The River Source case study

The Challenge

The River Source, a residential drug rehab center in southern Arizona, needed Rehab Revival’s help in order to increase their number of monthly admissions, while lowering their cost per admission. This client had two different locations and offered services tailored towards teens, adult outpatients and adult residential 30-day programs. Because of their stellar reputation as an affordable clinic with a caring and attentive staff, the client was able to attract patients from across the country.

Conversely, their nationwide footprint and multi service offering actually inhibited their ability to efficiently target patients that best fit their programs. Prior to working together, the client was spending so much money on AdWords, that it put them underwater on every admit they accepted.

They desperately needed a strategy to decrease their cost per admission before it was too late, and also sought to emphasize their 30-day program which delivered a higher value per patient.

The Insight

With three unique service offerings and a potential nationwide audience, we quickly determined that a strategic segmentation approach would be critical to success. We found that we needed to create separate campaigns for each service in order to align the right patients to the right program.

For the adult residential 30-day program, we discovered that our client’s affordable price point appealed to patients in states that only offered limited or high cost options. For the adult outpatient program, we focused our efforts locally for patients who were within driving distance of the clinics. And for the teen program, we found opportunities for specific keywords and custom messaging which differentiated our client from competitors who failed to meet teen patient needs.

Finally, we introduced a staggered approach to the client’s spend, which allocated dollars according to the program’s value per patient.

The Strategy

We began by working with the tools that our client already had in place, while integrating some of our proprietary processes for improvement. For instance, the client was already using Call Tracking Metrics. We did a full top to bottom test and analysis to ensure proper tracking functionality and reviewed their call dispositioning system. As a result, we found opportunities for better tagging and worked with the admission team to establish a three-stage conversion funnel: call > qualified call > admission.

We then introduced SPARC, Rehab Revival’s process for using lead quality data to bid more efficiently and leveraged new criteria for defining qualified calls. This gave the marketing team the data needed to optimize and generate additional qualified calls by focusing on leads that required some type of a follow up, such as a medical assessment or private insurance verification. From there, we not only calculated how many qualified calls it took to generate an admission, but also the number of calls it took to get a qualified call.

Naturally, we found that some keywords performed better than others. We leveraged this data to adjust bids, and allocated marketing dollars where they proved to be most effective. On the other side, we discovered that while certain informational keywords generated a significant number of calls, these leads were either looking for free treatment services or were unlikely to convert into a qualified call. As a result, we suppressed these keywords and adjusted bids appropriately.

Finally, we included several Google Display Network campaigns to diversify the mix of ad sources. Even though they were higher funnel and less qualified, the lower cost per click made them a good value and also provided branding exposure. In the drug rehab category, Google’s default display network targeting is too broad and tends to bring in clicks from celebrity rehab articles and other unrelated sources. So, in order to ensure high quality, we used a whitelist of relevant websites and pages that we had checked by hand for relevancy.

The Results

In just 90 days we achieved some remarkable results by implementing the above strategy. By the end of month three, we saw an 86% decline in the cost per admission. It started at $14,910 and dropped all the way down to $2,118. This represented a 604% increase in admissions per dollar spent. We also saw a 74% decline in the cost per call, which amounted to a 284% increase in the calls generated per dollar spent.

Additionally, our client received great results from our customized display network, which produced a cost per admission that was five times lower compared to search, and call center morale was elevated as a result of a higher volume of qualified calls.

Overall, our client’s budget remained the same, while total admits went from two per month to 14, a seven-fold increase.

The River Source - Residential Rehab Center - Mesa, AZ