The $2,000/Month Question Nobody Can Answer

You're listening to podiatry marketing, conversations on building a successful podiatry practice with Tyson Franklin and Jim McDannald.

Hi. I'm Tyson Franklin, and welcome to this week's episode of podiatry marketing. With me, as usual, my trusted cohost, Jim McDannald, aka big Jim Mac. How are doing today, Jim?

I said I'm doing well. It's getting to the near the end of winter here in Montreal. I feel like I can yeah. The sun's gonna be coming out before I know it, and the snow is gonna melt away. So things are all good.

Yeah. I miss summer. But even though in Kansas, it's hot. So everyone yes. This is our weekly weather report.

It's I do I I miss the heat of summer in the tropics, but it is nice when it starts to ease off a little bit. Still go in the pool, but it's not not as harsh. So what are we talking about today?

Yeah. So today we're the the topic today is the $2,000 a month question that nobody can answer. So Oh. We're gonna start off this podcast with little bit of a challenge. Maybe, you know, if you're driving to work, it may not be the best idea for you to do this.

But if you're at home, if you're listening, what I recommend is that you try something new right now for this. So go ahead and if you have a Google Ads account, I recommend that you go ahead and open up that dashboard. You know, either that or, you know, get in touch with your marketing company and see if they can answer one specific question. And that's how many new patients did your marketing actually produce last month? And I'm talking about clicks.

I'm not talking about impressions. Actual people who picked up the phone, filled out a form, or booked an appointment. So this is something this is a question that a lot of clinics don't always get a clear answer to. So we're gonna try to dive into that topic today.

Okay. That sounds good. Where do you where do you start?

Yeah. I would say that, I said, most people are kinda drawing blanks, you know, when they're trying to figure out what the real what is that real number. Right? Most practices can't answer it. Not because, you know, they're doing something wrong, but because the tools that most of us rely on weren't necessarily set up to give us that answer.

So this episode's about fixing that, and we're gonna start off by discussing what a conversion is. Tyson, do you know what a conversion is?

Depends in what context. A conversion normally, the way that I look at it is you present something to somebody. Say, for example, I'm talking orthotic conversion. So you do a biomechanical assessment with somebody. You present to them a treatment plan, and a percentage of the people that are presented with that treatment plan will follow that treatment plan.

So whether it was orthotics or some other form of treatment, but you present something to them and a certain amount converts. So I'm thinking when it comes to marketing and Google Ads, an ad is presented to a group of people, and what percentage of people from that group actually directly responded to the ad that you put out there.

That's it. That's pretty good. I mean, I'll give I'll give you, like, a b plus, a minus on that one. That was solid. Okay.

I'll take that. You know, your marketing report says you know, people get these marketing reports that say, you got 47 conversions last month, and that sounds really, really great. But here's the problem. Google counts a book surgery consult the same way would cook, you know, basically add up a some of the pocket dialed you from an ad that was on their phone. Right?

Both show up as a conversion sometimes. So both look identical in your reports. So when your marketing company says we had 47 conversions last last month, the real question, you know, might become, you know, how many of those actually become patients? Because conversion, like you said, it's basically any action that a potential patient takes that you've told Google out basically Google Ads to to basically count as valuable. So this can be a phone call.

This can be a form fill. I've seen it be so granular even to be where it's directions from Google My Business profile or even if people log in to the patient portal. So there's a lot of things you can set up to be these conversions. So they don't necessarily mean a new patient or returning patient. The problem that with these practices when, you when they with these conversions that, you know, they didn't set it up themselves.

And what maybe a doctor would think would be a conversion might just be like some random action the marketing company decided to put in there. So like I said, you know, Google accounts, these book surgery consoles maybe the same way as a pocket dial. So you have to be aware of these conversions and how the marketing company you're working with setting these things up.

Yeah. I think that is important because, like you said, somebody can phone your clinic and then just not make an appointment. Or somebody can phone your clinic and they actually make an appointment and then go right through that that whole process. So if you're wanting more orthotics, for example, wouldn't matter if a 100 people bring your clinic. If nobody makes an appointment, then hopefully, it's not the person at the front taking the phone call, hasn't butchered them all for you.

But the a percentage will book in. They're they're the they're the main ones you wanna be counting.

No. Exactly. And that's one of the difficult things is that Google doesn't always doesn't give you that kind of next level information. Sometimes we've talked about it in previous podcasts. Google can be kind of a black box.

