When HHS guidance forced healthcare marketers to rethink online tracking overnight, most scrambled to get back to baseline. Lauren Anderson of Baptist Health did something different. She used the disruption to finally answer the question leadership had always been asking: is our marketing actually driving patient appointments? In this episode, Lauren walks through how she mapped the full conversion journey, exposed the gaps hiding between campaign clicks and scheduled procedures, and built the cross-functional relationships with legal, IS, and finance that made a real attribution solution possible.
When HHS guidance forced healthcare marketers to rethink online tracking overnight, most scrambled to get back to baseline. Lauren Anderson of Baptist Health did something different. She used the disruption to finally answer the question leadership had always been asking: is our marketing actually driving patient appointments? In this episode, Lauren walks through how she mapped the full conversion journey, exposed the gaps hiding between campaign clicks and scheduled procedures, and built the cross-functional relationships with legal, IS, and finance that made a real attribution solution possible.
👉 Check out the actionable guide based on this episode
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⏱️ Episode Timestamps
*(01:22) - How HHS guidance forced a data stack reckoning at Baptist Health
*(03:57) - Showing leadership the tracking gaps: the diagram that changed everything
*(09:05) - Building cross-functional trust with legal, IS, and risk teams
*(14:33) - From web forms to real appointments: closing the conversion gap
*(17:10) - Using budget optimization and lead quality data to justify spend
*(36:41) - Practical first steps: mapping your conversion actions and UTM strategy
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💬 Quote
“ In the last year, we've worked with our Epic teams and we worked with our Salesforce teams and our IS partners with Snowflake to essentially pull some of these things together and map when we generate a UTM parameter for Google Analytics, for our campaigns, we're able to insert a service line or a care service to appointment codes that we get and it's all anonymized. But we're able to map those things together. When we look at our campaign data now, we're actually looking at it in Marketing Cloud Intelligence in Salesforce. We can see here's the campaign that ran. Here's how much we spent. Here's the web traffic on it. All of those great people call them vanity metrics. But we're also able to see how many patients booked appointments, how many appointments were booked, how many people showed up to their appointments. That's something we've never been able to do before. We're really, really excited about that and we're just looking for what's the next gap? What's the next step? Where can we pass through another tracking parameter so that we can see what our return on investment is?” – Lauren Anderson
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🔗 Links
Connect with Lauren Anderson on LinkedIn
Connect with Ray Mina on LinkedIn
Learn more about Caspian Studios
[00:00:00] Lauren Anderson: In the last year we've worked with our Epic teams and we worked with our Salesforce teams and our IS partners with Snowflake to essentially pull some of these things together and map when we generate a UTM parameter for Google Analytics, for our, our campaigns. We're able to insert like a, a service line or a care service to appointment codes that we get, and it's all anonymized, but we're able to, to map those things together.
[00:00:42] Lauren Anderson: So when we look at our campaign data, now we're actually looking at it in Marketing Cloud Intelligence in Salesforce. So we can see, okay, here's the campaign that ran, here's how much we spent, here's the web traffic on it. All of those great people call them vanity metrics. But we're also able to see how many patients booked appointments, how many appointments were booked, how many people showed up to their appointments, and that's something we've never been able to do before.
[00:01:09] Lauren Anderson: So we're really, really excited about that and, and we're just looking for, okay, well what's the next gap? What's the next step? Where can we pass through another tracking parameter so that we can see what our return on investment is?
[00:01:22] Ray Mina: When the HHS guidance dropped, gosh, over three years ago now, it forced a lot of healthcare systems to rethink how they did online tracking in the first place, and my guest today actually took that disruption as an opportunity to re-architect.
[00:01:36] Ray Mina: Her organization's marketing data tech stack, and actually get to a better place. I've known my guest for. Almost three years now, one of the, one of the people in healthcare that introduced me to a lot of the gaps that exist that I just assume healthcare marketers like B2B SaaS marketers would've filled by now.
[00:01:54] Ray Mina: And I'm joined today by Lauren Anderson. She's the Senior Digital Strategist and Copywriter over at Baptist Health in Jacksonville, Florida. Thanks for doing the podcast with me, Lauren.
[00:02:05] Lauren Anderson: Thanks, Ray. Thanks for having me. I'm excited.
[00:02:07] Ray Mina: I feel like I've known you so long that I've got to experience multiple, multiple new additions to your family at this point, right?
[00:02:14] Lauren Anderson: Yes. It's, it's been a, you know, we talked about the iterative experience in marketing and it's been a, yeah. A very iterative life, I feel like in the past three years.
