Case Study
Transforming Google Ads from guesswork to a science:
UMP grows monthly bookings by 82%, cuts cost per booking by 52%
United Musculoskeletal Partners (UMP) is a physician-owned shared services organization dedicated to excellence in musculoskeletal care. UMP partners with many well-known orthopedic practices nationwide, including Resurgens Orthopaedics (27 locations), AOA Orthopedic Specialists (6 locations) and Panorama Orthopedics (5 locations).
Goal
Unlock precise data, lower cost per booking and accurately track marketing performance
The marketing team at UMP began running Google Ads to drive traffic to each practice in its portfolio and needed visibility into which campaigns resulted in actual booked appointments. Without this data, they could not measure campaign performance or optimize for cost per booking (CPB) in their most important PPC channel.
Additionally, digital marketing was relatively new for UMP, so the team needed data to prove the value of their paid ad strategies for the rest of the organization.
We were asking ourselves, ‘How do we get more precise and targeted with our paid media dollars so that we can track true performance and be able to optimize towards those KPIs in real time?
Challenge
Confidently know which Google Ads calls convert to booked appointments
For United Musculoskeletal Partners, up to 80% of prospective patients reached out via a phone call. This was challenging because there was no efficient way to know exactly what happened on each call (specifically, which calls resulted in a booking), let alone use that information to optimize their Google Ads campaigns.
The team could use inferior proxies as conversion events (like calls lasting over 60 seconds or calls from new numbers), but they knew from experience that this strategy would lead to suboptimal results. When Richard Wong, UMP’s VP of Media and Digital Marketing, tried solving similar problems in prior roles with a legacy call tracking software, there were large gaps in data accuracy and the team spent months manually annotating phone calls to train their data models.
That’s what inspired the pivot to Liine: a truly out-of-the-box solution that provided accurate data and fast automation.
A call is not an acquisition. We were optimizing to an inferior metric of cost-per-call, not knowing whether those people made an appointment.
Solution
Utilize Liine to automatically track and optimize Google Ads for booked appointments, not calls or clicks
Richard and the team implemented Liine and our native Google Ads integration for their three largest brands: Resurgens Orthopaedics, AOA Orthopedic Specialists and Panorama Orthopedics. Given the plug-and-play nature of the platform and our white glove onboarding, all three of these practices were fully live on Liine in fewer than two weeks.
Once implemented, Liine’s proprietary AI began automatically determining which PPC leads were converting to appointments and then sending those anonymized Google Click Identifiers (GCLIDs) back to Google Ads as primary conversion events.
When it comes to implementation, the Liine team was so responsive. All our practices are healthcare but there is nuance between each brand. All the websites are different and Liine has been able to adapt to each one, which has been very useful — and painless.
Results
Monthly bookings surge by 82%, cost per booking drops by 52%
Comparing the first 30 days on Liine (baseline) to the most recent 30 days on Liine*, UMP has experienced drastic increases in monthly bookings and reductions in cost per booking. Overall, monthly bookings for Google Ads leads are up 82% while cost per booking in that channel is down 52%. On an individual brand basis:
- Resurgens bookings are up 52% and CPB is down 39%
- AOA bookings are up 86% and CPB is down 45%
- Panorama bookings surged 241% and CPB was reduced by 78%(!)
*As of the publishing of this case study in January 2025
Liine allows me to prove the performance of our marketing efforts with certainty, versus just saying, ‘trust us, it’s working.’
Liine is an AI-powered marketing analytics and optimization platform for multisite healthcare, dental and vet practices. Our platform captures and analyzes all patient leads across calls, web forms and online bookings in one intuitive dashboard. This empowers healthcare marketers to auto-optimize ad campaigns, increase lead-to-appointment conversion rates and quickly identify which strategies are driving new patient bookings.
