The Hidden Cost of Bad Measurement: Why Healthcare Marketers Waste Budget—And How to Fix It

Healthcare marketers depend on measurement to justify budgets, allocate spend, and prove impact. Yet most teams are working with data that is incomplete, misleading, or structurally broken. The dashboards look full. The metrics look impressive. But the foundation underneath them? Cracked.

The result:

• Dollars quietly shift into the wrong campaigns.
• Leadership receives distorted ROI signals.
• Teams optimize activity, not outcomes.

As MVP Health Care's Tom Armitage put it in a recent webinar, when measurement is limited to soft signals, “it’s going to lead to wrong decisions.”

And here’s the underlying truth: this isn’t one problem—it’s a cluster of interconnected, often invisible failures that compound each other. These failures rob teams of the visibility they need to stretch budget, earn trust, and protect strategy from disruption.

Below are the four hidden problems driving this waste—and the solutions that stop the bleeding.

WATCH: On-Demand | Compliance as a Growth Engine with Tom Armitage

Hidden Problem 1: Misdefined Conversions Create False Signals

Most healthcare marketers still optimize to whatever data they can capture—usually intent signals masquerading as conversions. 

At MVP, that looked like pageviews, form-starts, and video plays being treated as outcomes. As Tom put it, the team had been “a bit too liberal on what we defined as a conversion,” and GA4’s defaults only made the noise louder.

That noise carried a cost. Soft metrics inflated performance and distorted where dollars flowed. Cheap clicks looked like wins. Real business outcomes stayed buried. “It was leading to misdirection in the decisions we were making,” Tom said—a quiet drain on budget that no dashboard would surface.

The fix required discipline: redefine conversions around actions that matter to the business. 

For MVP, that meant tying success to outcomes that “equated to an actual lead within our CRM.” Once that definition changed, so did the conversations about performance, investment, and strategy.

Hidden Problem 2: Fragmented Data Breaks the Funnel

Even when teams align on what a conversion is, fragmented systems can destroy the ability to measure it. 

Before rebuilding its stack, MVP’s analytics, CRM, ad platforms, and BI tools all operated in silos—each capturing a piece of the journey but never the whole.

Tom described the issue bluntly: understanding real performance required “infrastructure changes on our CRM side… to track our marketing activity from awareness all the way to closed-won.” Without that continuity, budget flowed to whatever channels showed the most surface-level activity, not the ones driving revenue.

The solution wasn’t a new dashboard—it was unifying the data path itself. GTM capturing behavior. Freshpaint routing it safely. Ad platforms receiving compliant optimization signals. CRM recording outcomes. BI tools visualizing the entire journey. And critically, everything labeled consistently so systems finally spoke the same language.

That clarity unlocked something teams rarely have: confidence that their dollars are pointed in the right direction.

Hidden Problem 3: Privacy Risk Forces Marketers to Fly Blind

For most healthcare organizations, the fear of exposing PHI forces marketers to choose between compliance and performance. Many turn tracking off altogether. Others use tools that quietly collect risky identifiers. Either way, teams lose the signals they need to optimize.

Tom captured the tension well: every new vendor faced scrutiny around “what data they're collecting, where it lives, and whether they support a BAA.” If they couldn’t answer those questions, they weren’t getting through procurement—and marketing lost another opportunity to improve performance.

The loss was real. Retargeting vanished. Custom audiences vanished. Down-funnel optimization vanished. Tom called it exactly what it was: “crippling.”

MVP solved the problem by shifting to a privacy-first data layer that removed PHI before anything reached downstream tools. That single architectural change lowered the temperature in every compliance conversation, gave IT clearer guardrails, and freed marketing from constantly having to justify basic tactics like retargeting or audience building. As Tom explained, the moment downstream tools no longer saw sensitive data, approvals moved faster and experimentation stopped feeling risky. 

In short, once the data layer stopped exposing what shouldn’t be exposed, privacy stopped being a blocker and became an accelerant.

Hidden Problem 4: GA and Ad Platforms Don’t Automatically Track What Matters

Even with compliance and data flow resolved, teams hit another barrier: the limitations of the platforms they rely on every day. GA4, in particular, wasn’t built for healthcare or for the kind of outcome-focused measurement marketers now need. Tom didn’t mince words: “My heart broke when they released GA4… such a disappointing user experience.”

The problem wasn’t just usability. Defaults in GA4 and ad platforms track too much risky information, too little meaningful information, and the wrong information altogether. The result? Teams optimize what’s easy to measure—not what drives results. “We need a much more narrow focus around what we want [analytics] to be telling us,” Tom said.

Fixing this required rebuilding analytics with intention: custom event schemas in GTM, Freshpaint as the compliant router, event verification before campaigns launch, and BI tools presenting clean, actionable visibility.

Once the system was rebuilt, everything moved faster. “We can more quickly bring these campaigns to life because the platforms are all speaking the same language,” Tom explained.

Fix the inputs, and the entire marketing engine improves—a simple truth that becomes obvious only once the data stops working against you.

Fix Measurement, Stop the Bleeding

Incomplete measurement isn’t a reporting problem—it’s a budget problem. It distorts signals, fuels bad decisions, and quietly drains performance from every channel.

But when healthcare marketers:

• Redefine conversions around real outcomes,
• Unify funnel data from click to closed-won,
• Eliminate privacy barriers that block optimization,
• Rebuild analytics with intention…

Budget stops leaking. Performance compounds. Strategy accelerates.

This is the transformation Tom described—a shift from soft metrics that misdirect spend to a unified, privacy-safe measurement system that fuels smarter decisions, clearer ROI, and more efficient growth.

Understanding where your measurement is leaking money is the first step—Freshpaint exists to close those gaps and turn privacy into a performance advantage. Find time to talk to an expert today.