[00:02:22] Ray Mina: Yeah. For those of you, you don't know what I'm talking about. Not only is Lauren, you know, a key part of the strategy at Baptist Health.
[00:02:28] Ray Mina: She's also been raising a family, so always doing, and, and at the same time. Maybe I always like to give a little bit of context to the people that don't know Baptist Health, specifically Baptist in Jacksonville. Lauren, can you tell us a little bit about Baptist Health?
[00:02:43] Lauren Anderson: Sure. So there are a number of different Baptist Healths out there, and they're all independent.
[00:02:48] Lauren Anderson: So if you see a Baptist health across the country from from Jacksonville, they're not affiliated with us. We are a regional health system here in Northeast Florida and we, we cover kind of a five county region within the area. We have six hospitals and well over 200 different specialty locations, including orthopedics, primary care.
[00:03:10] Lauren Anderson: Heart specialty. Any specialty you can think of? We, we do. We also have Baptist MD Anderson, which is our cancer center and Wolfson Children's Hospital, which is the only children's hospital in the Northeast Florida region.
[00:03:25] Ray Mina: Well, I think we've had this conversation multiple times. I think we went to a healthcare conference together and spoke in front of a few hundred people over two and a half years ago, and I You were, you were on maternity leave when the HHS guidance dropped the, in the, in the first place in 2022.
[00:03:43] Ray Mina: And it basically kind of left you in the dark on across a lot of different parts of your stack. What did, what did it act? How did it show up in the day-to-day campaigns for you?
[00:03:56] Lauren Anderson: Initially, 2023, coming back in January was like coming back and getting hit by a wrecking ball because HHS had come out with, don't use third party trackers like Google Analytics.
[00:04:08] Lauren Anderson: We had already heard a little bit of conversation earlier in, in the previous year. With the megapixel lawsuits that had come out. So it wasn't a complete surprise that there was more scrutiny on privacy and tracking, but it really did catch us off guard with, you can't use Google Analytics anymore. And chat DPT had also rolled out while I was away.
[00:04:33] Lauren Anderson: So there were a lot of things going on at once and. I got a text message from our chief consumer officer that we need to strip out Google Analytics and that set me on the path for starting searching online. What, what can we do about this? And understanding too what the issue is, what the issue was, how can we solve this?
[00:04:56] Lauren Anderson: And I drew a picture. Essentially, I had a diagram that I'd given to leadership prior to this explaining. When we run campaigns, we're seeing a gap in conversions based on, you know, if they call and we don't get it tracked, we're not sending that data back if they schedule directly. All of these different things.
[00:05:16] Lauren Anderson: So we already had some tracking issues, just the nature of healthcare and with hipaa, and now you wanna take analytics completely away, we're gonna be completely in the dark. So we had to make some decisions there on what can we do quickly? Or do we go dark completely and fly blind until this shakes out?
[00:05:37] Lauren Anderson: So we moved quickly.
[00:05:40] Ray Mina: Yeah, because your leadership is all, even before this, your leadership wants to know how many appointments, marketing drives, and you know, that was already, I think, I think one of the eye openers for me when I first connected with you was that even, even beyond the HHS guidance that made tracking difficult, it was already hard to tell.
[00:05:59] Ray Mina: Leadership, how many appointments marketing actually drove because of the disconnects you, you did, you did create some kind of diagram for leadership to show like what the gaps were, what gaps were presented there, what, what gaps showed up in front of leadership.
[00:06:14] Lauren Anderson: I don't know that they fully understood that when somebody came to our website and filled out a request appointment form, I mean, obviously that's not booking an appointment.
[00:06:24] Lauren Anderson: You're requesting a callback. Essentially, we, there wasn't a feedback loop to know someone filled out a form, they came from this campaign and I can now attribute them to this appointment. That was made over the phone from a team. We didn't have any kind of open scheduling at the time. We had just made the switch over to Epic the summer before, and we're starting to get into more of that direct scheduling where you can log into MyChart and make an appointment.
[00:06:51] Lauren Anderson: But there's still, once you leave our site and you go into MyChart, we can't pass any information through to know that you came from this campaign. So I think. That was really eye-opening, showing them where the gaps are and, and understanding once we make this switch, it's, it's a much better user experience.
[00:07:10] Lauren Anderson: It's gonna be great for users to be able to go in and make their own appointment, but now we're completely in the dark. It's not even a form that's capturing that information to try and estimate to, to put our heads together with finance and with operations to say, here are the people who filled out this form, or any of these people on your list, you know, having to map.
