the best possible outcomes for patients. A large paid marketing effort was in place to generate awareness and grow volume.
Strangely around this time I was getting questions from rehab why they were getting requests for obgyn appointments or primary care appointments from the website. I scoured the website trying to find if we had a form or link directing to the wrong place. I ran a code scan to try and find any form that may be going to the wrong place but alas everything seemed to be in working order. I reviewed the rehab website to see if there was any misleading information but there was not.
The Solution
I looked at the rehab marketing campaign and a quick gut check told me the conversion numbers where too high. The volume of people needing traumatic brain injury or debilitating spinal cord injuries thankfully isn’t that high.
Here was the smoking gun, something was happening with our adwords campaign. Long story short Google’s AI can be set to optimize a campaign by testing a variety of keywords. In this case google was seeing more and more conversions for very general queries. This was leading people to a page where they expected a general appointment but the business was expecting people for Rehab.
We shutoff the AI and defined a more targeted list of words that would meet the users expectations that were seeking brain and spine injury rehab. Conversions went down for rehab but this was a good thing. We didnt want conversions. We wanted to get the right kind of conversions.