Ep. 126: Profit Injections - Part 3: Clinic Math

Patient Care Marketing Pros (00:00)
What's up everybody. You are listening to another episode of Walk -Ins Welcome. I have Nick the marketer right here. And then I'm real. I'm Nick with patient care marketing, Bruce. I'm just kidding. You're listening with Nick and Michael. He's just got us. He's got his NTM swag going today. And I think I've done something weird. Like I've got my headphones on backwards. So I hear everything in reverse. That's not true. Oh, that's weird. Yeah. I'll flip them around here in just a second. So if you're listening to this episode, we know, we know that we are post.

Urgent Care Association Convention. Yes, I'm gonna put out there. It was amazing. It was one of our best events yet. I'm putting it all out there because it hasn't happened yet. We are right currently this is a Thursday and we're leaving on Saturday to go to Vegas and to go hang out with a bunch of urgent cares for a couple of days and have a lot of fun going to the sphere which we're excited to go and I can't wait to go to that for sure. Yeah, we're excited. We saw how about we talk like we've

Y 'all we went to the sphere. We had it was we had Gordon Ramsay food. We went to Hell's Kitchen. We took some clients out to dinner. Are y 'all starting to get our agenda yet? Because we're throwing it out there. Y 'all are going to know where we're going to be. We had some urgent care. So I've been needing you guys for so long. Where do I sign? Like we had all that happening. No, we're really Jack to go to the Urgent Care Association Convention. We're Jack to be back from the Urgent Care Association Convention. If you listen to this post convention. One of the things that's happened though, Michael, is like.

we've been seeing a lot of conversation over the past probably two months now. Yeah. Thank you podcast listeners. It's mostly been from you guys. Yeah. Thanks for reaching out to us. And we're genuinely glad to help. Yes. But, but there's enough of this going on right now to where it makes me want to address it. So we've named this podcast episode clinic math, right? Which is a complete spinoff of if you ever heard the...

Not the phrase, but like just the trend right now, boy math, girl math stuff. We have clinic math. There you go. That's a perfect segue, perfect layup. But what's happening is, you know, if y 'all ever call in or if you ever schedule an appointment with us, most likely you're going to get a chance to meet Grace. Grace does what's called a discovery call and she learns about your clinic. You learn about us. And during these discovery calls, like she is getting a chance to look at your ads accounts.

your specifically your Google ads accounts. And then of course, they're coming on and they're doing a strategy session with me. And I'm seeing some trends here that actually bother me a little bit. Yeah, they bother me a little bit. Either we're very good at what we do or the expectations are really bad. I think it's both. Yeah, or you guys are trying to self implement. Be a good word. To me, self implementing your own ads and your own marketing and all of that.

to a degree is like me self diagnosing and self treating a medical condition. Me giving you a shot. Yeah, that's probably not a good idea. Probably not a good idea, but I'm bringing that up not to beat you up. Okay, it's this episode just to help you understand how numbers work in the advertising space. Yeah, what you should be expressing expecting leaning on our expertise because we've now worked with hundreds of clinics, multiple locations. I say hundreds.

tens of dozens or whatever, like I don't know how many it is. We've dealt with a lot of clinics. And we've been finding some consistency. We're finding some things out, right? I don't want to be disingenuous. I make sure I give good information. Yeah, because at the end of the day, we've worked enough with you guys that we're like we have now a benchmark. And when we are not meeting the benchmark, we know we got to make adjustments, of course. But across the board, we've consistently found this benchmark. It doesn't matter where you are like as.

The only differences between on your location is just one, do you have a good location? Like location still matters. But overall, if you're an urgent care that's in a thriving city, you know, not like a hundred people are there, you know, a couple of thousand, thousands and thousands and type of thing. This works like these numbers are very consistent for us. And we've seen it time and time again. We've seen it from a startup urgent care all the way to an urgent care has been around for 15, 20 years and it's multi -location.

It just works. To this point now that we want to bring this to you to say, like you were saying, we've seen so many new people come talk to us and they give us their ads access. And we're like, why is this so bad? And the expectation that it looks good. But when we look at it, we're like, no, our numbers aren't this. We have to talk about it because I think you guys are getting a disservice of some sort. Even if you're doing it yourself or you've hired somebody. Well, I mean, so with your...