[00:07:32] Lauren Anderson: The, you know, date of birth, things like that. There we wouldn't have any way to match people. But once we started moving things into, okay, well now we're not using Google an analytics, we're using a HIPAA compliant analytics tool. Well, that opens up the door a little bit. What could we pass through that we couldn't pass before that we could send into a HIPAA compliant place?
[00:07:57] Lauren Anderson: And maybe these things can. Kind of pull together, you know, the, the data lake idea. Maybe we can pull all of this stuff together in the same place and in a HIPAA safe way to match these things automatically. We're maybe we're not having to manually get this list and that list and make connections. So it, it really has opened up some opportunities for us that we're finally starting to see three years later, connections happening.
[00:08:23] Ray Mina: One of the things I've found in healthcare is, is like a lot of these conversations just weren't happening, like. Healthcare marketers weren't really, there wasn't really a lot of reason to interface with legal and compliance. Uh, maybe at the executive function, not really understanding how marketing works and how it's, you know, driving the bus, especially digital marketing.
[00:08:41] Ray Mina: Maybe they understand the sponsorship for some local sports better than the digital strategy. When you started having these conversation and showing people the gaps and explaining what did that unlock in the relationship with your cross-functional partners and executives, did they. Did they get better understanding and they were willing to invest more?
[00:09:01] Ray Mina: Like, I'm just curious like how that initially showed up.
[00:09:05] Lauren Anderson: Yeah, it was really interesting conversations. I think one of the benefits from my perspective was legal and risk. Prior to COVID, I sat across the hall from marketing, so I knew a lot of those people directly and had those personal connections. So when I was on a call with our person, it was like almost a family reunion.
[00:09:25] Lauren Anderson: It's so good to see you. And then pulling in our IS side too. Really, really smart. People. And obviously I think there, there's maybe a connotation that marketing and, and is don't get along as as much, but from my perspective they do a really good job of protecting us and I'm really thankful for that. So there's a lot of respect that goes back and forth.
[00:09:46] Lauren Anderson: And I think what we settled on is you have someone who works in marketing, who understands the marketing data and the need for it. You have a risk expert who understands the legal aspect of it, and you have an IS security expert who understands their perspective and we all had to come together and realize there wasn't just one person who could own all of it, you know, is wasn't gonna understand all of the ins and outs of tracking technology.
[00:10:13] Lauren Anderson: We would have to explain things like it's not just a matter of. We turn Google off. We have a video player for this news site. We have a, a feature story on this news site, and a player is on our site embedded. There's tracking data in there. We use Google Maps, you know, that can track data via the API.
[00:10:31] Lauren Anderson: There's all these different tentacles to it that they wouldn't have known, and I wouldn't have known all of these security risks and all of these state by state legal things. So we would meet on a monthly basis and just share our expertise and. Collaborate together to figure out, well, okay, what is gonna be our approach collectively for Baptist?
[00:10:55] Lauren Anderson: You know, are we going to be the pinnacle of safety and security and HIPAA? Are we gonna just, everyone's gonna look to us across the world for we have every single thing figured out? Or are we gonna find the most balanced approach that is gonna work for our team and for our size and our budget? I think that was a, that was a big eye-opener too, was everybody on the, the corporate side started to see dollar signs, right?
[00:11:23] Lauren Anderson: It was like every single vendor that we had who had a stake in our site was like, oh, we collect IP address too for tracking, so that's gonna be another a hundred grand for you to have a BA, A with us. And so we had to kind of walk this line of, this just is a domino effect of things that affected.
[00:11:42] Lauren Anderson: Everybody. It wasn't as simple as, well, we'll just change Google Analytics and go from paying nothing to, you know, needing a budget for it.
[00:11:53] Ray Mina: Are you still, we haven't caught up in a while. I know initially like moving, you had done a lot of work on rebuilding Google Analytics and migrating onto the new platform.
[00:12:02] Ray Mina: Are you still using, is Google Analytics still your web analytics platform?
[00:12:07] Lauren Anderson: We do, we still use Google Analytics. Yeah. And, but what we've done is we've really iterated on that again. So we had a basic framework for our UTM nomenclature to capture some of those important details that we wanna pass through.
[00:12:22] Lauren Anderson: But what's really cool is in the last year we've worked with our EPIC teams and we worked with our Salesforce teams and our IS partners with Snowflake, that's our data warehouse to essentially. Pull some of these things together and map. When we generate a UTM parameter for Google Analytics, for our, our campaigns, we're able to insert like a, a service line or a a care service to appointment codes that we get.
