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In this episode, Barbara and Jeff discuss:
- Why marketing is about building awareness impressions matter more than just clicks.
- How privacy changes like the cookie collapse are forcing marketers to focus on broader targeting and reach.
- How AI tools like Provalytics use predictive modeling to prove campaign impact and optimize marketing spend.
Key Takeaways:
“Stop chasing clicks and start buying attention. Marketing wins by building awareness through impressions, not instant conversions.” –Jeff Greenfield
Connect with Jeff Greenfields:
Website: https://provalytics.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/provalytics/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/provalytics/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@provalytics
Twitter: https://x.com/provalytics
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/provalytics
Connect with Barbara Hales:
Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales
Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist
Business website: www.TheMedicalStrategist.com
Show website: www.MarketingTipsForDoctors.com
Email: Barbara@TheMedicalStrategist.com
Books:
YouTube: TheMedicalStrategist
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/barbarahales
TRANSCRIPTION
Dr. Barbara Hales
Welcome to another episode of marketing tips for doctors. I’m your host. Dr Barbara Hales, today we have with us Jeff Greenfield. He is an entrepreneur with 30 years of strategy growth and marketing leadership. He is building the next generation AI driven, and the system that he calls it is provolytics. It has no cookies and measures solutions that allow marketers to prove the impact of their strategies. Welcome to the show, Jeff. Uh,
Jeff Greenfield
thank you so much, Barbara, it’s a pleasure to be here. How
Marketing Math
Dr. Barbara Hales
did you get interested in marketing analytics?
Jeff Greenfield
That’s a great question, because marketing analytics is not something that most people say, Oh, my God, that sounds so exciting, wow. And it’s not something like at a cocktail party. You can say, hey, I do marketing analytics, and people say, Wow, that sounds like a sexy profession because,
Dr. Barbara Hales
but you can’t say that you run a numbers game. That’s right, I do
Jeff Greenfield
run a numbers game, exactly. But the way I got here is, you know, through the lens of trying to deal with very complicated and complex marketing campaigns, I happen to be buying media for a publicly traded weight loss company. This was the 2006 2007 and we ran into this issue where the numbers didn’t add up. And what I mean by that is we would have, like, 100 new customers per day. We were buying media across about 10 different vendors, and when we went we could see in our system that we had 100 new customers. But we went into the vendor systems and added up all of the numbers. It said that we had 1000 new customers. So there was all this double counting and triple counting that was going on, and that became a problem, because we were paying out each of those vendors essentially a commission. And so, you know, we were paying out a lot of money, and so we needed to kind of fix this problem. And it was back then. It was like 2007 there was nothing available to do this. It was kind of the early days of digital, the wild wild west, if you would. And so I created one of the first, what we would call back then, multi touch attribution platforms. A early digital measurement platform was called c3 metrics, and it solved that duplication issue. It solved trying to figure out who was actually building awareness versus kind of jumping in at the end to capture that last minute sale. So solved a lot of problems for advertisers, and that then became kind of the new business. So that’s how I got into this. I got into this to solve the problem that I was having as a marketer myself.
Dr. Barbara Hales
Sure, well, you know, of course, it’s important not to have to pay for something that you’re not getting. But you know, the true beauty of it was really that when you ran your various campaigns, you could see what worked and what didn’t, what people were, you know, eager to get or receptive to, versus total duds.
