The Client:
After trying a paid search campaign with a very wide geographic focus and costly, informational keywords an award-winning St. Louis-based hospital approached tSunela for a more strategic approach to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. They were interested in a more targeted response and higher conversion rate.
The Challenges:
PPC advertising or paid search are ads served in response to user queries on search engines. Clients often assume that the more general the keywords, the broader the geographic reach, and the more times a day the ads run, the better the outcome. However, because PPC is intention-based marketing, its success is based on hitting the right person at the right time with the right message. It became clear that tSunela needed to refine the hospital’s strategy, taking into account action-oriented (vs. informational) keywords and targeted geographic regions for each service line.
The Solution:
tSunela helped the hospital identify key service lines including their heart center, breast health, digestive diseases, orthopedic and spine center, rehab therapy, and lung center to narrow focus. Then, based on the locations of these centers and other demographic criteria, they reduced the geo-target for each campaign. In addition, the tSunela team scaled back the time of day and day of week to preserve the budget and created campaigns around action words like “mammogram specialist” instead of “mammogram”.
The Results:
This new 12-month strategy resulted in a lower cost-per-click campaign that produced a higher conversion rate. In fact, overall, the hospital saw a 3.63% click-through rate and a 15% call-to-appointment ratio with 40 appointments across all service lines directly attributed to this effort. Specifically, the heart center received 19 appointments, there were 36 calls to the breast center, 12 appointments for digestive diseases, 9 appointments made at the orthopedic and spine center, and 14 calls for rehab therapy.
The hospital gained many new recurring patients, which translates to increased recurring revenue, all while spending less on their PPC campaign efforts. Many companies can implement a PPC campaign; however, meaningful results happen when a cohesive strategy and digital marketing expertise are applied to paid search.
Contact tSunela today for more information on our internet marketing services.