[00:12:54] Lauren Anderson: And it's all anonymized, but we're able to, to map those things together. So when we look at our campaign data, now we're actually looking at it in marketing cloud intelligence. Salesforce so we can see, okay, here's the campaign that ran. Here's how much we spent, here's the web traffic on it. All of those great people call them vanity metrics, but we're also able to see how many patients booked appointments, how many appointments were booked, how many people showed up to their appointments, and that's something we've never been able to do before.
[00:13:26] Lauren Anderson: We're really, really excited about that and, and we're just looking for, okay, well what's the next gap? What's the next step? Where can we pass through another tracking parameter so that we can see what our return on investment is?
[00:13:39] Ray Mina: Yeah. So it's like this forcing function of compliance as a requirement actually becomes a strategic advantage because now you can actually get, even it's, it's like, well, lights are out.
[00:13:50] Ray Mina: I'm, I'm doomed. I have to get back to baseline. You, you had phase one, which was getting back to baseline, but now you're actually able to track even more and that original diagram of gaps looks a little bit better. Maybe we can like put it into real world application. So up to you. Pick one that's memorable, but like, tell me about how you've leveraged the ability to track even more and close the gaps at the campaign level.
[00:14:15] Ray Mina: Like, I don't know if it's like. For orthopedics or some other service line and link it to like the business problem, like what problem were you trying to overcome and how were you able to use better data and tracking to like improve that business outcome.
[00:14:30] Lauren Anderson: We will just use Google Ads as an example. The way that we did it was we would stand up a campaign and we would have to give it conversion action. So maybe it was they filled out a form, maybe it's, they called a call tracking number previously that that would be it. You know, okay, we got this many forms, we got this many calls over a minute, and we've slowly started to just chip away at what is a conversion.
[00:14:57] Lauren Anderson: It's not just filling out a form now, right? It's filling out a form and did they get in touch with someone to make an appointment? Did did the team call them back and schedule that appointment? Well, now we can make that that link, right? We don't just have forms now. We have open scheduling. Epic. So we're passing parameters through that open scheduling widget.
[00:15:22] Lauren Anderson: If they go in and they're a new patient, haven't been seen in three years, if that doctor has open scheduling, they can go in, schedule an appointment. Those UTMs are passed through and then that's, that gets fed into Snowflake and then back into Salesforce, so we can see that information. And then the last piece is called tracking.
[00:15:42] Lauren Anderson: We use Invoca now, and instead of just sending back to Google, Hey, this call was over a minute. We know that people sit on hold for at least a minute before they can even get through a lot of times. So it's not just this call was over a minute or we, we got it. We got it even closer to, oh, they used one of these 12, 12 keywords.
[00:16:02] Lauren Anderson: Now we're looking at 191 different signals. Soon we're gonna be using AI to even further evaluate. They didn't just call, but they had an intent to make an appointment or they scheduled an appointment and instead of sending that conversion data back to Google, as you know, here's a duration, we're sending signals.
[00:16:23] Lauren Anderson: Like they booked an appointment, they had an intent to book, things like that, to optimize against. And that's where we're going now. You know, we're able to do that from a call tracking standpoint, but. The vision would be they come through a form or they come through open scheduling, sending that data back in a HIPAA compliant, safe way to signal to Google, oh yeah, this conversion action here.
[00:16:44] Lauren Anderson: That's really what we wanna optimize. Get us more of these, you know? So I'm really excited.
[00:16:50] Ray Mina: Before you do that, like how are you using that data to, like, how does it, how does it give you the power to adjust your campaigns today? Like having that additional knowledge of like, there, there was high intent higher in net 10 here than just a request or there was actually like an outcome.
[00:17:06] Ray Mina: How are, how is that inform, informing your campaign strategy?
[00:17:10] Lauren Anderson: Well one is budget, right? So we don't have, it doesn't all flow together with our, our revenue is, is pretty separate. So we've had to, we've had to learn, okay, well what is a ratio that we can give? And I, I, again, I think Google more specifically, 'cause I sit more in the PPC world, but how do you come up with a good budget for your campaigns?
[00:17:31] Lauren Anderson: You know, like where did these numbers come from? Who is coming up with this? So what we've been able to do is say, okay. We could estimate this is what a lead is worth. We can now estimate 'cause we're looking at the appointment data, we get this many leads a year, this many leads turn into this many appointments of this many appointments, this many turn into say, surgeries, which is a really high value margin.
[00:17:56] Lauren Anderson: So now we can kind of calculate a little bit better what is a lead worth to us? And now we can run a campaign with a, a better scale of what. Budget. Do we wanna use a more optimized budget? Again, the hope is we could run something like a CPA type budget. That's a cost per acquisition budget, and that's where we're hoping to go in, in phase two in the next year.
