The Attribution Trap Keeping Healthcare Marketing Stuck on Google

Talk to any healthcare marketer right now, and you’ll hear some variation of the same marching order from leadership:

“Do more with less.”

Most teams respond by doubling down on Google. They cut spend elsewhere and push all budget into that channel. It’s understandable. Google provides the best performance signals most healthcare marketers have.

But it's a trap because Google is a slot machine.

It’s a black box, you have limited control, and over time it tends to get more expensive. You’re competing against the same organizations for the same high-value keywords. On top of that, AI-driven search experiences are starting to soak up some of the “easy” intent that used to flow into paid search. The direction is clear: more competition, less obvious inventory, and higher costs.

So if your entire “do more with less” plan is “put more into Google,” you’re betting your growth on a lever that gets harder to pull every quarter.

Signal Quality Matters (And Most Teams Can Tighten It)

Don’t get me wrong. There are ways to get more out of Google. Google’s models optimize around the signals you give them. If you feed the system shallow signals, it optimizes toward the cheapest version of that behavior.

A lot of healthcare teams already optimize to something more meaningful than clicks. Usually it’s a form fill or lead submission. That’s better, but it’s still often a proxy.

When you can optimize to true outcomes (attended appointments, enrolled members, confirmed patients), performance tends to sharpen. CPA often drops. Efficiency improves because the algorithm learns what you actually value.

That’s the near-term win: upgrade the conversion point so Google gets smarter. But don’t confuse that with the whole strategy. Because once you’ve improved the signal, a new reality becomes extremely obvious: better data solves the efficiency side of “do more with less,” but it won’t create new growth on its own. Doing both is where the real shift in “doing more with less” is happening.

Google Is Made to Capture Intent. The Future Is Creating Demand

Google is great at capturing intent when it exists. But intent doesn’t appear out of thin air. 

Google doesn’t manufacture interest in your brand. It’s not designed to educate someone who has never heard of you, or persuade a commercially insured patient to consider you over a competitor, or re-position your organization around a new service line.

Once a searcher types their query into Google’s search engine, you’re competing in a crowded auction for a click.

Here’s a scenario to illustrate this. A consumer wakes up with knee pain, and they want to find out what’s wrong and how to fix it. They don’t have a provider in mind. They’re not loyal to a health system. They just want answers.

So they search: “why does my knee hurt” or “knee pain when walking.”

That’s intent, but it’s category intent, not brand intent. Google will happily auction that click to whoever is bidding. And in most markets, that means you’re competing against every urgent care, ortho group, health system, telehealth brand, and aggregator in driving distance. You’re not winning because search “created” interest in you. You’re winning because you paid to intercept a moment that already existed.

Now imagine you’ve built a true demand motion at your healthcare organization. That can change the consumer's behavior from searching “knee pain doctor near me” to “orthopedic dr providence health.” Or it produces something even better: a direct visit, a phone call, a “book now” click from an email.

That specificity in the consumer’s search drives down your costs. 

This all seems obvious, right? So why isn’t it happening? 

The truth is, Google has you trapped: the way most organizations measure marketing makes demand creation look like a waste of money.

Last-Click Is Lying to You

If you’ve tried channels outside Google and had to shut them down because “they don’t convert,” you’re not alone. But that’s usually not a channel problem. It’s almost always a measurement problem. 

Last-click attribution rewards the final interaction (often Google or direct) and ignores the touches that created the demand in the first place. Think about how you behave as a consumer. You see something in a social feed. You don’t buy from the click. A week later, you go directly to the brand’s site.

In most dashboards, that conversion shows up as Direct. Or it gets attributed to Search if you Googled the brand name.

But the truth is: that purchase had a touch point upstream.

If you could see that 50% of your “direct” conversions had a Meta touch point, or that a meaningful share of branded search conversions were preceded by CTV exposure, you’d make different budget decisions. You’d have proof that those channels are doing their job.

Without that visibility, leadership sees this:

• Google converts
• everything else “doesn’t” 

So budgets collapse back into the one place that gets credit.

The Playbook: Build Demand, Then Let Google Harvest It

The marketers who are getting ahead aren’t quitting Google.

They’re stopping the habit of treating Google as the answer to every growth problem, and they’re rebalancing around a more realistic funnel:

• CTV + display + audio create awareness and preference.
• Social channels (Meta, Instagram, etc.) nurture consideration and drive engagement.
• Search + direct capture conversion when the moment is right.

This is how you change someone’s behavior from:

“why does my knee hurt” to “orthopedic doctor near me” to “orthopedic dr at your brand.”

And when that shift happens, something predictable follows: Your Google dollars get cheaper.

More brand queries. More direct traffic. Higher conversion rates. Search becomes more efficient because the awareness layer is doing the heavy lifting, like it does in every other category.

How To Make This a Reality in Healthcare

Making this shift often feels impossible because the underlying infrastructure in healthcare marketing is still fragile. Data lives in siloed systems, tracking breaks the moment a pixel gets shut off, teams can’t safely share signals across tools, and compliance can shut down an entire channel with a single “we can’t approve this” message. 

But these aren’t impossible problems. These are old problems that have been solved by CDPs in other industries. But healthcare is unique so traditional CDPs cause more problems than solutions. But now Freshpaint is bringing the solutions to healthcare so marketers can win in the “do more with less” era.

Freshpaint gives healthcare marketers a privacy foundation with our BAA-backed platform, built-in consent management, and enforced allowlists so data only flows where compliance explicitly approves it.

Those features unlock true first-party tracking so you actually own your data. And because the data is captured cleanly and securely, it finally unlocks audience targeting, down-funnel optimization, and real multi-touch attribution instead of the stitched-together stories teams have been forced to tell for years.

This is where “do more with less” becomes more than a line. When your data foundation is solid, you can optimize toward the outcomes you actually want — attended appointments, enrolled members, confirmed patients — instead of upper funnel metrics. And the story you tell to leadership can be built around the full economics of the funnel, not a Google-skewed picture of ROI.