Jeff Greenfield
That’s right, and that’s that we call that these days, based upon a old time marketer from the Midwest. It’s the John Wanamaker type problem. John Wanamaker is credited in saying half the money I spend in advertising is wasted. The only problem is I don’t know which half, and that was back when there was before there was even TV. It was just mainly print, and that was a big problem. But today’s world, things have gotten very complicated. Let me just give you just a small example. So let’s say you’re like most practitioners. You’re running some campaigns on Facebook, which is now meta, so when you run on Facebook, you’re typically both on Facebook and Instagram, and then you also have ads running on Google, so that when people type in your name or type in the name of your practice, they’re able to find you and get right to you and not go to a competitor. So let’s assume someone is on on Facebook. They’re scrolling around, and they happen to see like, maybe there’s like, a video there. It captures their attention, but they don’t click on it. They don’t even watch it. They just hover over it for a minute or so. Now Facebook knows that when they hover over it, they don’t really tell you. But now maybe two or three hours later, when you’re on Instagram, you actually see it again, and you actually spend time watching it. You don’t click on it, but you make a note, you know, hey, you know, my shoulders have been bothering me a bit. Maybe, maybe I should go check out that PT practice and and get this finally worked on, get that, you know, frozen shoulder, figured out. And then you kind of forget
Awareness Attribution
Dr. Barbara Hales
about it. By the third video, you’ve made the appointment, right? But you haven’t
Jeff Greenfield
made the appointment yet, because what happens with us in today’s world? We get distracted, but we put a mental note in our head, and then you’re out doing some gardening work, and you’re like, Oh, I. Yeah, this shoulder is killing me, and you’re like, oh, yeah, what was the name of that practice? You take your phone out, you Google it, and you find the ad there, you click on it, and you book an appointment online. So from the marketers perspective, the one who’s running the marketing at the practice, they would go into their analytics at the end of the month, which is predominantly GA for Google Analytics four, and they would see, my God, Google is killing it. And as a smart, data driven marketer, they would see that Facebook meta isn’t working well, so they would spend less on meta and try to spend more on Google. But we know, just because we went through that, that it was actually meta, the facebook, instagram combination, that built the awareness so that you knew the name of the practice, and all Google did was jump in there and so what? But there’s a time delay, and because of that time delay, when that marketer makes that change and cuts down Facebook, it doesn’t happen right away. It could take because think about this healthcare and taking care of yourself, and self care is, for a lot of people, is a considered purchase. So that journey, that time to conversion, could be 3060, maybe even 90 days. So you could make those changes, and you wouldn’t notice anything for maybe two more months, and then all of a sudden, you’re like, Oh my God, what’s going on? What’s happening, and what happened is you cut off that awareness part of the funnel. So multiply that across a much larger campaign where you’re advertising, maybe connected television, you’re doing some coupons, you’re doing some print, maybe some other things as well, too, direct mail. And now it’s almost impossible to figure out what’s working and what’s not working.
Dr. Barbara Hales
So does your system differentiate between where they saw, where they got the exposure and where they saw it? Yeah,
Jeff Greenfield
so we’re living in a world today where we don’t know exactly who saw what, and that’s because of all the privacy changes that have happened in the digital world. We used to be able to track all of this, and my former company did that, and I left that company in 2019 thinking I was done in this business. And then when covid hit, all of the tracking that used to go on, all got pulled back. It started with Apple making some updates, and all of the different companies making updates, but no one knows who actually saw what. So in order to get to that actual answer, you have to use some really high level math and statistics. And luckily, before there was digital marketing, we used to do stuff like this all the time, a practice called Marketing Mix modeling that would look at the relationship between how many ads were out there and how your sales were, but it was a project. It wasn’t like an ongoing thing. It wasn’t like Google Analytics four that’s always up and running, but because of today, with the high speed computers and the combinations of AI we can now get that almost near real time effect that marketers really want. And that’s what prolytics does, is that it provides marketers, primarily larger scale brands, the ability to know, essentially find wanna makers missing half the stuff that wasn’t working and tells you where to redeploy those dollars to a place where you’ll get better return on your marketing investment.
Dr. Barbara Hales
I can see where the latter half of the word comes from. Analytics. But where does the Provo court come from?
Jeff Greenfield
Great question. Provo is an Italian word that means proof. And this is the problem that most marketers have, is they may see that a competitor is advertising on TV, and they’re like, Wow, they’ve been running ads for a long time. It must be working for them. I’ll test it. And they test it, and what ends up happening. They look in their analytics, their GA four, and there’s no tab in there for connected television, because when you run a TV ad, there’s nothing for anyone to click on. And so what ends up happening is that builds awareness, and then over time, those people will come in through Google, or they’ll just show up. And so you get this lift, but it’s impossible to prove where it came from. And so what our platform does is actually give marketers the proof so they can actually go to finance to get more money to take these small tests that they’re doing and turn them into regular, ongoing campaigns. That’s
Dr. Barbara Hales
so important. You know, a lot of advertising companies buy for the Clio award so that they could get, like, the best advertisement. But when they say the best, they are not talking about what brings in revenue and what is attracting clients. The Cleo awards is simply like, what what looks the prettiest? And so there is a big. You know, shift, you know, between what they want and what we want. So it’s wonderful that your system is able to differentiate that well.