[00:18:21] Ray Mina: Basically, you're at a point now where you're, you know, if leadership asks you, like this marketing spend, the spend that you're putting in Google, since we're talking about Google. How is it, how's it impacting outcome? You, you can actually go with confidence to leadership and show them how it's impacting the outcome.
[00:18:38] Lauren Anderson: We can, and it's automated, which is I think, the key for us because I, this is like one fourth of my job as a marketer and, and healthcare, there's so many other things that we're working on and kind of having to fill in gaps. You know, we didn't have a person who was the HIPAA compliant analytics person for Baptist three years ago.
[00:18:59] Lauren Anderson: So I went from being the digital strategist to, well, I, I can learn that I can do that because I know our marketing data so well, and I'm pretty savvy with technology, so I can fill in that gap. So to take that extra weight off of us. Of having to manually try and figure out what's working and have it automated has been a huge, huge help for us because a request comes in, now I pull up the dashboard and I give you the numbers.
[00:19:27] Lauren Anderson: I don't have to spend the next week tracking down different people and analyzing spreadsheet by spreadsheet what the answer is to that question or. The worst case scenario, you go back and say, we don't have an answer to that question, and we never did.
[00:19:43] Ray Mina: Yeah. The worst is like, you don't have the answer.
[00:19:45] Ray Mina: The second is that it's, you're spending so much time, and I hear this all the time, is like there's just so much manual data capture and data pooling and it's brittle, and if it breaks and you've gotta go build repo, rebuild reports. Again. What, when you say it's, it's a fourth of your job, there's, you know, 75% of, of the additional work.
[00:20:05] Ray Mina: By automating this stuff and be able to get to it at your fingertips, like what is it free you up to do that you weren't able to spend time on before? Like, what have you gained from it?
[00:20:15] Lauren Anderson: So the big piece for me, I, I was hired for SEO and now we have AIO and AEO and GEO, however you wanna splice it, but.
[00:20:27] Lauren Anderson: It all comes back to, you know, are we optimizing for AI and for these these agents, and are we ready for the ag agentic web? Those kinds of things. That's really important. You know, that's vital for the future of where everything is going from a digital marketing perspective. So I've spent a ton of extra time.
[00:20:43] Lauren Anderson: I mean, I still do a lot on the tracking components and getting that stuff. This is still, we're in probably phase two of getting all of this connected and working together. It allows me to go through, say, our listings. We have over a thousand listings, so let's, let's really work on getting those built out.
[00:21:02] Lauren Anderson: We have a bunch of locations on our website. Let's really work on structuring our website in a way that's going to be ready for the ENT web even more than it is now. So that, that's really where my focus is, and I still enjoy the analytics side and I'm really enjoying the PPC side and how we can optimize there. But I wanna spend more time in SEO and and AI for sure.
[00:21:25] Ray Mina: I love that you went to like a next step here. You know, now that you have the visibility, the next step is feeding that data back and we've, we've seen that firsthand. We have, you know, a number of partners we worked with where it is so much more effective and efficient by just feeding those lower, you know, stronger, lower funnel signals back to Google.
[00:21:46] Ray Mina: That they've created additional budgets of like three quarters of a million dollars using the same ad spend. So they can either put it back into Google or they can take that money and put it somewhere else in their funnel. You know, they finally have budget they weren't able to get before. But besides feeding data back to Google, like what are some other gaps that, now that you have this kind of data structure, what are some of the other gaps that you're hoping to fill or, or some of the other ways that you're hoping to use the data to lift the outcomes?
[00:22:17] Lauren Anderson: I definitely have to speak to audiences and retargeting. It's not as much of what I do, but I know our team is really focused on that and our, our automation, our digital automation that, that the team is doing with emails and email journeys and things like that, that's been really effective. We're starting to explore health risk assessments and all that.
[00:22:38] Lauren Anderson: Fun. And I think just the ideation side of it too, right? So while we've been trying to plug the gaps on can we even prove ROI, there's the whole other piece of why most of us got into marketing in the first place, which is the ideation and the innovation and the brainstorming of what are some new ways that we can reach people and you know, get in in their fingertips, things like that.
[00:23:01] Lauren Anderson: So with that kind of under our belt, we're kind of able to just take a look at the landscape and. Figure out what are some tactics that we can explore more of and where, where are we getting the biggest bang for a buck and things like that. So we've added a, a couple of different tactics and programmatic display is, is definitely one of them that's coming through and seeing how that's working and seeing how these things all work together.
[00:23:25] Lauren Anderson: I, I think that's the other big component is all of this data is great. And, and I think you asked the question, and I had a, a whole meeting about this earlier today, about, here's all this great data. Now what? And now what do we do with it? And my answer to that, I mean, if, if we can automate it, that's really the plus.