You're a first time parent. I have three. Okay. As a first time parent, you're doing the very best you can with what you have. Well, I've seen some things now with three kids and exocations. Like Connor's a total experiment, my oldest, but the other two, like we know what they're trying to get away with. We know what it should look like. We have a base level of success and, and, and know what we should be expecting from our other two. You don't treat them the same. They're not the same person. We get that. Where am I going with this? Well,

you may be dealing with your ads account, but it's the only one you've looked at. Yeah, we've seen hundreds of them. We know what it should look like. Yeah, exactly. Because if you're looking at your own data time and time again, yet you beat yourself. Right. Is that what the standard you should go for? Yeah. And I'm gonna tie this back in. There's good parents and there's bad parents. Yeah. There's a lot of people out there that have three kids that are terrible parents. And there's a lot of people out there with three kids that are really good parents. And we know in our industry, the

these numbers are usually hidden. Like people don't talk about them or they're not impressed by them. We're going to talk about them today. Yeah. These are real. Like we're going to bring in info today. We're bringing you guys actual, our account information and some things that we've seen some from discovery calls. Right now we're not going to mix names in, but I won't, I won't share ads accounts. I won't share locations. I won't share. I'm not going to share too much information to where you can figure out who we're talking about, even though I don't think you could with the amount of accounts that we have.

And we've done enough of these discovery calls and account reviews over the past two months that I don't think you'd know who I was talking about if I talked about those numbers. Yeah. Because they're so vague, but we're going to talk about them because I want y 'all to know what winning looks like. Well, cause at the end of the day, so we've been talking about in the past episodes, profit injections about adding stuff to boost your clinic. Right.

Now we're going to talk about the math side where, you know what, that profit injection is great, but there's a core here that you need to get correct anyway. And we're going to tell you today what these numbers should be. So when we're done with this episode, if you're running ads or you're doing any type of digital, you need to find your numbers and see how close you are. You might be beating us. You might, that'd be awesome. Or majority of you say, well, crap, that is not where my numbers are at all.

Well, I'm going to pull data from three very different parts of the United States somewhere in this episode. Yeah. Just so that y 'all know, like I'm not making it up off of our best, like I'm about to talk about our best performing account, but also want you to see like there's some significant consistencies, not significance, but there's some consistencies across these accounts that you should be looking for. Yeah. Right. So, um, here's what I want to specifically address is, is Google ads, how your Google ads should be performing.

So let's talk about what we're seeing. All right. So first of all, when we are looking at an ads account, we are seeing ad spends that range from a thousand to around five thousand. There was one that was spending like twenty grand a month. We don't work with them. Great people, by the way. We love them, but they were spending about twenty grand a month and we had a chance to review those ads accounts. So we're seeing a wider range of ad spend. Yeah. OK. In that.

we're seeing a range from ones that we don't manage. We're seeing conversions, cost per conversions that range anywhere from like $40 all the way up to like $60 cost per conversion. And when we say conversions, that's not a click. We're not talking about clicks right now. No, we'll talk about clicks, but not yet. But a conversion is an action. One of two things that we call a conversion. They scheduled on your online schedule or they called your clinic. Yeah. So like the human, the potential patient,

took an action. Correct. And we were able to record that as a conversion. So when we say $40 a conversion or $60, that means it costs you $40 something dollars in ad spend to get somebody to potentially become a patient. These same people have a cost per click, just somebody clicked on their ad and did nothing else. It was ranging somewhere between $9 and $18 cost per click. Yeah. All over the place, right? Yeah.

nine to $18 cost per click, 40 to about 70, something like that in cost per lead, 40 to $70 cost per lead. It was somewhere in that range. The one I'm looking at right here says $47 cost per lead, right? And these are companies that we're looking at from all over the United States. So what should it look like with a healthy account? Yeah. So just keep that in mind too, like that one of the accounts we referenced has like a $3 ,000 a month ad spend in Google ads. Correct.

