Drive Efficient Media Spend by Pairing Healthgrades with Google SEM Case Study

While Google Ads and Facebook remain the top platforms leveraged by healthcare marketers, many feel that they’ve exhausted these avenues when it comes to new patient acquisition.(1) Google SEM should remain a key component of health system promotion — but what strategies can be implemented beyond paid search to reach a new audience, drive conversions, and maximize patient encounters?

Healthgrades as a complement to Google Third-party platforms like healthgrades.com are growing in popularity among healthcare marketers due to their ability to reach new audiences outside of traditional channels. Healthgrades diversifies your existing paid marketing mix by reaching a highly targeted audience of consumers who are in the process of selecting a doctor or hospital. In fact, 67% of Healthgrades visitors to physician pages will make an appointment within a week of visiting the site.(2)

With minimal audience overlap when compared to SEM, Healthgrades provides an incremental source of qualified leads that complements SEO, pay-per-click/SEM, and business listings.

Healthgrades offers significantly lower cost per conversion In a comprehensive review of over 1,700 campaigns across 337 hospital clients, Healthgrades campaigns achieved a significantly lower cost per conversion compared to Google SEM or Facebook campaigns. Comparable conversion costs for Google SEM were 2.7x higher than healthgrades.com for all specialties, and the results were even more dramatic compared to Facebook campaigns, which had 10.7x higher cost per conversion.(3)

1. Wave 6 of the State of Digital Marketing in Healthcare Report by Greystone. Net and Klein & Partners, May 2021
2. Healthgrades site study. n=1896
3. Healthgrades data from 1/1/18 through 12/31/19; Healthgrades Conversion = patient call; Facebook comparison is based on 137 campaigns across 72 unique clients.