Revisiting LSAs for Healthcare: Early Results & Future Trends

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: Hey everyone, welcome back to Ignite, Healthcare Marketing podcast. I’m Lauren Leone, your host and Chief Growth Officer. I have with us today Evan Ilgenfritz, who’s our VP of paid media. You’ve seen him before on some of our deep dives in paid media. Today we want to revisit a topic that you probably listened to on our podcast a few months ago, local service ads.

The reason we want to revisit them is we’ve now been testing them for a few months across a number of different clients and client verticals. Today we want to revisit it to share with you what we’ve learned. Evan, let’s just regroup really quickly on what LSAs are, if someone’s listening to this episode and didn’t maybe hear our first line.

Evan Ilgenfritz: Sure. Thanks for having me, Lauren. LSA stands for local service ads. It’s a Google offering that is, it splits the difference between search and service engagement. They’ve been running for a long time, mostly on home services like HVAC or plumbing that has been going on for the better part of a decade. Healthcare Vertical has been a somewhat recent addition in the past couple of years, and it’s been expanding over time.

That’s what’s important to this group, to people in healthcare. To talk a bit about what they are, is that they are little service rankings that show up at the very top of the Google search results page. That means everything still shows, you’ll still have organic results. You’ll still have paid search traditional ads showing, but when an LSA ad shows, it shows at the very top, you could have both showing at the same time, which is a great angle. You could cover more of the results page by appearing at the very top of the service ad, as well as following up with a traditional paid search ad.

Again, what they are, they are tied in fairly directly with your Google business profile and by location. Traditionally when we work with healthcare companies that have multiple locations, we tend to start with individual locations and Google business profiles that have the most reviews and the highest rating. That is really how you effectively bid on positioning, is the strength of your profile, as well as how many reviews and how verified you appear to be. Ultimately, it’s an opportunity to drive phone calls specifically, and you only pay when someone does submit a lead or a call in this instance. It’s not pay-per-click, it’s pay-per-lead.

Lauren Leone: In healthcare, the traditional use for home services, that pay per lead, you could verify because Google recorded and posted those calls. You could go in and say which ones were valid or not valid leads. Obviously in healthcare, Google isn’t going to be recording anything because that’s a violation. That is our workaround for that.

Evan Ilgenfritz: That’s right. LSAs as an offering, don’t have nearly as much control compared to paid search. That’s even more the case with healthcare because they do not record calls. We tended to recommend– It does accommodate call tracking software. We have a number of ones that we use, Line, Callbox, CallRail, there’s a variety of providers, and that is going to be your best mechanism to look at and qualify how good these calls are because Google’s not recording them.

Again, you’re really just paying in this instance when someone opens up your profile and then calls, Google will register it as a lead when it’s about 60 seconds call duration. Then it’s up to you in your, call tracking and CRM to verify the efficacy[inaudible 00:03:39].

Lauren Leone: You can go back in and say to Google, this was not a valid lead, even if the call lasted 60 seconds, because you have that data from call tracking?

Evan Ilgenfritz: Actually, no. In, again, when you’re dealing with traditional home services, they’re not what we would say in a sensitive vertical, like plumbing, for example. The LSA platform lists them out. You can listen in the LSA platform to calls and say, hey, this is actually just an informational call and that they will refund you. Because in healthcare it’s sensitive and Google’s not recording, that’s not a mechanism we have. It’s very important that you have– We really do recommend that you have a call-tracking software solution on the backend so you can verify it. You really won’t have a mechanism to really dispute calls or manually adjust quality signals.

It’s all about testing LSAs, seeing that it works, verifying the quality of these calls, and then you can make some minor adjustments in the profile and where you target to help improve that. That’s really the angle is that you trial it, make some adjustments. If it’s going well, great. If it’s not, then additional testing or maybe LSA won’t work in your market.

Lauren Leone: Yes. That call tracking is really there more as a mechanism to validate the use of LSAs and that’s for that [crosstalk].

Evan Ilgenfritz: That’s right. To recommend this to anyone, be some sort of mechanism to make sure it’s doing what we need it to do.

Lauren Leone: Speaking of seeing if it’s doing what we need it to do, let’s talk about– We’re revisiting this topic because we have some insights. What have we learned? Let’s talk, first, verticals. Where have we used it so far from a testing standpoint? What do we feel about the use of it for those industries?

Evan Ilgenfritz: Good question. A lot of where we’ve seen use in the dental, orthodontic, vertical. We’ve also trialed some physical therapy. We’re, again, expanding with more offerings for all our clients as time goes on. Right away, I can say that the learnings are interesting. We’ve got some dental clients that have had great success. The efficiency is good. They’re able to verify the quality of LSA calls in their call tracking software, and that it even is comparable or it can be more efficient in terms of qualified leads compared to paid search.

