Measure What Matters: How Attended Appointments Transform Healthcare Marketing Performance

Healthcare marketers are facing a fork in the road. Privacy grows more complex, and pressure to deliver intensifies. To thrive, teams must adapt or risk getting sidelined.

That urgency brought 40 leading healthcare marketers together for House Call Chicago last month—an exclusive event for healthcare marketers at the forefront of privacy, performance, and ROI. As leaders convened to confront the uncomfortable truths holding healthcare marketing back, the takeaway was clear: Healthcare marketers must move beyond tracking “vanity metrics” and focus on measuring revenue impact. 

If there was a way to transport you back in time to take part in the conversation, we would. But in lieu of time travel we’ve distilled the key insights here, laying out a framework for measuring the metrics that matter and bolstering Marketing’s reputation in your organization. 

Where Healthcare Marketing Measurement Goes Wrong

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. And in recent years, many healthcare marketers have tracked engagement metrics—impressions, clicks, and bookings—but not business outcomes like appointments attended. Here’s why:

1. Privacy regulations

As data privacy regulations tightened, measurement across the patient journey stalled. Kate Malham Pardes, Account Director at StackAdapt, explained at House Call, “with privacy regulations constantly evolving, marketers have been left scrambling for any measurable signals.”

Without a clear way to tie attended appointments to the marketing campaigns that drove them, Marketing can’t prove how they’re influencing revenue. Instead, teams default to reporting on channel-level metrics without a clear view of how engaged leads are converting to revenue-driving events. Freshpaint’s Ashley-Yvonne Howard put it well: “Marketers want to connect campaigns to outcomes, but HIPAA restrictions make it tough. Clicks and impressions are easy to capture, but they don't always tell the full story.”

2. Organizational silos

Mapping patient engagements throughout the funnel requires connecting different data systems across the business. But in many organizations, Marketing and Compliance don’t collaborate on a holistic patient data strategy, and systems remain siloed. Like at Boston University School of Dental Medicine, where Marketing Director Julie Elias described that “Marketing ran campaigns. Compliance stayed in its lane. The two didn’t need to talk much.”

But analyzing Marketing’s impact on business outcomes requires a unified view of patient activity. And when organizational silos arise, the bridges for data collaboration wither. Marketing defaults to tracking the metrics they can control, like impressions and clicks, rather than the outcomes that require cross-functional coordination, like attended appointments and patient outcomes. 

3. Limiting beliefs 

For years, healthcare marketers have dismissed the tactics employed by counterparts in other industries as too risky. Watching marketing teams across retail and media develop award-winning loyalty programs and turn data into predictive personalization, healthcare marketers gave up on innovating themselves.

But after years of strategic stagnation, marketers have lost touch with their goal as a department—driving revenue. And as a result have begun to lose trust across the organization. 

How to Redefine Measurement Around Revenue

These are big challenges, and healthcare marketers are frustrated. But there’s good news, as many at House Call attested: Once healthcare marketers progress from focusing on vanity metrics to measuring revenue impact, they start to see much better results. 

Optimize Your Ad Platforms For Revenue

Having a clear view of patient outcomes allows you to optimize campaigns for revenue-driving events. When conversion metrics within an ad platform, like StackAdapt, are set to a patient engagement event, like clicks, instead of revenue events, like an attended appointment, the ad platform will optimize to generate more patient engagements, regardless of whether they lead to revenue or not.

By orienting ad platforms to revenue-driving outcomes, however, you can optimize delivery to patients that are more likely to generate revenue for the organization. Teams that use attended appointments instead of bookings as their conversion metric in Google Ads, for example, have seen a 17-22% reduction in customer acquisition costs. 

Recognize Measurement Is a Leadership Tool

In addition to campaign improvements, being able to report on revenue builds trust with leadership. When healthcare marketers are stuck tracking vanity metrics, they can’t frame their results in language that leadership understands. “When you can't optimize or prove impact,” Kate explained, “how can you argue to your business stakeholders that you need more budget?” 

Clicks and impressions don't move a CFO. What does? Dollars earned, patients seen, and waste avoided. When Healthcare marketers speak to leadership in terms of revenue driven and dollars wasted, they’re able to build trust and even secure more budget. Kate shared that she saw a client secure additional CTV budget once they were able to tie conversions to CTV exposure.

Let Measurement Reshape Your Marketing Strategy

Measuring Marketing’s impact on business outcomes also reveals gaps in the patient journey. Instead of saying ‘our campaigns are getting clicks, we’re doing our job,’ marketers have a clear view of whether or not their programs are generating revenue. 

This exposes what’s working, and what’s not. "Some of the ways I was thinking about my digital strategy are different now," shared one practitioner from the audience. "I thought this search campaign was getting lots of people to book. But when I looked at attended appointments, Performance Max was actually better." 

Build a Privacy-First Full Funnel Measurement Strategy

Now at this point your compliance alarm bells might be going off. And you wouldn’t be alone, many at House Call had the same question—isn’t full-funnel measurement impossible as it requires invasive tracking?

But fear not. As Kate noted, “advancing technologies are now able to de-identify patient engagement so you can accurately measure and retarget.” 

House Call’s panelists discussed how modern healthcare privacy platforms, like Freshpaint, make it possible to unify patient engagement data from throughout the patient journey and share it with advertising and measurement tools without exposing PHI. That means marketers can “attribute a specific display campaign to an increase in appointments booked on your website, or retarget people that drive to your website but didn't convert,” Kate explains. 

Having a full view of how campaigns drive business results transforms marketers’ outcomes, Ashley noted. "Freshpaint ensures sensitive health data is stripped out before it ever reaches ad platforms. "with compliant conversions in place, marketers can finally measure with confidence."

If you’re interested in learning more about how leading healthcare organizations are using tools like Freshpaint and StackAdapt, we’ve put together a complete recap of all the topics and use cases discussed at House Call Chicago. You can access it here. 

Or can subscribe to Freshpaint 5 and be the first to hear when we’re hosting a House Call event in your city next year.