When most patients contact a treatment center, they are at a crisis point in their lives. They need accurate information to guide their decisions and compassionate reassurance that they’ll be treated with care and respect. Privacy is also important, which is why many prefer to make the first contact by phone rather than fill out an online form.
These initial calls aren’t just inquiries – they are moments of trust-building with a prospective patient. Calls also provide valuable insights into patient needs, concerns, and decision-making, which, if you use call tracking and marketing analytics software, can help you improve your marketing and your patient service.
How call tracking works
Tracing the patient's journey from their first search for help to the moment they reach out can provide valuable insights. For a treatment center, understanding this patient journey can clarify what’s working: Is your content offering the right information at the right time? Are your paid ad campaigns positioning you as a trustworthy resource? Are you reaching patients through the most effective referral partnerships?
With the right data, treatment centers can refine their outreach, optimize marketing spend, and ensure they’re connecting with those in need. That’s where call tracking comes in.
Call tracking software matches incoming phone calls directly to online and offline marketing campaigns, even enabling visitor-level tracking when needed. With visitor-level tracking, each unique visitor is assigned a unique phone number, allowing your treatment center to see exactly where a potential patient found your facility. This sophisticated form of call tracking allows you to see which marketing channels and keywords deliver high-quality leads over the phone. A simple JavaScript snippet installed on your website ensures that a specific phone number is shown to every visitor, which allows the collection of data about that visitor (referral source, page path, etc.).
While many healthcare providers may assume that call tracking is off-limits due to privacy laws, recent updates from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have confirmed that call tracking can be used in compliance with HIPAA. CallRail’s Call Tracking is designed with these privacy considerations in mind, offering HIPAA-supportive solutions that allow treatment centers to securely track calls while protecting patient confidentiality. By partnering with a call tracking provider that signs a business associate agreement (BAA), like CallRail, treatment centers can confidently use data-driven insights to refine marketing efforts without compromising compliance.
How Call Tracking informs your marketing spend
Most treatment providers need a sophisticated multi-channel marketing strategy that promotes their full range of services. This could include educational content about common mental health struggles, a well-developed website that makes it easy to connect with clinical staff for guidance, and outreach efforts, including in-person events, email newsletters, or nurture sequences. These campaigns are not cheap. For mental health treatment centers, the average cost per conversion from Google Ads is $29.20, while Facebook Ads delivers leads at an average cost of $1.58 per click. While digital advertising can be an effective way to acquire new patients, without Call Tracking to measure which campaigns drive actual admissions, centers risk wasting their budget on ineffective channels.
When it comes to marketing, making the tough call about which campaigns to invest in and which to scale back on can be difficult even with the right information. When there isn’t enough information to make an informed decision a wrong guess could lead to a drop in business and cause significant stress.
With CallRail’s Call Tracking in place, your treatment center can instantly identify which ads and marketing channels are driving inquiries and which are underperforming. You can see at a glance which ads and channels are leading to phone calls and which are not. This data allows you to make informed decisions, allocate your advertising budget more effectively, and optimize campaigns for higher engagement. Additionally, Call Tracking includes call recordings, which provide valuable insights into patient needs. This enables your team to refine their approach, improve intake conversations, and ultimately convert more leads by delivering a compassionate and supportive patient experience.
How Call Tracking improves patient service
Call Tracking also helps your reception team better connect with incoming callers. With Call Tracking whisper messages, your team can access key insights about each call, such as the search term the caller used to find your facility. This allows your reception team to anticipate patient needs and provide more efficient, compassionate assistance—all while managing other front desk responsibilities.
Advanced call flows can also help. By diverting incoming calls to staff members who are available and qualified to answer their questions, you can avoid missed calls, saving your patients time and frustration.
Call Tracking’s call recording feature can also be used to improve staff training and quality assurance. For example, if your front desk employees frequently receive calls about inpatient rehabilitation programs—one of your most critical services—but aren’t equipped to answer key questions, those high-value leads may go elsewhere. By reviewing call recordings and identifying knowledge gaps, your team can be trained to confidently handle patient inquiries and guide more callers toward admission.
Even the most effective marketing campaigns can fall flat if your team isn’t equipped to convert calls into actual admissions. With Call Tracking, you can record, review, and refine call interactions, helping your staff improve intake conversations and increase over-the-phone bookings. Patients will also feel more at ease when they receive clear, helpful information, strengthening their trust in your facility.
Better patient service increases patient satisfaction and loyalty. This leads to more word-of-mouth referrals, which are invaluable for healthcare providers.
Analyzing call data
Once you set up Call Tracking for all your marketing methods, the system automatically collects data as phone calls come in. This data will create a picture of what’s working and what isn’t so you can prioritize your marketing spend to get the most out of your marketing budget.
Start unpacking Call Tracking data by reviewing the following key metrics:
Number of first-time callers
If you simply look at the volume of calls, you will inevitably count existing patients who rely on a quick internet search to look up your phone number.
Call Tracking allows you to compare the total call volume and the number of first-time callers. Make a point of seeing how many first-time callers a campaign reaches before you conclude its effectiveness.
Keyword level tracking
When using visitor-level tracking, you can identify keywords that help resolve what drives new patients to your treatment center website. If you offer a particular service, such as addiction counseling, you will naturally want to know how many users search for keywords related to this offering.
With Google Ads costing an average of $3.74 per click for mental health searches, treatment centers can’t afford to guess which keywords will deliver the best return. Call Tracking’s keyword-level insights pinpoint which search terms lead to patient calls, ensuring marketing spend goes toward the highest-converting keywords.
Landing pages
Call Tracking’s dynamic number insertion (DNI) feature can help you evaluate the effectiveness of your treatment center website landing pages by showing which pages drive calls. If your outpatient rehab landing pages convert three times the leads of other landing pages, that’s important to know. Call analytics show where you are successful, so you can replicate what works.
Visitor timeline
To garner as much data from a single phone call as possible, take the visitor timeline approach. Call Tracking can show how a patient arrived at your website, which website pages they viewed before a phone call, and what actions they took on your website before, during, and after the call.
Lead quality
Call recordings deliver valuable information about lead quality. Call Tracking allows you to mark calls as having a good lead/bad lead status based on the recorded call session. This can help you refine your advertisement sources by seeing which channels deliver the best leads, not just the highest number of calls. If you find that Facebook ads do not deliver quality leads, you can end that campaign and funnel the money into a channel that delivers better leads.
Staff performance
When the waiting area is busy, reception staff may struggle to provide high-quality patient service over the phone and in person. If new callers can’t get through to speak with someone, they may contact your competitor. Call Tracking features, like missed call reports, will allow you to view at a glance how many of your calls are going unanswered or are sent to voicemail, so you can make necessary changes to staff availability. Automated call responses offer even greater returns, allowing you to touch base with a text message, even when a call is missed.
Call recording helps analyze callers' needs and the performance of reception staff. If you find many callers have the same question — say, about hours or directions — you can add a service menu or a quick welcome message to the phone system. This eases the demand on your reception staff, keeps callers engaged, reduces missed calls, and ultimately helps your staff provide better service to every patient.
CallRail Call Tracking delivers insights you need to optimize your marketing budget
Call Tracking delivers the insights and information you and your front office staff need to grow your treatment center, increase your patient roster, and recruit new patients by smartly investing in marketing. Stop wasting time and money on efforts that do not pay off. Instead, learn from quantifiable data and call recordings collected via call tracking, then replicate your successes to maximize your ROI.
