Consider all of the ways your prospective patients embark on journey toward your services – imagine all the steps they might take before they call your offices: they go on Google, browse on social media, watch TV, read the newspaper, and more.

How can you tell which of your marketing strategies are working effectively?

That’s where we recommend call tracking to most of your medical professional clients. Call tracking analyzes individual phone calls based on how the callers accessed the phone numbers they’re dialing.

That little piece of added tracking data is enough to clear the fog often associated with last-minute attribution. By implementing call tracking into your marketing mix, you can gain a better understanding of where in the journey your patients decided to convert, and what led them there.

Take, for example, a patient who calls a specific phone number displayed on an ad or search page:

With call tracking, you can look back at the patient’s path as well as gather insights from the call itself.

Using dynamic phone numbers and keyword tracking for your medical marketing

Dynamic phone number tracking uses different forwarding numbers for every space on the web where your practice is found. For example, you’d have one number displayed on Facebook, and another on a Google search ad – but these numbers would lead to the same place.

Here’s why this is so helpful to giving you the insights you need to optimize your campaigns:

Let’s say that a patient who browses from their phone for a local pediatrician lands on one of your service pages. They call the number displayed on that service page.

Call tracking will tell you exactly which page the patient saw that led them to place the call.

On top of that, keyword-level tracking lets you know what terms callers searched for to access contact information. When your prospective patients visit a website, they’ll see a unique phone number tied into the pages they browsed and keywords they used.

For example, someone who searched for “foot doctor in Atlanta” will see a different phone number from someone who searched for “top orthopedic surgeons near me.”

Let’s notch up this data to the next level: when your patients and prospects call your office, your team can see exactly which keywords the patients used that led them to this call. This could come in handy in your efforts to deliver the best possible experience for your clientele.

Making the most of your marketing budget with call tracking

It’s pretty clear from what we outlined above that call tracking is a great way to improve interactions with your prospective patients. But it’s also a powerful tool to help you manage your digital marketing campaign budget by showing you which strategies are leading patients to your office, and which are not.

For folks in the medical world, a phone call (to book an appointment, schedule a consultation, or get more information) is the best indicator that this prospect is ready to become a patient. With call tracking in place, it’s easy to see which channels are your blue chips driving conversions.

Let’s use this as an example: a prospective patient searches for “top orthopedic surgeon near me” before making a call. If keywords about location or type of service are leading to more conversions, you know that you should guide your healthcare paid search strategy in that direction and create more content around that topic for SEO purposes.

If, for example, your print ads aren’t doing their job of getting folks to call your office, (you’ll know this because you used a dynamic number), then you know you can scale back that marketing effort and move your dollars elsewhere. You can instead try a healthcare SEO strategy that will give you long-term results.

Once the call is made

Call tracking is incredible at helping you understand how your patients got to make the call to your office. But it can also help you dive deeper into the patient journey by showing you how your patients interact with your clinic.

Call tracking technology can automatically transcribe recordings and organize strong insights without any additional effort on your part.

By analyzing calls you can measure the success of your current campaigns by evaluating real feedback from your patients. You can get a firm grasp of patient awareness of your office, and understand the language used and pain points experienced by your patients.

Summing it all up

Call tracking might seem like a tool used only by medical teams with a full suite of online marketing solutions at their disposal.

But that’s the beauty of call tracking – it’s an easy-to-implement and affordable platform that will help you better understand your patients, condense your marketing strategy, and increase your conversions.