Marketing Proof
Jeff Greenfield
Thank you. Thank you. And I’ll let you in on a little secret, because what we’re able to do, and the reason we’re able to do this is because we’re able to find a unifying metric where we’re able to unify all these different forms of digital marketing with traditional marketing and bring them together. And the reality is, is that even for like a solo practitioner who’s only spending, let’s say, just $1,000 a month, or even $500 a month, they can do this same type of stuff on their own, a DIY approach, but it takes a little bit of a shift in understanding how marketing works. Most marketers believe that what we do is we invest our marketing dollars to buy clicks, clicks clicks lead to leads, and leads lead to new patients. And so the goal is to buy clicks. But that’s not how marketing works. The way marketing actually works is we invest marketing dollars to buy attention. We want people’s attention, and with that attention, we want to build awareness. And when awareness is built up to a certain level, a percentage of people will come and visit your practice. And if you have a website online, that is translated into clicks, and then those clicks will then lead to new patients. So it starts with that attention and most practitioners have a Google Sheet sitting on their on their desktop or their laptop, and it has a list of every day how much money they spent. It has a list of how many clicks they have. Their cost per click off figured out, their cost per lead, their cost per new patient. They have it all figured out, but that’s all at the bottom. They’re missing that attention metric. And the reality is, is that when they downloaded that data, that attention metric was there, but they didn’t know what to do with it, so they ignored that column. And that attention metric is called impressions. Impressions are how many impressions are you? Are you actually putting out there? How many people are you attempting to reach? It doesn’t mean you reach them. It just means that you attempted to get to them. And so what I encourage everyone who’s listening to do so they can kind of do this on their own and gain some insight from this is that if you take that sheet that you have, and go back a year, re download all of your reports and include those impressions. And then what you want to do is you want to graph your impressions by day, and you surprised how they change day over day. And then you want to overlay that with your clicks, and then overlay that with your your new patient appointments, and then your new patients. And then you want to kind of go backwards. You want to look when you had a lot of new patients in a week, look back to the clicks, because there’s obviously that were clicks that were there, and then go back to look and see when the impressions were up. And what you’ll notice is it wasn’t, in most cases, it wasn’t that same day. It may not even been that same week or same month, and you want to start to see the relationship between that increase in impressions and or certain types of campaigns that you’re running. And then you want to dig into those days, and whatever you were doing on those days, that and your estimation led to those new patients. It’s real simple do more of that. That’s what you want to do. So you want to focus on that versus the clicks. The clicks are the end result of the marketing. It’s not what you’re getting, because most of your marketing is going to lead to things like referrals, someone picking up the phone and calling someone just walking in. We’ve all had that experience before, so the key is, it’s all about those impressions. And let’s say, Hey, you’re sponsoring like a little league team. Well, guess what? Go online and see where your sign is and start doing some research. You can probably get an estimation of how many cars drive by per day. And what I would do is I would put into my thing for every day. I would put down little league banner, how many impressions each day. And there’s lots of things that that solo practitioners and even larger practices do that are out in the community, that are reaching people that are generating impressions. So you want to try to track all those so that you’ll know what to do more of versus what to do less of.