[00:23:45] Lauren Anderson: And that's what I'm hoping to do with some of our things is I, I don't wanna have to go in and see, well this heading worked better than this heading and this subject line or this creative, I want Google to do that for me. I want Google to have that data and figure out what's working. Make that the most efficient.
[00:24:02] Lauren Anderson: And I just have to keep giving it is I look at Google ads sometimes as like this golden retriever, you know, that just really wants to please, of course, really wants to bring you, yeah, I wanna bring you back what, whatever you've sent me out to get. And sometimes it comes back with, you know, a, a stick and sometimes it comes back with a bird, you know, whatever it is, you know.
[00:24:23] Lauren Anderson: But having to explain to this, this Google golden Retriever. This is what a good job looks like. This is what I want you to retrieve for me. And this is, these are the things I want you to leave out in the woods for me. Maybe that's a terrible analogy, but, um, I think it's
[00:24:38] Ray Mina: That’s a good analogy. I think, I think Google's like a golden retriever in that it will eat your budget in the way that it'll eat whatever food you give it, and then it's key.
[00:24:47] Ray Mina: A hundred percent it's key. What, what food do you want your golden retriever to eat and what budget do you want Google to use and where That's, that's the key. Yes.
[00:24:55] Lauren Anderson: That's the key.
[00:24:56] Lauren Anderson: Let's talk about that for a second. Yeah. Because we, we, we tried this with our new dashboard. Okay. We tested vendors head to head.
[00:25:03] Ray Mina: When you say vendors, like what, what, what kind of, in what category?
[00:25:07] Lauren Anderson: Uh, as an agency that run our paid search as an example.
[00:25:12] Ray Mina: Got it.
[00:25:12] Lauren Anderson: So on one vendor side. We have full access to everything. They run things out of our accounts. So full transparency, and that's where we've really worked to not just send conversions back to Google, but send hi higher quality conversions back to Google.
[00:25:27] Lauren Anderson: Yes.
[00:25:28] Ray Mina: Key.
[00:25:28] Lauren Anderson: So we have that, we've run those before. Another vendor looked interesting, so I said, let's, let's try it. Let's run them head to head and see what we get out of it. And when we ran the numbers. The kinds of conversions that we were getting with the first vendor where we've been optimizing. It was something like $28 a lead.
[00:25:53] Lauren Anderson: The second vendor, when we looked at everything and calculated the types of conversions they were getting, it was something like 70 to $80 a lead. And so. When it came up again, which vendor should we go with? I said, if you choose a second vendor, you are going to set us back to COVID days 2020. You know, where we're spending 70, a hundred dollars on a lead when we could be getting quality leads at 25, $30.
[00:26:24] Lauren Anderson: So I think that's been another. That was a big learning I think, for us and having that, that data.
[00:26:28] Ray Mina: You mentioned a little bit ago about retargeting and some of those strategies. What, I'm just curious if, if you have yet, what kind of practical guardrails have you put in place as you start to like test some of that stuff so you don't drift into that world of, you know, accidentally sharing like sensitive information.
[00:26:49] Lauren Anderson: We've had these conversations a lot and we've demoed a lot of different products because that's something that I've noticed too, is everybody's coming out with a new kind of golden record audience lookalike, you know? Feature. And one of the pieces of advice that have has been given to us is one, the how you name things in Google being really, really vague about it.
[00:27:14] Lauren Anderson: So not not giving Google any, any wiggle room to make assumptions about what it is you're trying to do, which I think is smart. And the other one is just from a, a HIPAA compliance standpoint, being really broad in your retargeting. And that's something that we've, we've been at. Analyzing, do we wanna test that out and see does it really work?
[00:27:33] Lauren Anderson: So if somebody's looking for an orthopedic surgeon or they're looking for bariatric surgery, weight loss surgery, whatever it might be, that is a really sensitive topic. Instead of hitting them with, you know, a weight loss display ad after they visited our site. Maybe it's just a more brand play of, you know, you visited our site or you, you had these search terms, you had this affinity.
[00:27:59] Lauren Anderson: You meet this, this lookalike audience, or the cha I think the, the other retargeting opportunity in healthcare is with insurance. Like what's the likelihood of folks having this kind of insurance or folks in this market are losing a particular insurance there? You know, another competitor might not be accepting that insurance, so we wanna go after.
[00:28:20] Lauren Anderson: You know, we accept your insurance, come see us instead. But keeping it really high level, vague, more about the brand, that's the advice that we've been given. So I think if and when we go that route, that's pro, we'll probably play it that way.
