Reaching the Right Patients with 3P Data

Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite Podcast, the only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week, Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Lauren Leone: Welcome to Ignite: Healthcare Marketing Podcast. My name is Lauren Leone, our Chief Growth Officer. With us, I have Ruchi Patel, who is our Group Media Director, one of my all-time favorite Cardinals, and our Flocker of the Year, just had to shout that out. If you’ve had the pleasure of working with Ruchi as a client of ours, you know that this is a podcast you want to be listening to. Thanks for joining, Ruchi.

Ruchi Patel: That is a very generous introduction, but happy to be here.

Lauren: Very accurate. What we’re here to talk about today with you, Ruchi, is how to activate third-party audiences to enrich your campaigns, to enhance them, to find the right people on the right platforms, on the right time. On that topic, the privacy landscape is changing. It’s getting more challenging to activate on your first-party data. We’re losing data out of things like pixels and signals, and the actual platforms themselves have grown their restrictions on their native audiences. All of that to say, we need to start looking at third-party data sources to enhance our campaigns.

Starting with defining what is a third-party audience, what are some of the types of third-party audiences that we have access to, and what is different about a third-party audience from natively what you might be able to get in a platform?

Ruchi: Just talking about the need for a third-party audience, as you guys are scaling your spend up and trying to get more bookings, there will come a point where in search you will hit a point of diminishing returns. You will have to go after more niche audiences. Like you mentioned, there are a lot of restrictions that we are facing by ages being generally in healthcare, also with all the changes that Meta is rolling out.

If you look at a business, think about a dental client. A dental client can have five different brands under them and each of them specialize in something. One of them specializes in dental implants and dentures. The other one is probably an orthodontic brand who specializes in braces and Invisalign. Then the third one is more about dental cleaning and general dentistry. If you look at the current audiences that we have in Meta, you will not be able to identify that core group.

The most you can do is probably demographics, where you know that primarily, users who end up in my clinic are female in a particular age range. They are probably people with kids, but there is more nuances to it. You have to be looking at what are the attributes that define that user. In a situation like this, this is when a third-party audience comes into picture.

Who is a third-party audience? There are multiple ways to identifying this audience. One of them is claim-based data. I went to the dentist. I used my dental insurance, a claim was generated with the provider, the kind of service that I opted in for, how much I paid, what insurance I paid. This is very important data because it is probably the most relevant data you can find in healthcare. Again, there are very few providers who can provide it. If you are in a sensitive vertical like ABA therapy, mental health, or rehab, you probably will not be able to access it directly. However, there are a lot of other healthcare segments which are not as sensitive and can utilize these audiences.

Talking about the other audiences that you can do, not modeled audiences, let’s talk about another way of accessing this audience, which is based on medication. I am dealing with eating disorder. Obviously, before I think about rehab, I’m probably going to be taking the medication to get that under control. If I can identify an audience group that has been prescribed that medication, I am probably the most prime candidate to be targeted for medication not working, try out our eating disorder outpatient rehab as a next step here. That is a second kind where you’re using a particular kind of medication that has been prescribed to you to target the users.

Then the last one is just general interest. My dad is looking at dentures and I’m doing active research about how much does it cost to have a denture. Can I do it without insurance? What exactly is the process like? Based on all my research, there is a lot of data that is being generated at the back end, which puts me in market for dentures and dental implants. That is a third category that you can go for. Again, like I mentioned, insurance-based is a very expensive audience. Maybe your budget is not allowed to pay for it. There is always an in-market or a contextual component that you can go after. I think these three are some of the audience groups you can target using a third-party provider.

Lauren: We’ve got claims history. What type of providers have you seen? Have you seen a provider that might indicate that the next appointment you need is maybe with a specialty that I offer? We’ve got the medication and the diagnosis codes. I know that’s a big one. Then we’ve got all the contextual signals we can get from your behavior. I love it. Like you said, that differs from in-platform, which has really gotten quite restricted to age, basic demographics, basic geographic information. That’s just such a broad audience, you have no idea what their intent is. It’s just a different approach.

With the third-party audiences, you mentioned specifically insurance segments can be quite expensive. How do you consider the potential value of a third-party audience? If you’re going to pay more for it, it obviously needs to produce higher quality on the backend.