Dr. Barbara Hales
Absolutely. Now you can’t turn to any business nowadays without hearing we are incorporating AI every. Everybody has AI in their pocket, and you know, it makes you think that if you don’t, then you’re like, behind the eight ball. So you have AI, and it’s in your platform. Tell us about that. So
Jeff Greenfield
when we first designed the platform back in 2022 it was a series of a multitude of different steps, because this is, this is pretty complicated math, and you have to make sure that everything lines up. And so the process would stop, and then a human would have to evaluate to determine what is the next step. So once we had enough test data to go through, we could then automate that process and have aI manage that entire process. That’s the first part that we do. The second part that we do is that our models are predictive models. And what I mean by that is that not only are they telling our marketers what happened yesterday or what happened last month, but they’re also able to tell you, if you spend this much here, you will get this many new patients, if you will, or new patient leads. So in order to do that, we need to be able to demonstrate and prove that our models can do that. And the way we use AI is we take the clients data and we train the model with the marketing data, and then for each day during that training period, we say, essentially, hey, this is how many new patients came in for this many marketing impressions. Then we go to the model. We say, now you have to guess and predict. And then we look at what the model says versus what actually happened, and that helps us see how well the model is actually predicting. So those are the two ways that we use AI here at provalytics, kind of on our roadmap, in terms of what we’re doing, is that our data then gets put into dashboards for our clients, where they can visually see things. But our clients do have a lot of requests like, Hey, I have a meeting with my boss later this week. It would be great if I could get some insight on what’s actually happening on this date. Can you give me your opinion on it? And obviously, most of our client customers want to come to me, because I’ve been doing this for so long now, but there’s only so much of me to go around. Well, we’re in the process now of training individual AI bots, what we’re calling like real time AI analyst with clients data, and it’s completely restricted. So this is not something that would be available inside of chat GPT, because it’s within, it’s within our own environment. And our clients, when we talk to them, what they seem to like is they like the process of texting for information. So each of our clients are going to have their own phone number that they can text the AI analyst. 24/7, ask it questions, even ask it to draw pictures and charts and PowerPoint slides for them, stuff like that. That’s kind of our next level, and that’s a huge value for folks, because to hire a full time analyst is a couple $100,000 a year, and now having one that works weekends and nights is pretty, pretty great,
Dr. Barbara Hales
although your AI is probably going around hungry because you have no cookies in
Jeff Greenfield
your system. That’s right. That’s absolutely right.
Attention Shift
Dr. Barbara Hales
What is a cookie collapse referred to? And what does this mean for everyone? And why is it significant?
Jeff Greenfield
It’s significant because there’s been this massive shift in terms of how the advertising ecosystem is operating. You know, the internet is essentially free, powered by advertising, and it used to be that third party cookies. So there’s the cookies are little pieces of code on your machine that have information in them. It’s usually encrypted data, little, tiny pieces of data that mean nothing to you, but means something to whoever can retrieve it. So a great example is you go to your laptop and you type in amazon.com and you’re automatically logged in. That’s a cookie. That’s a first party cookie only Amazon can read that. Let’s say you go to the New York Times and you see an ad for Volvo. Now, Volvo is advertising a new car, and they think Barbara that you’re going to buy one, or you’re in their demographic to buy a Volvo, but they also know that if you see 100 of their ads per day that will turn you off to Volvo, you will immediately get very upset. So they want to limit it to maybe five per day. So the way they do that is that they would drop a cookie onto your machine, so that as you go from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal to another publication, it’s just a counter once that number gets to five, when you load the page, they’re not going to they’re not going to buy any more ads for you to show you Volvo ads for today, and it’ll get restarted every single day. So those cookies allow people advertisers to improve the experience, but they also allowed companies, like my former company, to be able to try. Track and determine effectiveness across the web. And it also allowed companies to create profiles of you so that they know you would like a Volvo and maybe know what types of restaurants you dine at, and things like that. When covid came around and we had the pandemic and everyone was spending so much more time online, a lot of companies made a more of a push towards a privacy type world. And Apple made a big update. They got rid of all the cookies and the tracking that was there. And then Google was going to get rid of these tracking cookies, and they said they were going to do it, and then they said they weren’t. They said they were going to do it. Then they said they weren’t. They now say they won’t, but we’re starting to see some shifts that it will but the reality is, yeah, but the reality is right now. What’s happened, though, is that the way people traverse the digital world is so different now than it was 10 years ago. It used to be we would spend most of our time on websites like news sites, but now we spend all of our time in these apps, and these app worlds don’t allow cookies at all. So the ability to track people and build up profiles that you can go across these different ecosystems, you can’t do it anymore. So now, from a marketer’s perspective, where you could buy very granular you could, you know, they talk about user level targeting. You can’t do user level anymore. It’s a little bit broader. So we’re kind of going back to the future, if you will. We’re back to the days before digital, and I think that’s better for most marketers and advertisers. We got too into the weeds. We literally couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Is what was happening.