Like, it'll let you set up something to a certain point, but you don't know know if that person actually followed through and became a patient. So there's always, you know and I'm not trying to point fingers at people, you know. I think a lot of marketing companies do a good job and they pass along as much information that Google allows them to. But the issue isn't with the marketing agency necessarily, it's with Google's reporting and it shows activity not necessarily outcome. So two questions worth worth asking are, what exactly are we counting as a conversion?

And how many of those actually become real patients?

Yeah. I remember being at this is a marketing event twenty five, thirty years ago probably. And the person was talking about online ads at the time. Not online ads, because they weren't around. It was a paper ad and had two ads there.

Spending the same amount of money, and one got 10 people call the the business, and one got 50. And he said, which was the better ad? And put your hand up if you think the 50 or the other 10, and people went different ways. He said, you don't know yet. He said, just that initial contact to the business is irrelevant.

Then who made an appointment? Then out of the 10, it was like eight people made an appointment. Out of the fifty, ten people made an appointment. Which is the better ad? People would answer, you don't know yet.

And then it was then it broke it down to what services were used, and ended up being the one that had ten, eight people booked in, but five people booked for this high end service. The other one had 50, had 10 people, and five people booked. And he said, they were both good ads because they both produced the the same result with the same money spent. But then he showed how then when the numbers are different, yeah, you can't always rely on that initial impact because sometimes the phone will be ringing crazy. People go, oh, our marketing must be working, but there's no appointments.

That is also kinda like getting what you're getting out there too, is it is it the right patients that are booking in. Right? Like, do you do you wanna do more orthotics? And if you're getting a bunch of routine foot care or other types of things you don't wanna have come into the practice, you know, yeah, you might be getting those quote unquote conversions, but it's not the type you wanna have. So you have to kind of there's different levels of granularity and different levels of depths that that are really, really important there.

And this kind of leads to the next point is that Google gives you a certain amount of information, but there's a way to go even deeper into the numbers to really track calls and to track forms. And this is something that I work with when the clients that I work with, the clinics I work with is that we have a limit something called call tracking. So imagine knowing that the patient you just booked a surgery consult for found you because they searched, you know, bunion surgeon near me and clicked on a Google ad. Not as a guess, you know exactly which ad, which keyword, which channel, that's what call tracking does. There's some different services out there.

There's one called call tracking metrics, there's CallRail. What it does is it kind of uniquely kind of switches to a unique phone number based off of someone that found on your website. So there's these kind of dynamic numbers that get populated on your website through some software so they can tell when people came through on an ad. So the front desk as well. So they if a patient calls from an ad or calls from the website, they can be if they have this call tracking installed, know where the patients are coming from and you have a way of tracking that instead of whether the front desk has to write it down, but they don't have to do that because it's all on this call tracking software.

So like I said, call tracking kinda swaps in unique phone numbers based on how the visitor got to your website. So there's a different call tracking phone number for your Google Ads. There's another one for your Google Business Profile. There's one for email newsletter. When interview whenever your phone rings, you know exactly what marketing channel produced that call.

Yeah. It's just it's making me smile because back in the old days when we're doing paper ads, and we had, I think, four or six phone lines coming into our clinic, and we used to use different the different phone lines based on the different ads that we were running at the time. So we go line five was a completely separate number, and we would use that one in the ad, and that's how we used to be able to tell if that ad in that particular spot was working as well as it should. And our website, we had a different phone number again. So we could tell that this is a there's a lot more modern way of doing it.

Yeah. That it's something they called dynamic number insertion. So that's the technical term. It sounds complicated, but really does. There's kind of a pool of numbers in the background in the software, and it puts it up onto the website and allows it to tell, you know and this is all we'll get into it later, but this is all HIPAA compliant.

This is something that these services offer, but, you know, your front the the phone rings in your front desk, and you can actually have it whisper to the to the person, you know, on the line saying, this is a, you know, a call from a Google ad or this is a call from the website or this is a call from Google business profile. So like I said, the software itself kinda keeps track of those numbers so your staff doesn't necessarily have to do it, but it gives you an idea, you know, what's working, what's not working. So this form tracking, you know, works in a similar way. It's gonna capture the page that the person filled out the form, the ad was that led them to that form, and the keyword. So if you get 12 submissions a month, you'll know seven are from a heel pain ad, five are from a local campaign.

It's really easier to break that down, and you're better able to kind of either adjust the quality of the ads in some of these campaigns, or you know, defer ad spend to the ones that are working to get more of the types of patients you wanna have come in the door.

