Privacy. The rules governing patient privacy in the United States are clearly defined by HIPAA.1 But you need to advertise and gather data to ascertain the success or failure of your campaigns. Digital advertising is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal. At the same time, gathering personal data on potential patients is a violation.
Privacy in digital marketing, especially in terms of data information and tracking, is an issue your prospective patients and their families are especially concerned with. So how do you honor patient privacy and support your digital marketing strategy?
Conversion Measurement
Conversion measurement tracks the engagement and conversion rates of your marketing campaigns. In the digital marketing contest, a “conversion” is when a visitor to your website, or someone interacting with your digital presence on social media or Google Ads, completes a predefined action. Typically these actions include things like completing a form on your website, downloading a pdf, or scheduling an appointment through your chat bot.
Digital marketing depends on conversion measurement to evaluate the effectiveness of content and ads.2 The data collected is used to gauge how efficient your efforts are and to inform future strategies.
Privacy policies are intended to protect users’ personal information and ensure data practices are fair and transparent. While these policies seem to undermine the efficacy of conversion measurement, with some recent advancements in digital marketing, you can now protect patient privacy and get the data you need to track conversions.
Autism Patient Privacy and Data Collection
Today we’re sharing three steps to improve the privacy protection of your potential clients while collecting the insightful data you need.
1. Establishing a Strong Tagging Infrastructure
A tagging infrastructure supports personalization, data privacy, and protection in digital ads. Tagging guides data collection, sets cookies, and integrates third-party content like ads and social media widgets. Tags add dimension to your marketing campaigns.
They collect information you can use to learn more about who interacts with your ads. The data collected can include the web browser your site visitor used, referral source, content or ads viewed, and whether or not the user interacted with those assets. A solid tagging strategy can overcome the challenges of privacy-safe measurement.3
Most importantly, the data collected is hashed,4 so user privacy is protected. And all your conversion reports are anonymized and aggregated.
2. Enhancing Conversions
As privacy regulations tighten, conversions can be underreported, and you’re left without a full picture of whether or not a marketing campaign was successful. Digital marketing strategies depend on accurate reporting of ad performance, but privacy regulations can be at odds with that need. Google’s enhanced conversion feature5 lets you get the information you need while respecting patient privacy.
Enhanced conversion is a simple, but powerful, tool. When a user who is signed into Google takes an action on your ad, their information is sent to Google. The information is matched with user data there, and the conversion is recorded. Without enhanced conversion, you would have no record of that conversion. Without access to correct reporting, you may incorrectly evaluate the success (or failure) of a marketing campaign.
Again, the data collected is hashed, so the privacy of your site visitors and your prospective patients and their families is protected.
3. Tracking Offline Conversions
The path from prospective client to client isn’t always straightforward. In fact, as an autism treatment center, most of your enrollments will take place in person, not online. But if those conversions driven by your digital marketing initiatives didn’t take place in the digital space, just how exactly are you supposed to track them?
Offline conversion data6 allows you to consider the contributing factors to a conversion in order to more accurately refine your data. Tracking offline conversions provides you with a much more robust picture of the patient journey. You can track conversions that start with either a click or a call, and you can import from traditional customer relationship management (CRM) platforms like Salesforce or Hubspot. Or you can use a tool like Zapier to connect any CRM you’d like.
Regardless of how you import your offline conversions, capturing this data provides a much deeper understanding of how you should target and optimize your digital marketing efforts.
Protecting patient privacy doesn’t mean you have to be in the dark about the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy. And you don’t need to handle these complex tasks yourself. Dreamscape Marketing can help you set up the right metrics and reporting to support your digital marketing goals while protecting your clients’ privacy. Contact us today at 888.307.7304 to schedule a strategy session.
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