Now, we’ve also had other dental groups that have run it, and they’ve run into some interesting nuances and issues that didn’t lead to the exact quality that they would require. In this instance, I believe it was because they were getting a lot of calls that were requiring about Medicaid that this particular business did not support.

Fortunately, there are not tons of mechanisms to avoid those kinds of calls. The best you can really do is look at data related to Medicaid usage in markets, adjust your zip code targeting to try to find where that might not be as big an issue. You can also include that in your LSA card, we would call it. On the platform results page, you’ll see a small little section for LSA. You click it and it opens up to reveal photos and service details.

Lauren Leone: Much like a Google thing?

Evan Ilgenfritz: Correct. In that instance, I think having more information there can help, potentially if people have Medicaid or they rely upon it, and your listing shows that you don’t support it, that may dissuade them or reduce the number of calls as well as geographic targeting. In this instance, it wasn’t going as efficiently. This is just something to watch out for in terms of deploying LSA ads.

Lauren Leone: The other major barrier,– Let’s just talk about what we’ve learned in bringing this to our clients, and why it takes so long to get it up and running, and why we don’t have every client on LSAs. What is the number one reason that this just takes time?

Evan Ilgenfritz: Number one reason is set up. It’s always interesting because I think as, non-marketers, as just citizens, we appreciate how strong these systems are in place to ensure that we’re verified and that this is a valid business. However, it can be a bit challenging when you’re the marketer trying to stand us out.

There’s a somewhat robust process to stand up LSAs where Google effectively needs to verify your business, your business licenses, do background checks on the people or owners at the clinics to ensure that everything looks good, that Google can stand behind their verification and sponsorship of your ads on the platform. That ends up taking some time.

One of the things you can run into, you have clients that have onboarding more and more different individual clinics into their family and while retaining the original branding. That can make things more challenging because in that instance, when overall companies owns multiple different brands, that they have to do more verification for each of these locations, whereas a company that has all, say, a hundred dental clinic locations, they’re all branded the same, they’re all the same entity, you can get a more fast track version. Once you get approved, then you don’t have to really do the same steps per clinic.

Lauren Leone: The one tip I would give- if you’re hearing this and saying, “Oh gosh, that sounds like such a burden. I don’t know if I’m ready for that,” is everybody else probably views it as that burden too. If you can push through it, you have the opportunity.

We don’t see LSAs on that many results yet because they’re just simply aren’t users of it. There may not be someone bidding on or participating in the dental category in your zip code, so therefore they just don’t show up. If you can push through that, get verified, you could find yourself in the top position on the results as the only person bidding in that option.

Evan Ilgenfritz: That’s right. Because healthcare is still rolling out and is new as an offering, newer as offering for the LSA program, there’s a first-number bonus. If you were to search now for HVAC service near me, you’ll see tons of LSAs. They’ve been doing it for a long time, but with healthcare, it’s not the case. You can get ahead of the competition. It’s a great opportunity, especially in really competitive markets you may be serving in. You can get that on top of your traditional paid search ads, then you’ll get an advantage to break through in the market.

Lauren Leone: Yes, I would say those are some interesting learnings. We’ve now been, with those first six months of just understanding the nuance of it, bringing it to clients in and recommending it in markets where we’re finding that our cost curves are really high relative to the system. Major metros, highly densely populated areas, or where there’s a competitive density, using it as a tool if you are a player that accepts Medicaid for example, in a market where maybe not all of your competitors do.

It could be a great way to capture that traffic that they’re not able to capture. Those are a few early learnings. The industries that we’re moving in or working through with our clients to test in right now, outside of dental and PT, what are some of those other ones that we hope to have early learnings on?

Evan Ilgenfritz: It’s expanding. It’s always expanding. One thing I’ll add just to caution everybody is that there are distinctions. The United States is ahead. Canada has local service ads, but they do not support healthcare at this time. They’re rolling that out separately with the legal system there. In terms of current American service offerings, we of course talk about physical therapy, dental, orthodontic, ophthalmologists- I hope I said that correctly- as well as allergists. Then now, we’ve been talking with our LSA reps and they’re expanding into plastic surgery and meta spa-type services. This is on the front edge of the new offering. There are more and more that are coming.

Lauren Leone: Primary care is probably fairly underutilized too. What we see oftentimes is a lot of, even like urgent care groups that are also primary care. There’s some opportunities there for across, a lot of the retail-esque healthcare verticals to start trying this out.

More to come on LSAs as we test into these new verticals, as we build larger data sets to maybe publish a couple articles on the trends that we’ve seen. Thanks for listening in to this quick update on LSAs. Evan, thanks for joining and sharing your knowledge as always.

Evan Ilgenfritz: Yes. Thanks for having me, Lauren.

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