[00:28:34] Ray Mina: You've had a pretty long journey from like, you know, oh my gosh.
[00:28:38] Ray Mina: We have to turn everything off to getting the visibility where you can speak data to leadership pretty easily in, in an automated way. A question on two dimensions. On the positive dimension, where do you feel that you've made the most progress? And then where do you feel like there's still like a level of frustration that's unsolved still?
[00:28:59] Lauren Anderson: Yeah, that's a really great question and it's something that I joke about a lot. Like how did I get here? I was hired to write, co copywriter is in my title. I was hired to write copy.
[00:29:11] Ray Mina: I think you've outgrown the copywriter title at this
[00:29:13] Lauren Anderson: I, I think so. Unintentionally I have veered very far away from shore.
[00:29:19] Lauren Anderson: No, it's been really fun. I'm, I'm a, I like puzzles and I like problem solving and I, I kind of get obsessive, I think over things that I want answers to it, and that's really what drove me to this place is I'm writing copy. But I wanna know how it's performing so I can make it better. And that's always been the motivation.
[00:29:39] Lauren Anderson: And it's been seven years now of, well, I'm just here temporarily so I can understand how it works, so I can make the copy better. But it's, it's so much has changed in seven years too. Tech, technologically marketing. Um, so it's just become this fascinating. Anytime something new comes up, not, not to be.
[00:29:59] Lauren Anderson: Someone with shiny object syndrome, but I, I am curious and I wanna know, and so I just start going down a, a deep dive and learning as much as I, I can about it. But HIPAA compliance has been a really fascinating journey. Understanding, learning about our data, and I think this is maybe the thing I try to stress amongst other marketers is that people hear data and they get really.
[00:30:26] Lauren Anderson: Shy about it or scared. They just wanna, I don't want anything to do with that. That's not me. I have nothing to do with it. And then realizing that a lot of times it's not just data in terms of performance and metrics and analytics, but it, it's data even from a content standpoint, you know, how, how we think about content.
[00:30:46] Lauren Anderson: It is data, you know, this is information that we're, we're trying to, to give to people to improve their customer experience. And so it, it's really this convergence of creativity and writing, but also psychology and human dynamics and puzzles and all that fun stuff. So, yeah, I, I, I think. It's been a really fun journey, learning about campaign performance and how to run campaigns, PPC, SEO, AIO, schema market, like all the things that you can do.
[00:31:18] Lauren Anderson: I still have quite a learning curve, I think in. Retargeting, remarketing, DSPs, programmatic. There's still so many and social media I haven't touched in years and years, and I think there's a, a wealth of opportunity there as well where we can connect and optimize further, but. There's just always something new to learn and I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes and realize I've been dreaming about UTMs campaigns, so yeah, I need to, need to figure out, you know, how to have a life as well.
[00:31:53] Ray Mina: There's that. Yeah, I think you've also hit on something with like marketing it. It's evolving constantly and, and we have to keep. Digging in and learning and testing new things, and we need data to do that. But if we're spending all of our time digging through data, we don't have enough time to like stand up and test campaigns.
[00:32:13] Ray Mina: So this is why automating more of this stuff is so important to you, because if you have it at your fingertips, then you can focus your energy on running that campaign and testing the campaign and see how it's working and know if it's worth doing or not. But if you don't have that baseline of data. How do you really know?
[00:32:31] Ray Mina: Like you might have done a great job and it might be the best work you've done, but how do you, how do you really know Unless you can measure it, at least in some simple way, right?
[00:32:40] Lauren Anderson: Right, exactly. And that, that's kind of how I felt even before the idea of going completely blind. I felt like we were already kind of blind because.
[00:32:49] Lauren Anderson: There was so much we didn't know. And it's funny, even now sometimes I'll get questions about a dashboard where I'll, I'll just at a high level show our, I, I think it's still important to show analytics to your site. This many people came to your site. These are the pages they visited, what they typed in.
[00:33:04] Lauren Anderson: But I'll get questions about how long was somebody on the page as if that's an indicator of, oh, they were reading. Yes, they were on the page for three hours that they must have been reading our site. That one page for three, you know, it doesn't really tell you anything. So understanding even what the, what the data is, what does it mean, and.
[00:33:27] Lauren Anderson: I, I, it's been really interesting. People will ask me very, very specific questions about data and I have to go back to them and say. I, I understand that you want this very specific number for this very specific page, but you're missing the narrative because you're not looking at it in a holistic way.
