Acupuncture marketing: Generic agencies miss the patient record.

The alternatives most practices meet are a generic agency or a freelancer. Their playbooks assume a pixel, Google Analytics, and a lead as the result. An acupuncture practice keeps the visit and the payment in an EHR, and a tag that can see a condition or a booking request can send that information to a vendor with no business associate agreement.

Agencies and freelancers

What do generic agencies miss?

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services warns that a tracking tool which sends health information to a vendor (opens in a new tab) can violate HIPAA when that vendor has no business associate agreement. The measurement problem is the other half: new patients and revenue have to trace back to the spend.

01

What do their playbooks assume?

They are written for businesses outside healthcare, and the same sequence shows up for a clinic as for any other local service. They rarely account for how an acupuncture practice gets paid, or for how much a patient has to trust the practitioner before booking.

02

What is the problem with the pixel and Google Analytics?

A generic setup adds the Meta pixel, the Google ads tag, and Google Analytics early. On an acupuncture site those tools can receive the condition someone asked about and the visit they requested. Google does not sign a business associate agreement for Analytics, and Meta does not sign one for the pixel. Many agencies never ask whether the page collects health information.

03

Which numbers lead their reports?

Clicks, leads, and click-through rate. Those are real counts. They end before a new patient exists, and before any revenue is collected. A practice can look busy in that report and be break-even on the patients who actually came in.

04

What do they fail to ask?

What an EHR is, which one the practice runs, and how a course of treatment gets billed. Return on the marketing has to be calculated from those records. Most generic agencies do not know to ask, so the question never enters the work.

Common questions

Questions from practice owners.

Can an acupuncture website use Google Analytics?
Google does not sign a business associate agreement for Google Analytics. If the tag can see a condition someone asked about, or a visit they requested, that information is going to a vendor who is not set up to handle it. The same problem applies to the Meta pixel and the Google ads tag on those pages. A marketing setup has to be built so health information stays out of those tools.
What should an agency ask about our EHR?
Which system you use, what it can export, and how a new patient and a paid visit are recorded in it. The appointment and the payment live there. An agency that has never asked is reporting from the ad platform, which can see clicks and form fills and cannot see the revenue.
Why do generic agencies report on clicks and leads?
Those numbers are sitting in the ad account, so they are easy to put in a report. A new patient and the revenue from a course of treatment are in the EHR. Connecting the two is harder, and most playbooks written outside healthcare never get there.

Who you work with

The people you talk to do the work.

Dan RamosFounder / Growth Engineer, High Country Digital

Page updated

Dan has been one of the few people to deliver on what he promises. He's prompt and follows up, I never have to wonder what the status of my project is. I knew Dan would be great to work with as soon as I saw how organized he is and is able to reduce a problem down to an easy project he can fix fast. Thanks Dan!
Anthony GordonOwner, Integrative Family Wellness: acupuncture in Smithtown, New York

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