In 2021, Crossroads — an Infinity client in the healthcare sector — had a question that’s all too familiar in such a data-driven environment: How do we know if the money we’re spending on marketing is actually helping us acquire new patients?

We were running a geographically targeted campaign for Crossroads to drive more patients to some of their newer locations and to locations that were seeking a boost in overall patient census. Each location had a dedicated landing page and phone number linked to digital ads that Infinity placed.

With our robust performance dashboards, we were able to show that those ads helped create leads. However, without a traditional CRM system to store lead data, we needed data that proved those leads also converted into patients that contributed to Crossroad’s bottom line.

According to Meghan Dimas, director of analytics and insights, “Clicks are great. But to secure budgets to do these targeted and integrated campaigns, client C-suites need proof that the investment is justified based on the return. Our dashboards need to show, ‘Here is what the ROI is, and here’s the cost to acquire each new patient from marketing.’”

While thinking critically about what was needed to reveal accurate results, Infinity found a workaround to the lack of a CRM as a central source of truth that could connect all client data together at the individual lead or patient level.

We coordinated with the Crossroads team to get appointment data stripped of any PII or sensitive information. Using ChannelMix, that data was then moved via SFTP to an encrypted data warehouse alongside Infinity’s media performance data. ChannelMix automated the collection of campaign data from more than eight different sources, including paid digital media sources like Google Ads and The Trade Desk, alongside Google Analytics web data, call-tracking data, and contact form and webchat reporting.

Infinity matched those confirmed patient numbers from the client’s electronic medical record system to the ones they collected through the campaign’s landing pages, webchats, contact forms, and call tracking software. This created the missing link between leads and paying patients.

Using Tableau, Infinity created an ROI dashboard that showed how paid media led to incremental web and phone leads and then how many of those leads ultimately became patients as a result of paid media efforts. The dashboard displays granular performance by individual locations, marketing channels, and lead source.

In collaboration with ChannelMix, Infinity created a single source of truth that is automatically updated each day. It delivers an accurate, automated data foundation to perform more advanced analysis for the Crossroads team and provides near real-time updates on how campaigns are performing across each stage of the funnel.

The investment in media doubled new patient revenue within the first campaign window and has surpassed 4x ROI in subsequent campaigns. This has also led to significant new patient increases across locations that were part of the campaigns.

In the dashboard, both Crossroads and Infinity have new visibility to provide a rough estimate for how much value each campaign generated, using the estimated first-year EBITDA for the average new patient.

With this improved and increased visibility, we’ve expanded the channels deployed within the campaigns and have been more focused on targeted marketing campaigns across a media mix that drives in leads at every stage of the funnel.