So put that perspective, we're not talking big, big numbers here. Like these are very common ad spends that you should be experiencing as a clinic. Right. So this particular clinic that I'm going to talk about has a $1 ,500 monthly ad spend, right? I think we somewhere, sometimes it's like 1 ,450, if it's a long month, July or something like that, it goes just a bit over 1 ,500. So 50 bucks a day in ad spend. Exactly. And their cost per acquisition,

per new patient based on all the data that we have ranges between $25 and $35 depending on if it's summer or peak. Okay. I forgot what I, oh yes, their patient value. All right. So this particular patient value is up in the $200 range, but we've seen a patient value that's somewhere as low as 150 all the way up to 220. Again, just depending on where you are in the country. States matter. States matter.

Texas here has different payouts than like a New Mexico or a New Jersey or California or whatever. Right. So just the payouts are all different. Right. Here's what you should be targeting. This is where you're going to want to take some notes or go back to listen to this episode so that you can go back and compare your own Google ads account. Your cost per click should at that, at these numbers should be less than $2 and 50 cents per click. This one right here is the prime account that we're referencing.

$1 .86 cost per click cost per click over the past 30 days. $1 .86 people. Yes. $1 .86. It should be less than 250. And again, I just told you what we're seeing is somewhere between $9 and $18 cost per click. That's an absurd amount of money. You want a profit injection, lower your cost per click. All right. It really is. You're going to get more clicks for the same amount of money. Because yeah, think about it. So if it's $2 a click at 1500 bucks, you know, 750 clicks, you can get out of it. That's 9x the cost.

And then, but if you were at $10 a click, now it's only 150. Like it's amazing how quickly that number changes, which then dives into the cost per conversion. All right. So let's talk about the cost per conversion. They picked up the phone and they called your clinic and we were able to track it or they scheduled on your online scheduler. Okay. So that cost per conversion should be less than $7 unless it's a phone call only campaign. Those costs more. Those tend to be about double.

than if they go straight to a scheduler because people don't like to talk as much. Right. So you'll see if they're if you're just driving phone call only ads, it should be around $15. Right. It's almost double your conversion rate should should it's a pretty big range depending on who's answering the phone. Should have learned that to somewhere between 30 and 50 percent somewhere in that range. It should be your conversion rate on Google. It's not going to be like that in other areas. But on Google, you should have a 30 to 50 percent conversion rate. All right.

Any questions about that, Michael? Am I right on line there? Yeah, so recapping that a little bit, that cost per conversion that we see that's a good number is around $7. One of our prime accounts we're referencing is $4 .71. So we're just doubling that number for just to say an average, right? But what we've seen with non -clients, so people that are like, I don't know if my ads, I'm running ads, but I'm not happy with them. That's typically how it starts. We're seeing...

close to that 30, 40, 50 plus cost per conversion compared to what we know is a good number of seven. So, and you ask yourself, well, how do you calculate all that? So here's another thing. If you're running Google Ads and you don't have conversions set up, you are set up for failure all day long. So all I have to say is if you go into your Google Ads and you check the cost per conversion box, which is typically green, by the way, when you're looking at thorough graphs,

If it has zero, that means you don't have conversions set up. But your cost per click is always there. They're always going to show that. So if your cost per click is above $2 .50, there's a potential problem. These are all leading problems, right? But at the end of the day, we're going to tie it up in a little bow. Go to your Google Ads. If you see something above $7 on a conversion, above $2 .50 on your click, you have potential to make that better.

So what is our conversion rate over the past 30 days for this account that generated 309 conversions in Google? Again, we can't tell if they came through the door yet, right? But we track that in a different system, all right? That we have our own system for this. And this is how we come up with conversion ratios. So we were able to track 184 of those conversions in our software. So if I take 184 and I divide it by 309 conversions tracked through Google,

It gives me a conversion rate, a actual close rate of 59 .5%. So 59 % of those turn into new patients for our client. And that's just Google Ads. Yes, that is just ads. That's just ads. And that is with a $1 ,500 ad spend budget. You don't need $10 ,000 in ad spend. If you're spending $10 ,000. And you're not getting enough. No, no, listen to me. What did I just say? 9x, right? Yeah. So $10 ,000.

divided by nine is 1000. Let's do this. I'm doing this wrong. Clinic math is hard. Clinic math. What I'm trying to say is like you should be able to divide that like you really should get the same result for $1 ,111 is where I was going with Azure. Right? Like if you were, if you had it optimized the way we optimize a Google ads account, that same to our $1 ,111 would go the same length as your 10 ,000.