Dr. Barbara Hales
Well, how could it be better for marketers or advertisers if they can’t track who’s actually getting them?
Jeff Greenfield
Well, that’s a great point. You can track, but you have to do it from a broader perspective. The reason it’s better for advertisers is because what happened is, is that you know, for for advertisers and marketers, when you tell someone, hey, you can target the people that your precise customers, and to a marketer that’s like, crack, that’s like, unbelievable, like, I gotta have it. And so what happened is, is that marketers started taking all of these branding dollars where they’re saying, hey, feel good about my brand. You know, we’re i We’re a family company. We care about our employees. So because remember, most of marketing and advertising is really unconscious. It’s very emotional. People still don’t understand why they buy, but they moved those messages and those dollars over to buy. Now here’s a special offer, and what they did is is that when you think about marketing, is like a sales funnel, they took those dollars that were at the top of the funnel, that were reaching lots of people, and they put it down to this highly targeted number, and so they violated this one rule in advertising, which is reach, which is attention. You want your dollars to get as much attention as possible. So they were getting attention for only people that were in market to buy today. And what that meant is they were always chasing their tail, and they’re down at the bottom, which is 100% auction type environment. And what I mean by that is that their competitors are there too. So instead of buying a TV spot, and the cost of the TV spot, you know, like Super Bowl ad, it’s $8 million that’s the price. And when they’re sold out, they’re sold out. Well, all of these digital ads are the highest bidder wins, and what ends up happening is that they constantly get bid up. That’s why the profits for both Google and meta continue to rise. So now marketers are spending most of their dollars and an auction environment where the prices are continuously rising and they’re reaching a fewer number of people, so the ad effectiveness, how well their ads are performing, are going down. So yes, it is more difficult to measure, but it can be done, and you can even do the DIY method that we talked about earlier, you just have to find that awareness metric of impressions.
Advice for Beginners
Dr. Barbara Hales
What advice would you give our listeners who are just starting to navigate the terrain?
Jeff Greenfield
What I would say is, is that get that Google Sheet going and make sure that you are looking through the lens of awareness, not of clicks. You want to drop the click, yes, the click is important, but it is not an indication of how well your marketing is performing at all. You want to look at awareness, and then you want to look at outcomes and understand that that takes time, and it all depends upon. On what it is you’re selling, what type of practice you have. For some practices, it’s, you know, it’s injuries that bring people in. So it’s an immediate type thing. For others, it’s a considered purchase. You know, it depends what type of practice you’re in in terms of how long that time to conversion is going to take. But you always want to start at the beginning, which is that attention metric,
Dr. Barbara Hales
although what I suggest strongly is, unless you’re really, really into tech, that you outsource it, let your favorite marketer, tech person, do all of that and compile the lists and compile the data while you do what you do best. Yes, I would agree with that 1,000%
Jeff Greenfield
if you’re a solo practitioner and you think you can handle all of the marketing and all the analytics, you’re not going to have much time for patients.
Dr. Barbara Hales
No, you can’t do everything. That’s right. That’s where protocol analytics comes in.
Jeff Greenfield
That’s exactly right. Yeah, you know you went to school because you wanted to take care of people and help them focus on that. Outsource to the experts that can help you, without a doubt,
Dr. Barbara Hales
if people are interested in reaching you, how do they do so?
Jeff Greenfield
Barbara, the best way is to go to the website. It’s provalytics.com or you can get prova getprova.com, to check out the site. You can also check me out on LinkedIn as well too.
Dr. Barbara Hales
Well, in case that just ran by you, it will be in the show notes so that you could look at it
Jeff Greenfield
at your leisure. Awesome. Thank you, Barbara. Well, thank you
Dr. Barbara Hales
so much for being with us today. It was really a fascinating episode, and thank you listeners for being here today. This has been another episode of marketing tips for doctors with your host, Dr Barbara Hales and Jeff Greenfield, our guest till next time.