Ruchi: Absolutely. Think about it. If you’re using this audience, it is probably going to be in a top-of-funnel or middle-of-funnel tactic in either programmatic or Meta. There are two ways to evaluate it. One is, if I’m running a full-funnel strategy, what is the total number of patients I’m getting out of my total investment? As a marketeer, your first move is I’m going to be investing the dollars where I know users are directly searching for it. I will just be looking at how much I’m spending, how many patients I’m getting out of it, and then we do the basic math here.

The second way to go about it is, if I’m using this particular audience at top-of-funnel or middle-of-funnel, there is clearly some impact on conversion rates it is going to have on all my other digital channels. At the end of the day, it’s going to be basic math about looking at, did my digital booking volume see an uplift once I launched the strategy. How much did I invest in the strategy? What was my cost per booking after the total investment now versus before when I was not investing into this audience?

Like you mentioned, these audiences are usually expensive and they come at a CPM charge. You’re already paying for the ad spend in Meta and then you are adding on the additional charge there. However, at the end of the day, if your cost per booking sees an improvement with the addition of this audience, there is absolute [crosstalk]–

Lauren: The cost.

Ruchi: Exactly.

Lauren: I’ll take a step back because you mentioned it, the places where we activate these audiences are either through a programmatic DSP; people who work with us know that we work with some healthcare-specific ones like illumin, and then in Meta, we can push. I guess other healthcare social channels as well, right?

Ruchi: Yes. 100%. You can directly push it into Meta. Again, this is a very relevant audience. Again, I think an example would be super helpful here. If we are trying to identify people who might be at risk for breast cancer, there’s a journey where you get there. You are going to a women’s health center, you get your annual checkup, you realize that there are certain signs that require further testing. Once you are in that process, there are a lot of diagnosis codes that are generated before you get to the final outcome here.

If I’m identifying this audience, again, I don’t know if this is too sensitive to call out here but I’ll just go ahead, if you are talking about somebody who already has a diagnosis for a breast biopsy, you know that this is somebody who is in the process of identifying if they are at risk, if there’s anything they need to do here. This is a very relevant audience for a direct bottom-of-funnel targeting.

Instead of going the route of top-of-funnel or middle-of-funnel, I would be directly porting this audience into Meta and running a bottom-of-funnel campaign where I’m asking these people to, “Hey, let us help you in your journey. We can provide you support right from the start to the end.” Again, that is when I would be porting this audience into Meta. If you’re thinking about a more high-level audience, if you think about just somebody who is dealing with a child who is showing signs of autism, they require speech therapy, you are starting to notice that they are lagging behind a little bit as compared to other kids and you’re getting concerned, this is something that probably requires a more top-of-funnel approach.

Like you mentioned, we have illumin. We have StackAdapt. There are a bunch of programmatic vendors out there who provide in-market and contextual audiences for these users. It is going to be obviously cheaper than porting an insurance-based audience directly into Meta, but that is when I would think about using programmatic, using this audience within programmatic, probably funneling it down other middle-of-funnel or bottom-of-funnel initiatives in programmatic, or maybe even into Meta for a cross-channel strategy.

Again, depending on what is the user profile you’re trying to target and at what stage are you meeting the user in their journey to getting around the situation, I think that determines the kind of audience provider you’re going to need and B, the platform that you will be running ads on.

Lauren: I love that approach. It’s really platform and audience-agnostic in the sense that it’s more about your business need who you’re trying to reach, and then let us go out and source the most likely audience. Let us identify if there’s audiences maybe at a very high level that we could push to a top funnel, introduce our services to you type of campaign. If there are additional signals like diagnoses or medications that indicate that someone might be further down the path of exploring care, we could perhaps drop them into a digital funnel a little further down and try to activate them.

Ruchi, I think in practice we have a good grasp on third-party audiences, where we can get them from, what some of the signals are, but this is not a everybody go race and jump straight to a fancy third-party audience. What are some of the like gotchas, things to consider, and potentially blind spots of third-party audiences?

Ruchi: 100%. The first thing that I would like to call out here is the quality of the audience. You will see a lot of data providers out there who say, “This audience is a modeled list based on attributes for people who have kids with autism.” Now, again, a modeled audience is more so like, these are 100 people, they are all male, they are in this particular age group, and there are 7 more attributes that are common. We model an audience based off of this, and you do not know how accurate the profiling is.

Definitely be very careful about the audience source that you’re going after. Have we seen success with it? What is the audience size? Always question what are the attributes that got us to this particular audience group for the service that I’m looking for. That is the first thing. The second thing is, in most cases, when you’re using a third-party audience, you are porting them into a platform.