And I think that's the important part too, is knowing that when you're spending money somewhere, which ads are are working and which ones are not working, and then taking it from what's not working. Even if you've yeah. You may have modified it slightly, and it just doesn't work. It could be just a dog of an ad, is then put that money spend into the one that is working. Just double down on it.

Yeah. It's a huge opportunity to kind of make better decisions with more information in this way in this way, you can make better decisions with your ad spend budgets. You're not just spraying and praying. You know, you're actually, you know, kind of piling into the stuff that's working and then trying to improve maybe the stuff that isn't quite optimized.

So where do where should someone when when if somebody wants to do this, where do they where do they do this?

Yeah. So there's different ways of doing it. Right? So, like, obviously, the probably the most easiest way some of these softwares can be a little complicated is to work with either marketing agency or marketing con consultant like myself. It's probably the easiest way of doing it.

But it's one of those things where, you know, it's it it takes a little bit of setup when it comes to tying the Google Ads, the website into the software.

So can people learn to do it themselves, or it has to always go through an agency?

I don't think so. I mean, if if someone's really motivated I know I I've talked to different podiatrists over the last few months who are like, they love marketing, and they wanna set up their own Yeah. Websites and do those things. And like, if you have the time, then it's something you can definitely do. If you have the if you have the time and the willingness to learn how to do it.

I think you know a lot of these companies will work directly with podiatrists as well if that's what you choose to do. But I don't find that many podiatrists are that keen to to dive into the Google Ads and then to try to tie that with this call tracking software.

Okay. And just to point it out to people, this is what Jim does. So if you've been listening to this podcast for a while and you're thinking, oh, I'm not doing Google Ads at the moment. I've thought about doing it. You call Jim.

If you're doing Google Ads at the moment, you're doing it yourself and not doing a very good job, and you don't have the time, you call Jim. If you're working with another agency who you feel you have no idea whether you're doing the right job or not, you call Jim. Nice and simple.

Well, I appreciate that that that those are very kind words, Tyson.

Yeah. Don't call me because I won't help you with this. I I will say, call Jim because this is not what I do. When I'm doing my marketing workshops, I'm looking at marketing as a as a broad subject and more of a strategic thinking, not the actual tactics and the doing side of things. Call Jim.

Don't call me. If you're looking at business coaching and you wanna take your business or is it strategically wanna take your business to a different level, you call me. Nice and simple. Okay. That was our plug Sure.

We're gonna jump to the next section, which is more about kinda like trust and verifying, you know, when you're utilizing call tracking. So most practices set up a call duration around sixty seconds or so, meaning that only calls that, you know, are longer than a minute count as potentially a real lead. That's something that's really difficult in Google Ads because that's that's one of the parameters you have that you can control is like the length of a call might mean that it's a good patient. But maybe it's someone that, you know, got on the call, was on hold for thirty seconds, and then was talking to the staff for another thirty five, forty seconds about some some random topic that didn't have anything to do with. Maybe it was, you know, someone forgot the their their the instructions to their ingrown toenail.

Yeah.

You know, that took a minute or two to happen. So just know that like you don't have that clarity in Google Ads. So it's important that you when you do have the call tracking, when you can actually hear the conversation and see the text of the conversation, it it can really give you much more granular details about what's actually happening there. And I and I wanna be clear, this isn't about just like like I said, marketing companies are doing as the best job as they can. Some decide not to go to this level of granularity with the call tracking, and they're missing out on huge opportunities because, you know, it's really, really important that, like, that you just don't like rely on things like call duration.

When you have the opportunity to spend a little bit of extra money on call tracking, you hear what patients are actively talking to. And when they call the clinic to make an appointment with you, you can get a lot of information, not only about the patient and what their needs are, but how is your staff communicating with that? If someone's like, oh, is there a positive interaction? Is there a way that the staff could have maybe been a little bit more welcoming? Or, you know, I've heard calls in the past where people, you know, were they they they weren't sure whether that the the what a podiatrist did and how they explained that, you know, like if we have the name surgery in our business name, like do you do more than just surgery?

Do you do any other type of care for feet and ankles? So it's a really important opportunity also to help train up your staff. So that's something really to be aware of.

The the other part too, just want to point out to people here, and why this is actually important or working with the right person is and I've said this ages ago when we first started this show. I was at a networking event one morning. It was a breakfast meeting. I'm there, and this guy, young guy, turns up with his on a skateboard because that's how I like to arrive on business networking events is on my skateboard. Not.