Yeah, yeah. That's what I'm trying to. That's what I'm trying to communicate. Yes. OK, that makes sense. Does that make sense? I was just saying it wrong. Clinic math. Clinic math. No, but at the end of the day, so like we're presenting standards to you. Yes. And I'm going to also put an asterisk to that. We're also presenting to you standards that we've that takes time to get to. Correct. We've been working with this client for how long? Almost three years. Almost three years. Great client for us. So like it's we love them. It's what we call dialed in, right? Yeah, that's right. And we're not.

sitting in or trying to reinvent the wheel every time because we're getting that finite, cause that dollar 86 used to be $2. So cutting off - And then when docs says, Hey, I need more patients. We just increase the budget. Cause he already knows that we're, that we have it completely dialed in. Or he wants to do some profit injection and spin up a different thing. And it's all there. Yeah. So what we're saying is like, if you came to us, well, I had $40. Can y 'all get me to that $7? Like probably, but it's not going to be.

in 30 days. It's not gonna be in three years either. It may be like six months, right? Give or take. And there are also lots of factors there. Another thing in there, cause I know you're probably thinking, well, this is probably for some giant city that has no competition or whatever. This city has less than a hundred thousand people in it. Yes. 89 ,008. So less than a hundred thousand people, some competition. So when we say sun there's probably 10 or so urgent cares in the -

vicinity type of thing, right? Sure. And one that just won't get out of our way. And one that just magically does things. Anyway, so all that being said, like this is, in my eyes, very average of like a typical location urgent care, not in giant city, not in a small, small city, but like right in the middle. Now I want to make a, I want to make a transition here for just a second before we look at two other accounts that are from completely different parts of the country. So I want to make a note here that we do, we do SEO for them as well.

Yeah. All right. So I just told you, we generated 184 new patients, 309 conversions, right? So let's just say, let's chalk that up to 309. I'm going to say that 309, 309. Okay. So 309 conversions from SEO search engine optimization, organically go into their website. Not the ones that went direct to their website, people that found them and clicked on them. And went to their website. And this is not Google business profile. That's right. That's 227.

new opportunities that were generated through SEO. This is the kicker. This is why we focus so much on the Google Business Profile and Google Maps. 639 opportunities came from the Google Business Profile. They never went to an ad, and they never went to the website. They went straight to the Google Business Profile, and they either clicked Book Online or they clicked to call. So think about that. No, these are just phone calls. We didn't even do the scheduler. Just the phone call. So think about that. The Google Business Profile.

did three times as much as SEO, which means at the end of the day, Google wants people to interact with their platform. They quote unquote lose when someone goes to the actual website of a business because Google's like, you fell off my platform. But at the end of the day, if your Google Business Profile isn't maxed out and doing all the right things, you're losing, absolutely losing out. And this is a huge number. 639 calls were generated on Google Business Profile in 30 days, which is crazy.

to think about. And this is not a giant urgent care. No, and really, I mean, even though it's two location, technically it's one, they just haven't set up as two. We want to bring this up for a very specific reason is that we treat Google as the platform. And we have three separate approaches to that platform. We have Google Business Profile, Search Engine Optimization, and Google Ads. That's our three prong approach to the Google platform. Yeah. OK. Just for...

for sakes here, because we're doing good on time. I want to make sure that I shared another one. Let's go over here to a phone call only campaign. We only track phone call conversions for them. I think you can still hear me. I think I moved away from a mic for a second. Beautiful. So this again, it lines up with a little bit. That's right on the money. Yeah. So it's pretty close to what I was thinking anyway, right? So they got in the past 30 days, 145 phone calls to their urgent care.

They had a cost per conversion of $14 and 86 cents. On a $3 ,000 budget. That's right. They don't use online schedulers. If that's what you're wondering, they just don't use it. They don't want it. They don't use it. They want to talk on the phone. They're spending around $3 ,000 a month. Again, it's a more expensive to just get phone calls, right? So go call, solve or Xperity or somebody and get an online scheduler. A cost per click is what I'm going to look at. Should be about less than $3.

