Case Study: An in-app attribution adjustment made all the difference for one healthcare org

Providence St. Joseph Health is a multi-state healthcare organization that faced a challenge in 2016. Their teledoc service’s cost per action (CPA) was over $560 for each telehealth visit. This was overly inefficient, but Providence was committed to increasing medical sessions while also trying to drive the CPA down at the same time.

To reduce CPA right away, they began by optimizing irrelevant search queries that were being captured through their Express Care Virtual service. Once this was cleaned up, the team started to see better efficiencies. However, they did not see their biggest wins until they restructured these campaigns to target additional but relevant keywords. This is what ultimately lead to more conversions and efficiency in costs, which caused a significant CPA dip within the first three months.

However, there was still a challenge to tie a mobile and tablet web experience conversion back from an in-app event. This meant the mobile and tablet traffic in Google Ads did not have any conversion performance associated with it. After employing an in-app event tracking solution, the web and app attribution problem was resolved. Through ongoing conversations, the team developed a deeper understanding of how in-app tracking worked and balanced how the various app stores operated. They blended analytics and marketing to solve the attribution problem.

As a result, the attribution blind spot required researching how the platform renders data. They were able to capture necessary information from the URL, specifically the “gclid” and “mkclid,” and send these back as an offline upload to map back to the keywords that generated those in-app events.

Previously, there was minimal visibility into conversions. Users clicked from a mobile device to a web landing page and eventually were redirected to the app store. Once this was set up, then tied back the medical sessions, the results were shocking. Breaking out campaigns by device effectively drove down CPA without compromising volume.

After a full year of advertising this service and driving down CPA, while not compromising scale, CPA was reduced by 96 percent while the medical sessions increased by 158 percent. Because of this success, the team implemented Google Universal App Campaigns as well as Apple Search Ads to track the full user experience. Now, the medical sessions drive 36 percent of the total sessions from apps on a monthly basis.

Providence St. Joseph Health’s next challenge was an install campaign for its “Circle App,” which provides information for parents from pregnancy through their children’s teen years. Year to date, the campaign drove 7,145 installs and expanded the service on search channels through Google Ads.

Overall, the campaigns were hugely successful and helped both patients and doctors alike. In this digital age of healthcare, it’s critical to provide convenient and accessible care. By successfully overhauling digital marketing efforts, Providence St. Joseph Health is now able to be a true partner to their patients in providing awareness of the full gamut of services available.