Category: Uncategorized

Advocating for more complete attribution

After spending tons of time making increasing the effeciency of google ads campaigns, SEO, website and webserver performance optimization, social media and other methods of attracting new patients for a group of detox facilities, showing real attribution, aka proof that this 10k in ad spend in one city delivered X number of patients into the facility, was an interesting challenge last year.

This led to several conversations with others including some back and forth with support from Kipu, about combining data for a more robust look into our attribution reporting.

I know there are other methods for combing call data with admissions data for dynamic visibility into all sorts of things, and I will be doing a follow up post discussing some other methods and options. (sign up for newsletter / new post notifications!)

At the time in mid 2025, we had data from Call Tracking Metrics mostly also in Kipu CRM and EMR.

No google analytics or tag manager type of data (not HIPAA compliant)

I had spent a little time in 2024 and 2025 trying to tie together additional information about user journeys and multiple touch points for our patients, and their family and friends or others who may be researching or supporting / advocating for them in some capacity. Yet not quite landed on a solid reporting mechanism between all the other busy work.

As I dug deeper into what Kipu offered in it’s reporting, it appeared it was very close to what we needed. Lots of opitons, good graphs / visuals, options for selecting different columns or fields, it was very close to being to provide the view into some data that I knew we had.

I moved into Kipu BI – the higher level business intellegence reporting options, spoke with colleages, read a lot of docs, ended up with support describing the issues. Several back and forth showing other options. As of October 2025 the combining of the particular data I was trying to visualize did not seem possible inside Kipu.

I ended up with a feature request form being filled out.

I had seen in a webinar featuring other customers of Kipu that they are responsive to making additional features, but I am not sure if they ever did anything with this one request.

I am posting some notes here to remember the processes.

Look for another post on my 2026 and beyond methods for not wasting time with things like this.

A longer story short (look for the longer more complete in a new post next month)

I wanted to find all the phone numbers that called using a google ads tracking number (not tracking via google, tracking via CallTrackingeMetrics, that was assigned to only show in or when someone clicked on a google ad), and combine that list with patients that admitted (and people who did not with list of reasons why) – but also combine that information with the list of people (or other phone numbers) associated patients who admitted.

This was so we could better see that a couple grand spent on google ads went to a patient’s parent or spouse and they did the research via that stage of the funnel / journey, and that led to an admission (or not) for example.

At the time we just couldn’t get that data combined inside Kipu’s reporting. I did manage to use Kipu to sort and filter the data that was porting over from CTM, and from that I took a couple of reports and pasted them into an excel spreadsheet and did some lookups for matches, and was able to find 2 patients that admitted within 30 days where the initial touchpoint was a google search ad click – viewed our landing page, made a call. Some time later their family member came in and got treatment.

Without doing this extra manual work, we showed 0 signups per $30,000 spent with google ads during this 30 days.

A lot of work to attribute 2 signups, but that definitely changed the math for the equations that the CFO was anxious about.

More reporting and data options were also in my plan book, combining data and looking at lifetime value and if an ads signup was a re-admit, which also drastically changes the value.

This is additionally challenging when you can’t upload customer lists to google because of Hipaa. Non-Hipaa businesses have more options for showing / not showing ads based upon emails or other info. More on that in another post.

Found part of the email thread, this was Feb 2025

Feb 28, 2025, 5:32 PM EST

We were able to create a new custom pipeline flow, which does has an option to see records based on ‘opportunity status’ … but we do not have a column in that for ‘crm marketing event’ and tracking source/

We need both of those in the same report at a minimum.

Is this possible within the system or do we need to create a custom excel that combines two reports?

Steve

Everyday your addiction treatment center is not in the top 10 position for these keywords you are missing out on those new patients. By creating great content, perfecting your websites code, and building powerful backlinks to your website we are able to achieve the SERPs you need in order to get new patients.

PPC is often times quite complex, and there are those who profit from it – often at the expense of the business that depends on pay per click advertising to reach new patients.

We’ve seen all sorts of wasteful ad spend via PPC – sometimes it’s because google’s ads system is complicated and makes it difficult to do simple things. Sometimes it’s because the incentives are mis-aligned and it actually benefits the ads managers for the budget to have a high burn rate. Sometimes it’s simple neglect. We’ve seen hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted on bad clicks with google ads, and we’ve helped dozens reign it in.

It’s shocking that google (and others) makes some things so hard to do. We are also shocked how often ads mangers just let the algorithms run wild and don’t care about wasted ad spend.

Sometimes having a high marketing burn rate is part of the overall branding strategy – and sometimes it is important to be super aggressive pay top dollar for all the clicks are that are remotely possible to get a customer. Often times we find that even when you place certain limits like time of day or location / geofencing – someone needs to take a closer look at exact intent and stop the bleed of wasteful pay per click keywords and phrases to prevent these mistakes recurring month after month year after year.

We think this is important, it’s not easy, and yet it something we do to add value, contact us to have us take a look at your ads situation and see if we can manage it better to decrease waste and increase your ROAS this month.