Yeah, do 95. Yep. So there you go. Yeah, right. And that math completely checks out from what we were just talking about is the call ads, it's gonna be a little higher cost per click, it's gonna be a higher cost per conversion. But these guys are calling you like they're picking up the phone and they want to talk to you and schedule an appointment, they have a problem. Yeah, it's very high intent. So it's worth the extra money. The cost per acquisition, even though the cost per conversion is higher, the cost per acquisition is pretty much the same. Yeah. All right. Let's look at one more, Michael.

I'm not going to say their name, but they heard us on the podcast and they've been with us from a startup and they still only have one location.

And that's right up. And that's exactly what they want is one location. All right. So Michael, because I've been talking a lot, this is the funny account to us because I forgot about this. They have like almost no budget here, but, but, but still the math doesn't matter. The budget doesn't matter. It's the math that counts. Well, yeah. And what we're so in this budget here, this is a $500 ad spend, which is funny to us, but it works for them. That's all they want. Cause they even told us we have the number of patients per day that we really like. Yep.

and we don't want to go up because the quality is exactly where we want it to be. Like, okay, well, I mean, if you do, you have an amazing ad spend that you can increase. Because this is what we know. Once we start hitting numbers like this, it's really a matter of increasing ad spend because the urgent care industry has a wonderful benefit that most industries don't, is search volume. It's never a lack of search volume in what you guys offer. So people want you.

All the time. Let's go through these numbers real quick. I'll let you call out these numbers real quick because this is funny. It lines up exactly with what we're talking about. It's a completely different budget. So this one's funny to us because the cost per click on this guy. So this is a $500 budget. $500 a month, y 'all. $500 a month. We're used to $1 ,500, $3 ,000. Like, that's what we're used to dealing with. Yeah. So and this is a big city. This is not like a tiny city. No, that's big. Yeah. $1 .05 cost per click. $1 .05 cost per click. It has to be one of our top.

cost per click. That's our best cost per click. One of the top cost per conversion. So we were telling $7 is a good number. $4 at nine cents. Well, what I was saying is it should be less than seven. I'm giving you litmus test. Yeah. Like if you, for example, if your cost per click is over $2 and 50 cents, something isn't right. Yeah. I just pulled from three completely different strategies, three completely different cities, putting our Google ads to work.

you need to be under $2 .50 cost per click. You need to be under $7 cost per conversion. Yeah, so like in our company here, we like a red light system with our accounts, like a red light, green light type of thing, and a yellow. So in your world, if your cost per click is breaking up to 50, that's a red light or potential or yellow, yellow becoming red. If your cost per conversion is above $7, that's a red. But for us, if it's a, you know, if you're staying under it, it's all green. So at the end of the day,

120 plus conversions off of 500 bucks. That's like, like, y 'all don't understand how nice because if we took this budget and went to the, the ones that we've been seeing our $40 cost per conversions, that's 10 conversions compared to 120 conversions. That's right for the same money, which is just hard. You are going exactly where I wanted to go to wrap up the episode to you. Yeah. Right. This is that, this is that profit injection that we're talking about. Yes. You have,

Kind of a split fork in the road here. Once you figure this math out, right? I can do, I can do one of two things. I can drastically lower my cost per conversion and take my 6 ,000, 10 ,000, whatever dollar budget and divide that by like seven or eight. Right. And I can, I can pocket that money. Imagine giving yourself a five to $7 ,000 race. Cause you're not having to spend that money on ad spend option too.

keep that spin right where it is and seven to 10 X your patient volume with the exact same dollars you were already spending. It's like, it's a, choose your own adventure here. Right? So like, do I, what do I need to save money? I don't want, I like the patient volume, but I'm spending way too much for these patients right now. Well, that's something that you can solve for if these numbers don't line up with what I just told you. All right. Did you get that?