One of the things to be super careful about is match rate. I have an audience group of 100,000 users in Atlanta. However, when I’m porting it into Meta, my audience size is not big enough because the match rate is not great. I think it’s an IP-based match that the programmatic–

Lauren: It’s like a hashed IP.

Ruchi: Exactly.

Lauren: Device ID.

Ruchi: Exactly. The device ID. Again, it differs by audience providers, but we’ve seldom got into the situation where we are trying to port a particular audience into Meta. It seems like it has a really big audience size and we would be able to target a lot of people. However, you start to notice that the audience size is really small, and with the estimated spend that you had, you’re probably hitting a frequency of five, which is where you do not want to be.

I think audience size and ensuring that your audience pool is big enough to run a sustainable strategy is the second thing I would be careful about. The third thing is, in general, what you mentioned, you just don’t run to it. There are a lot of tactics that we have tried in other channels that have worked. I would literally say there is a sequence to it. First of all, you’re trying to target audiences who are searching for your services.

I would absolutely recommend you max out that at the desired ROI or the desired cost per booking that you’re looking at. Once you exhaust that audience, you then go into the second segment of, these users are probably not looking for me but they might need me based on their previous user activity, whatever we can track digitally. The third part would be, understand when it makes sense to leverage or test out a third-party audience based on your digital journey. How sophisticated am I? How good is my measurement?

If you’re using third-party audiences, especially in the top and middle of the funnel, you want to be able to measure it. You want to be able to have good tracking for direct, organic, paid, social, all of these other channels so you can actually say that once I started running this particular audience in top-of-funnel, I actually saw a big improvement in my conversion rates for direct and organic. The measurement piece is super important. Make sure your digital journey is sophisticated to be able to measure the actual impact of something, not complicated, but something as more nuanced as third-party audiences.

Lauren: I would actually add another thing to that, Ruchi. I think this whole activating on these audiences, make sure you have something to say to them. Make sure you’ve thought about your creative strategy because I’ve seen too often groups go after the sexy audience thing, and then they’re just serving them the same generic messaging that they would have served. You know so much about this user because of how you’ve sourced them. Use that to play in or empathize or help them pull them through a journey.

If you guys are sourcing third-party audience vendors, to Ruchi’s point, know and understand the difference between a modeled audience and an actual audience. Is it the exact user, or is it modeled off of a sample set of users? We’re not saying that one is always better than the other. It’s just important to understand what type of audience [crosstalk] so how you should treat it.

Then one thing I think too that I’ve learned is understanding any lags or delays in the data as well. In the claims-based world, we’re always looking at how long after the claim was generated might that data become available in the database? Then how long after the data’s available in the database, how long does it take to get it into platform? If you have a one-week window from claim to when you need to reach them, that just might not be possible. There might be a two-week delay.

Ruchi: Maybe they’re already committed. It depends on the healthcare vertical you are in. In certain verticals, once a claim is generated, there is still 12 months or a longer timeframe before the user is actually able to arrive at a solution. For other diagnoses, if a claim has already been generated, they are probably already committed to another provider. It’s very important to understand the service that I am offering and what the journey of the patient looks like from a diagnosis to a solution here.

Lauren: I really like too, you mentioned, if they’ve already generated a certain code, then they might already have selected a provider. We use third-party audiences a lot for exclusions as well. It’s like a cost savings. Who should I exclude from my campaign? Then one thing I’ve seen too, you mentioned women’s health, a lot of timeframes since they last got a specific code or claim. In mammography, we use it to, if you haven’t had a mammogram in three years and we know the cycle for women is every three years, then we want to be targeting you [crosstalk]–

Ruchi: Exactly. As we are accessing this insurance-based data, you can always play around with the date range. We can always request our provider to look at only the last three months, only the last six months. It is something that we have to proactively communicate because we understand the business more than anybody else out there. Again, it’s very important to be cognizant of when exactly was this particular claim generated and if they make sense to be targeted three months down the line or not.

Lauren: Ruchi, it’s always so fun talking to you about this stuff. I think we can nerd out forever, talk about examples. This stuff just really excites me. To your point, there’s a time and place for it. This is not a prescription for y’all to run out and just put all your budget into this. Thank you for those tips and the cautionary tales as well. It was great to have you on. Thank you, guys, for listening. We’ll see you next time on Ignite.

Ruchi: Thank you.

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