And so I started talking him. He said, oh, what do you do? He goes, oh, I do online, you know, like Google and Facebook online advertising. I went, alright. Okay.

How long have been doing that for? He goes, well, actually, I've only just started and I really don't know what I'm doing, but I'm learning of other people's coin. And that's what you've got to avoid. I think when it comes to this type of information and what you're talking about, there's so many people out there who've just got their hand up saying, oh, yeah. We do we do Google advertising.

Scrut you can doesn't mean you actually are doing it properly. So I think people just need to be aware of that.

That's a that's a fair point. I think that kinda leads into the next point is that, you know, HIPAA compliance and making sure that we're doing things by the book. Right? So, you know, quick

question by the book.

Podiatry Yeah. We have to do it. I mean, you don't you don't want to get an audit from you don't wanna get an audit and show that you're being, you know, kind of willy nilly with patient data. That's a huge no no these days. So, you know, the question is, you know, is the call tracking platform if you're using one in your clinic, is it HIPAA compliant?

Because a patient's phone number plus the fact that they called a podiatry clinic is protected health information in The US. So their name is on a form asking for bunion surgery, that's also protected health information. If your tracking platform doesn't have a signed BAA agreement or the person that's handling your your call tracking software, you've got a compliance gap right now. And the fix is simple, but you have to know how to ask that question. So the moment you're recording phone calls or capturing data from patients, contacting a health care practice, you're handling protected health information.

So a patient's phone number plus the fact that they called a podiatry clinic is PHI. So their name, email, and a contact form asking for an inserted, once again, is PHI. So make sure that the person you're working with, that's working with the call tracking software has a signed BAA with you. It's a really, really important component to make sure that not only are you covered, but the patient's information is also safe.

And what's the penalty if you get this wrong?

I haven't looked at it recently. Maybe I should contact some lawyers to see what it is, but I'm sure it's it's probably not very cheap.

Yeah. Because it is one of those things, especially when everybody knows you're supposed to protect patient information. And everybody is where it's you can't use ignorance as, oh, I didn't know I had to do that. Everybody knows you gotta protect patient data. So I think this this side of things is super important.

No. It's super important. I think a lot of these tracking tools too are built weren't necessarily built for health care. Right? They were built for other kind of use cases like, you know, home services where there's less regulation.

Yeah.

And places kind of where there there's BAs are not offered. So people really need to ask specifically to their vendors or the marketing people with them at, you know, do they have a BAA in place? Because when there's calls being tracked, that patient health information is out there. So it's not an optional thing. But the good news is it's pretty easy to fix once you know how to ask the right question.

Okay. So what's next?

I'd say the next is thing that we kinda touch on a little bit here is that, you know, what changes when you actually see this kind of granular data about people contacting your practice? And here's a real scenario, you know, practice discovers their whole website contact form maybe gets, you know, 15 submissions a month. But the front desk only follows up on maybe eight of them. And that's seven, know, potential patients that just are kinda falling through the crack. So, you know, no amount of ad spend fixes that.

It's a process problem, not a marketing problem. But they never really some clinics don't really have that level of granular detail into the kind of workflows within their clinic. So they and when you're trying to track it through Google, there's always these gaps that that kind of maybe get blamed on marketing. Oh, marketing's not working. But you know, it's about the overall clinic workflow.

So this is the part I get excited about is because you know when things are more easily tracked, then practice can be more successful and it kind of build better processes. For the first time you know when I when people ask me you know is my marketing working? Then I could provide them a real answer based off of real data. It's not like, oh, well, we think so because Google, we had this many conversions, but like in our conversion based off of length of a phone call or, you know, maybe it was coming from that. It's not a feeling anymore.

It's an actual number that you can point to, which I think is really important.

What about keywords and campaigns? Will that actually we actually be able to look at that and what's actually driving the calls?

No. Absolutely. You'll be able to get down to that level where you can see, you know, which campaigns are more successful, you know, which which keywords are really converting to new patients. You know, is it more of a diagnosis term? Is it a location term?

By by kinda seeing and and having this detail, you're able to make better decisions about your budgets, so you're not just wasting your money on ads that are maybe bringing in the wrong types of patients or just no patients at all.

Okay. And you're talking before too about, yeah, like forms getting ignored and bottlenecks, and that could be part yeah. It could be a bit of a process problem. Of course, that's not something you would actually help them with, but that's something they need to be looking at if they're gonna start doing this right, and they're really gonna start looking at the numbers. They really need to look at those bottlenecks a little bit more.