Are we going to dial this in, spend the exact same money and take our patients from 20 a day to 40 to 60 a day? Then you keep the same ad spend, you dial this in and you solve for that problem. You're not spending any more money than you were already spending. Now you just have it dialed in. And then the other side of that is there are there are there diminishing returns? Of course. So like, what if I throw a hundred grand a month at it? You'll probably won't spend it. But that's the nice thing with Google ads in particular or any paid ads platform.

It will tell you if you're actually using your budget or not. That's right. We've come across accounts that had like a $5 ,000 ad spend and it was struggling to spend it. Some of that's because the ads themselves needed to have better performance. Not so much the search volume wasn't there. But at the end of the day, we can actually see like, yeah, there's a point of diminishing returns where you can throw a bunch of money at it. It's not really benefiting you. But we don't get to that point until we've optimized down to these type numbers. And then we start just adding that ad spend until we see a number change.

Google is not going to allow you to dominate 100 % of the market. They don't like that. You need to know that. They're not going to put all of their eggs in one basket just like you shouldn't either. Because at some point you're saying, I'm done with the Google ads and boom, they just lost. And they locked out all of their other potentials, spenders. Yeah. So that's what that's part of the diminishing return. The other one is Google does not drive demand. No Google matches demand. We know summers are slow. Yeah. If there are 1000 clicks,

and there's 10 competitors and all of your quality scores are at 100%, you're going to get 100 clicks. Yeah. On average. They're going to 100 % divvy that up equally. Now that's not how it's going to work. What's going to happen is quality score is going to matter. Ad spend and bid is going to matter. There's so many factors that go into that. But what I'm saying, if all things were equal, the clicks would be divided. There's nothing you can do about it. OK?

Google is only going to match the demand and then put you in a competition. Who wrote a better ad? Who targeted their audience better? What's more likely to convert? That's where we come in and feed the data. Okay. All right. So let's put a little ribbon and put a bow on this. Here you are. We've given you really good information. Your budgets are out of whack on your Google ads. Okay, great. You told me what it should be, but I don't really know how to fix that. You got two options. Okay. Well, you got more options to that, but here's two options you can consider.

One, you can go to our website, schedule a strategy session with us. I mean this discovery, and Philip or Devin will review your account and send you a bullet point of what you need to do. We've done that quite a bit in the past couple of weeks. We have done this a lot and not gotten that person's business because they wanted to self implement and you know what? We're not mad. We're here to serve. We had some plans. We literally this is what's happened the past couple of times. Someone reaches out.

I got some Google ads issue. I'm running Google ads, but I'm not happy. Cool. Give us read access only so we can't break anything or touch anything. We can just see. Cool. Give us that. Give us a day or two and we'll have a pretty much a read it up bullet point list of things that we would change. We meet with you and we say, here's how you can improve your account and we'll show it to you. And at that point you can say, thanks, I'll try that. Which has happened already. It happens a lot.

actually. Yeah, we give away way more than we receive because we also know too, if you're good at what you do and we just give you some direction, we want you to be successful. But we also, what we know if we give you that you'll implement, I'm putting quotes here, implement, which means you'll say, that's interesting. I'll go try that. And then three months later, it's not working because you didn't actually do it. Right. So like that's happened lots of times where we just, here it is. And then the other options to have self implementing, you say, okay, I want you guys to kind of figure this out. We already, y 'all.

We got the keywords, we got the negative keywords. We got all the seasonal campaigns. We have the ads, we have the seasonal campaigns. We have proven over and over and over and over and over and over again now that our team knows how to implement the strategy, rinse and repeat and make it work for you. And I want you to think of like the cost of missed opportunity that you have now with your ad spends, what it would cost for you to hire a person. That person may.

work out, they may not work out. I hope they do. I mean, that sincerely, but there's going to be payroll costs to that. There's going to be vacations and benefits, or you have a team of people that do this all day, every day, and we just do it. So anyway, that's not a sales pitch. That's literally, if you just want, hey, tell us what to do. We'll send it over. Bullet points, do this, this, and this, and it's on. Yep. Okay. Hey, I've enjoyed this episode. We love clinic math. We do it often around here. I love the fact that we have these numbers dialed in and I hope...

really that you're able to measure this against your own services that you're doing in house. And it should give you a good indicator on whether or not it's working or not working until then. We'll see you guys on the next one. Have a great week.