When you’re working on marketing initiatives, coming up with creative campaigns is only half the battle. You’ve worked hard to create your assets, landing pages, CTAs, and social media posts — but your job isn’t done once you click “publish.” After your campaign is deployed is when phase two — monitoring, analyzing, and optimization — begins.

But with so many marketing tools, analytic dashboards, and digital campaigns, the world of marketing is full of different metrics to track. How do you know which metrics to pay attention to?

Let’s dive into four metrics to keep top-of-mind when measuring the success of your healthcare marketing campaigns.

Patient Acquisition Cost

When you’re building marketing campaigns and measuring the results, one of the most important metrics to track is patient acquisition cost or the total average cost your organization spends to acquire a new patient. This number includes all sales and marketing costs for a set period — including line items like advertising spend, content creation, vendor fees, and more. That figure is then divided by the number of new patients generated in that same time period, giving you the average patient acquisition cost.

Calculating Patient Acquisition Cost

Once you have a clear picture of your patient acquisition cost, you can see where you can tweak and improve your spending and, if needed, identify the lower-cost programs that have a higher ROI.

Marketing Originated Patients

This metric is the proof point for many marketing programs — the number of new patients acquired as a result of a marketing effort. This figure includes anyone who initially interacted with your marketing programs and then became a patient.

Calculating Marketing Originated Patients

For this metric, it’s critical that your marketing program have strong source tracking. This helps you identify where a patient originated—did they click on a banner ad, or did they come to your site through a social media post? Perhaps they completed a health risk assessment advertised on your website. There are many ways a new patient may find you—by tracking which patients came from marketing programs, you can allocate your marketing efforts and budgets to the highest performing tactics. Learn how one hospital used the Wellactivate health assessment to get the lead attribution data they needed to prove marketing program ROI. 

Marketing Influenced Patients

Unlike Marketing Originated Patients, this metric demonstrates how well marketing programs support all patient acquisition programs. This metric looks at the success of the many touchpoints a patient may have before scheduling an appointment. The Marketing Influenced Patient metric takes into account anyone who has ever interacted with any of your marketing materials. It is measured by looking at all new patients in a given period and figuring out what percentage of those patients interacted with marketing materials. What counts as an interaction? Anything your team identifies as advancing the patient in their journey to health — opening an email, taking a health assessment, or reading a text — are examples.

Calculating Marketing Influenced Patients

This metric requires some sophistication in how you track a patient’s digital journey, but can reveal which of your tactics are helping a patient progress – beyond clicking a banner ad, what message on your website made them convert? Examples of marketing influence could be clicking a banner ad, engaging with a social media campaign, or completing a digital health assessment.

Patient Engagement

Though this metric is not directly tied to hard ROI or revenue, it’s critical in measuring the value you have brought to the overall patient experience. Positive engagement can help you understand if your communications resonate or if you’re building positive brand associations. Measuring engagement can be difficult and depends on the tactics you choose - clicks on your emails, blog views, and social media shares are all valuable measures of engagement. Positive engagement here can be a good indication that your patients will be more likely to leave positive reviews on third-party review sites in the future.

Calculating Patient Engagement

Last piece of advice? Start thinking about your success metrics before your campaign ever launches, even during the content creation phase. That way, you can ensure the content you create and the engagements from your campaign hit the mark. And remember — the metrics you review should be used as tools and benchmarks to continue to improve your campaigns. They aren’t just a snapshot in time, but instead measurements that can trend up or down.

Looking for guidance on building engaging and successful healthcare marketing campaigns? Download our guide for a 5-step strategy that drives patient acquisition and demonstrates marketing program ROI.