One of the most appealing aspects of online marketing has always been its trackability. Unlike spending on radio ads, billboards, local magazines, or other offline media, it’s easy to see how many people responded to your online campaign and became patients. Or at least it was.
While we can still do a very good job of tying your online marketing spend to actual leads flowing into your practice, privacy changes over the past year and in the immediate future mean that our ROI (return on investment) calculations are getting a bit diluted.
What’s Happening
In response to privacy laws such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), big players in online media (namely Google, Apple and Facebook – but others as well) are all changing the way user behavior is tracked. We’ve discussed privacy before, but the recent introduction of a new privacy feature in Apple’s iOS 14.5 is going to mean that there’s a black box for much more user behavior in the very near future.
Apple has been rolling out a privacy update for iOS devices that allows users to block tracking by apps and sites that monitor user behavior. With a simple click of a button, a user can decline tracking. Once they do, all user data including IP and device information is transmitted via a proxy server, making it impossible to see what actions individual users are taking.
Beyond Clicks and Conversions
As we said, trackability is one of the huge benefits of online marketing. While we are still able to track some user behavior, more and more of it is becoming hidden. Does that mean that online marketing will be less effective? Yes and no. To the extent that the lack of data makes it harder for us to know which marketing efforts are most successful, it will lead to some dilution of online marketing effectiveness and some wasted marketing spend. But fundamentally, people still spend an enormous amount of time online and marketing on online platforms will still be the best way to reach prospects, especially compared to the alternatives.
And let’s talk about those alternatives for a second. How do offline media like billboard, TV and radio measure success? These media have always struggled to tie advertising views with consumer actions. So they get creative with performance metrics, tracking things like average daily drive-bys (billboard) or gross rating points/ad frequency (TV).
With less data available to track online user actions, online marketing will need to shift a bit from explicit lead attribution to more implicit attribution, like offline media have been doing for decades. As an example, if we run a newsletter campaign encouraging existing patients to write a review, we might not be able to track all the way from a person opening that email, clicking on a Review Us button, and completing a review on a third-party site. But we can see how many new reviews your practice received over a 1 or 2 week period following the campaign, and ascribe any increase in reviews to the campaign effort.
We also don’t have to abandon more traditional indicators of online marketing performance, but we need to take them with a grain of salt. For instance, when compared year over year, it might look like your spend on Google Ads is leading to fewer conversions. But we can extrapolate from the number of conversions continuing to be tracked an estimate of the total number of conversions coming in from the Ads, including those users who are not being tracked due to privacy settings.
Other Ways to Adapt
We are moving into an online privacy framework where you need permission to track user actions. Who would willingly agree to be tracked? Actually, you might be surprised. According to a study by Broadridge Financial Solutions, 45% of consumers are willing to hand over data if it will provide them a better experience. This means that if you ask users for the information you need, and give them a good explanation about how they can benefit from sharing the info, in many cases you can continue to track key datapoints.
Another thing you’ll want to do is regularly review your privacy policies. We used to recommend a yearly review, but with how fast the data privacy landscape is changing, we recommend reviewing these policies about every 6 months. This includes HIPAA privacy policies, terms of use on your website forms, opt-in language for email newsletters, website policies on use of cookies and data sharing, and more. We’re here to help our clients navigate the rapidly changing world of data privacy so they can continue to make the most of their marketing dollars and set the right expectations with patients and prospects.