Absolutely. Like, when you talked about strategy, I know a guy in the podcast with me who does a lot of high quality strategic thinking with podiatrists.

Oh, yeah. I like going.

That would be Tyson Tyson Franklin. So, you know, if you're looking to really dive into the operations and the systems, I think Tyson would would be a great person for you to connect with. So, I mean, there there'll be you know, when I'm setting up these systems for people, maybe there's a little back and forth about, you know, what's going on and then some ongoing information like, hey. You know, I listen to all the calls that come in Yeah. For for the clinics I work with so we can, like, kinda iron things out, especially in the early days and give them a little bit of suggestions.

But if they really need to, like, learn how to, you know, be a better manager, learn how to, like, make teachable moments for some of these, you know, the their employees so they can retain staff at a time where it seems like it's very difficult to, you know, train and retain staff, definitely Tyson's your guy.

Thank you very much, Jim. Yeah. Because it is it is one of those things. And I think we spoke about podcasts just recently and maybe the other podcast. And I just said that if if all of a sudden you had double the amount of new patients coming tomorrow, whatever campaign you're running, it could be Google, could be something else, and twice as many people came in or started phoning your clinic, Could would it break your clinic?

And if it would break it, all these people can't get in, then there are bottlenecks. There's problems that need to get fixed up. You should be able to cope. An extra 20 patients ring up next week and want to get in, and they're high quality patients. If you can't get them in, you got problems.

Absolutely. I mean, think you're touching me on a really important problem. You know, like I think it's how to get everybody on the same page. You know, like how do we get everyone moving in the same direction together, whether it be through workflows or the systems in our practice. But it's also when everyone, you know, when everyone, you, your staff, your marketing company, you see the same data and you have the same understanding of what's going on, then the whole team can be aligned and kinda move in the right direction together.

It's one of those like when the data is and it's never gonna be perfect in marketing because there's just things like brand marketing and, you know, word-of-mouth. Those things can't always be clearly controlled, but at the same time when you can get a little bit more granular in some of this data, it helps people make better decisions. So I'll I'll close by saying, you know, you don't need to become a data scientist. Tonight was not a, you know, not trying to grill you or your marketing company about, you know, why you're not doing things the right way. It's just a huge opportunity, I think, that a lot of people don't necessarily understand.

You know, when it comes to what a conversion is, how you set that up, and then implementing this call and form tracking can be a huge unlock for practice. So you don't need to overhaul everything all at once. Just get independent tracking on your on your phone calls and on your form fills. Make sure it's HIPAA compliant, and for the first time you'll actually be able to answer the $2,000 a month question which is you know is my marketing producing patients or is it just producing a lot of reports? So if you're not sure where to start, you know, there's a great conversation to bring your you know, to your next call with your either your marketing company.

You know, if you wanna have more, you know, more in-depth information about this call tracking and what it means, we're happy to do more podcasts on the subject, or you can email me, myself, or Tyson to help get those systems in place. But I think it's an important thing that people know exist so that they can make better decisions and provide better care to their to their patients.

That is fantastic information, Big Jim. And give a plug to the scorecard.

Sure. Yeah. So if people are curious about their online visibility, obviously, Google Ads can play a part in that. You know, there's some map related stuff. But if you're not sure when people search for podiatrist near me or maybe you wanna do a lot of orthotics in your local area, it doesn't matter if you're in The UK, Australia, or The US, or even Canada.

We're happy to provide a free practice visibility scorecard which will kind of rank things like your Google business profile, your website, and that kind of local visibility when people are searching for certain distance around your clinic to make sure that you're being seen And you'll know whether you're being seen or not being seen with this free visibility scorecard. So if go to podiatry.marketing, the very top of the website, you can click on a link up there, and we're happy to provide you this free practice visibility scorecard.

And you've had a few come in so far already?

We've had ones from all over the world. I got one from The UK this morning. Had like three or four from Australia, you know, about 10 or 15 from The US. I'm not sure if I've done any Canada yet, but definitely if there's any Canadians listening, feel free to, you know, visit podiatry.marketing and request that scorecard.

Okay. That is awesome, Big Jim. I look forward to talking again next week.

Sounds great, Tyson.

Okay. See you.

Bye now. Thanks for listening to Podiatry Marketing with Tyson Franklin and Jim McDaniel. Subscribe and learn more at podiatrymarketing. That's the website address, podiatry.marketing.