[00:33:45] Lauren Anderson: 'cause it's not just about this one number for this one page. It's about taking a step back and looking at the whole picture because it's telling a story. And now we can understand what that story is to a much greater degree and figure out how we can. You know, create a, a better story and a better journey for people that come to our site.
[00:34:06] Ray Mina: You just nailed it. The, the only, if you can measure, like in your case, you have to, there's a bunch of jobs to be done for you as a marketer, but like you have to drive high quality patients to your locations. And if you can measure down to the campaign how effective they were at driving high quality patients to your locations, you don't really need to know anything else because.
[00:34:30] Ray Mina: You know the inputs, the reason we have to go back and figure out things like time on page and bounce rate is 'cause we don't know the answer to the other thing and we have to justify the work that we're doing. So why not just get to the strongest possible signal? That way you don't have to spend a bunch of time on like tactical data points.
[00:34:51] Ray Mina: Now some, there's application where sometimes maybe you can't measure that and you've gotta look for leading indicators. But for a mature business that has a tried and true need, like you, people, consumers come to you for services that's like tried and true. I think that's the thing. We kind of fall into the trap and, and we have, but, but we have to defend our work in some way or else, you know, it's hard to keep justifying the things we're doing.
[00:35:17] Ray Mina: So just get to the, just get to the output that matters to the leadership. Is, is really the, the, the advice. So let's give, let's, you know, let's wrap with some advice to those folks. So if you feel like you're tracking things, but you don't actually have the ability to draw and, and the distinction I think you made, which is clear is, and it seems like it doesn't matter, but it really, really does, especially when you're feeding machine learning models like Google is.
[00:35:47] Ray Mina: If you have this web form that's an intermediary, that actually is not the. Booked, let alone the attended appointment. That may not be the actual result. Like there's going to be a drop off. Like people who request this appointment may not end up like booking or attending appointment. And that matters so much, like not theoretical.
[00:36:08] Ray Mina: It matters so much to Google that you could, if you have a million dollars of ad spend, you can probably get 200 K back, at least in effectiveness. So for the marketers who are still. Flying blind in that bottom of funnel part that they're still anchored on This intermediary, that gaps diagram that you built for your team.
[00:36:28] Ray Mina: Like what's the first gaps diagram they need to go build so that they can like, take that to their leadership? Like if they're gonna go listen to this podcast and then take that as an action item, what, what should they do?
[00:36:40] Lauren Anderson: Start sketching it out. You know, this is, this is what a campaign looks like. Here are the different channels that people can come to.
[00:36:47] Lauren Anderson: Now they land on your site. What are the different points of conversion? Do you know what the different points of conversion are? And what happens to that information? Once they go to those different conversion actions? They fill out a form or they go direct appointment scheduling, open appointment scheduling, whatever that might look like.
[00:37:04] Lauren Anderson: Fill out a form. Yeah, start, start kind of getting an inventory together of those conversion actions and where the data goes and, and you know, follow the money, follow the data. Where is it going? Where can you. Sort of intercept a little bit, you know, whether it's call tracking, you know, that's where we're kind of intercepting before it goes into the call centers and into that whole system.
[00:37:29] Lauren Anderson: At least we have an interception where we're capturing some information there and we can tie it back. And then as far as start filling those gaps. Where, where can you make connections? Where can you pass UTMs through? Where can you shore up what your UTM nomenclature is? Ha have you even done that? You know, are you using UTMs at all?
[00:37:49] Lauren Anderson: Get on the same page with don't, don't just use a builder. Kind of get together as a team and decide what is our UTM nomenclature. We're gonna use something standard, and then start passing that through wherever you can. I think that's the, the first step is figuring out where can you pass data through.
[00:38:08] Lauren Anderson: Into a HIPAA compliant safe place, so then you can kind of analyze it. Until you do that, you, you can't really return back and send that back to, to anything to optimize against. But at least that'll give you a starting point, a, a more quality conversions 'cause you can actually see what's happening, not just guess.
[00:38:26] Ray Mina: Sage advice. Lauren, thanks for, thanks for joining me and, and doing marketing rounds together.
[00:38:31] Lauren Anderson: Of course, anytime. Thanks for having me.
[00:38:35] Producer: Today's episode is brought to you by Freshpaint. If you're a healthcare marketer, under pressure, to do more with less. Freshpaint helps you stretch fixed budgets, prove what's working, and protect the strategies that drive growth. Freshpaint brings performance and privacy together in one platform so you can see real outcomes across channels and double down where ROI is highest. With Freshpaint, privacy becomes your performance advantage. Turn better data into smarter decisions, find more high value patients, and keep your growth plans on track. Learn more at freshpaint.io.