October 2017 Ceatus Chronicles

Digital Marketing ROI: Trick or Treat?

Three ROI tricks…don’t be fooled

Return on Investment (ROI) are three words that receive an enormous amount of attention in the digital marketing sphere. We often speak about digital marketing at major conferences and inevitably, there are questions from the audience about how to evaluate ROI for digital dollars invested.

This is a very important question, but unfortunately it provides a great opportunity for some marketing companies to “spin” the ROI calculation. This month’s article describes three of the most common strategies used to TRICK doctors, and other businesses, with regard to the true ROI they are achieving.

Trick #1 – “We Guarantee First Page on Google or You Don’t Pay!”

Over the years, this trick had pretty much died out. Unfortunately, we are now seeing a resurgence of this tactic. Marketing companies that don’t have the skill for this brave new world are now looking for anything to hang their hats on and “promising” first-page Google results. But in today’s world, simplistic “key word stuffing” no longer works. Real SEO requires real analytical skill and real time-intensive work.

As with every claim, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Digital marketing is still marketing, and there are no magic wands, only hard word and skill. Any company that can “guarantee” a result has a trick up its sleeve. (On a side note: these companies always have ironclad contracts you can’t get out of – why is that?)

The Scam goes like this: The practice signs up for “guaranteed SEO” and the digital marketing company provides a list of search terms that will be optimized for first-page Google results. The problem is that this list always contains terms that either a) the client already ranks for or b) are ridiculously easy to get ranked for on the first page of Google, with essentially no work; for example, terms such as the practice name, business name or doctor’s name. The website is probably already ranking for many of these terms.

As a backup plan, if these companies can’t get the site to rank for even these non-competitive terms, they will purchase a little PPC advertising, which costs them only about 10 cents per click. Voila – the company has sneakily achieved “first-page results” and promptly collects their fees. Yet no real optimization or digital marketing work has been done, and importantly, your website still doesn’t rank for important procedure terms that actually drive revenue.

Trick #2 – “You Don’t Pay Unless We Generate New Patients or Clients!”

This scam is particularly enticing for doctors and other businesses because the ultimate goal of marketing is to increase sales and profit. If no payment is required unless practice sales increase, what a deal, right? Not so fast.

The way this scam works is that the digital marketing firm places a tracking phone number on the practice website, Facebook and your other online platforms, and then they “track” every call that comes from these platforms.

But here’s the rub: in many cases, consumers visit your website, social media and other online practice assets due to factors unrelated to efforts by the digital company (such as word-of-mouth referrals). Also, a large percentage of visitors arrive on the practice or business website by first searching on Google for the name of the doctor, practice or business. The website pops up, the potential patient or customer visits the site and then calls the tracking phone number.

The problem is that the digital marketing company counts EVERY contact and takes credit for EVERY call made on the tracking phone number. So, a skilled doctor who provides great service and a great patient experience will generate word-of-mouth referrals. These word-of-mouth referrals end up on the practice website, use the website (i.e. tracking) phone number to contact the practice and – BIG SURPRISE – the digital company unjustifiably takes credit (and your money) for all of the “new” patients and clients generated by your own word-of-mouth referrals. Pretty slick TRICK, huh?

Trick #3 – “We Track the Source of All New Leads to Determine ROI”

 The basic promise goes like this: “We have a unique leads tracking system that automatically tracks all leads and then populates our system to calculate the revenue and ROI generated from each digital lead source.” This trick has so many holes in it, but many practices and businesses sign off on it because it sounds so good.

The holes: First, let’s talk about email leads that come from the practice website. There is no physical or technological way to determine exactly how the consumers sending these emails actually arrived on the site. Was the visit due to a word-of-mouth referral or did the website visitor land on the site due to search engine optimization of a competitive procedure-related search term? Was it from a current (or past) print or broadcast advertising campaign initiated by the practice? Or maybe the visitor came through a directory listing that links to the website. The list of possible sources goes on and on.

Second, most leads come into practices and businesses via phone, not email. This means that whoever answers the phone is responsible for inputting, into the practice database, the correct lead source, while continuing to take care of administrative work and patients. Phone-answering staff are demonstrably ineffective at capturing and inputting marketing information (the reason being that they are busy answering the phone and typically have other demanding duties). Furthermore, consumers often become irritated if the phone-answering person is asking too many questions to determine the lead source because, after all, the customer is calling to find out more about what they are interested in and ask questions, not the other way around. And as if this isn’t enough of a challenge, even if the consumer is willing to answer the question, “How did you hear about us?” they often reply “I found you on the Internet,” providing no information about the original “source” (e.g. a word of mouth referral, search engine optimization, a directory listing, a review site or some other type of online presence). And yet, with all these technological and human challenges, these companies still claim they can track every lead – Seriously? This is nothing more than a TRICK to artificially boost ROI numbers and give their clients the false impression that they are tracking ROI for each digital strategy.

Tired of all the tricks? Good news – now it’s time for the treats. 

Treat #1 – Some Email Lead Sources Can Be Tracked

It is important to note that there are certain technology applications that can be applied to better determine the digital source of a visitor to a website, and thus the digital source of the email lead. Ceatus applies this technology to all of our client sites so that the digital referral source for each email lead can be identified. (Examples of digital referral sources include Google Organic, Yelp, Directory Listing, Google Paid and Facebook.) But still, a visitor from Google Organic or Facebook, for example, could have been originally driven to those platforms by a variety of sources, including word of mouth, SEO, print advertising, etc. And while the technology can determine that the website visitor did a search on Google before visiting the site, it cannot determine the actual search term used. Basically, it is misleading for a digital marketing company to promise that every lead can be tracked – it simply is NOT possible.

Treat #2 – The Best Metrics to Determine ROI

By now you are probably asking yourself, “If these scams do not represent real ROI, then what is the best way to determine if my digital strategy is working?” The answer is twofold. First, the ultimate goal of digital marketing is to generate more traffic to your online platforms, and more leads. Higher traffic and more leads are the best ways to measure ROI. For a new client, it is not unreasonable to expect a traffic increase of 10-15 percent, or perhaps as high as 20 percent the first year, depending on where the strategy begins. Then, over time, a 5-10 percent increase each year would be considered a success. Lead generation should increase by approximately the same percentages. Of these variables, lead generation is obviously the more important of the two measures to assess. That where the real TREAT is.

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