How to Maintain Double Stable Demand in an Unstable Market: A Case Study of a Medical Service Laboratory

The demand for medical laboratory services is inherently unstable, especially in the highly competitive private medical center sector, where significant advertising investments are made to attract new clients.

The pandemic added another layer of complexity. The number of services in medical centers increased, but so did the restrictions: entry into the country with QR codes and rising infection rates made attracting new leads even more expensive.

In this case study, we will show how we built the promotion strategy for one of the medical laboratories in such an unstable market.

The primary information about the client is under NDA, but we can share that it is a large network of laboratories covering several cities, including megacities. Among thousands of studies, the medical center conducts PCR tests for COVID-19, including various antibody tests, provided both at the medical center offices and through home visits.

The client approached us with two problems: leads were too expensive, and new directions and advertising were launching too slowly. The previous agency couldn’t handle the task, and with new laboratories opening, a steady flow of clients was a pressing matter.

Our collaboration started in January 2021. We needed to use advertising tools effectively, pass Google Ads moderation (with its restrictions on medical topics), and bring profit to our client through advertising. The primary task was to promote home sampling services.

The medical center allowed us to initiate and test various hypotheses. The most effective ones formed the basis of our promotion strategy. Given the dynamic market situation, we had to adapt quickly, launching the first advertising campaigns in just one day and continuing by the end of the next day.

Correct analytics setup is crucial as it allows for accurate management of advertising campaigns, avoiding incorrect decisions.

What we found in Google Analytics:

What we found in ad account settings:

Based on analytics data, we set correct goals, configured and tested tracking from various devices, and optimized ad campaigns. This allowed for the most effective budget allocation, resulting in improved metrics.

We connected call tracking to handle inquiries via calls (which were the majority): optimizing campaigns, listening to the client to understand their inquiries, testing automatic strategies, and using static numbers to collect calls from virtual cards. Based on this work, we provided the medical laboratory with collected statistics.

After ensuring all services were set up and functioning, we began launching advertising campaigns.

Before starting this stage, it was impossible to predict the outcome. Therefore, testing various formats and types of advertising—contextual, retargeting, and display banners—was crucial.

We focused on three services provided by the laboratory: home medical tests, PCR tests for COVID-19 for B2B companies, and the same tests with translation of results from the original language into English.

One of the most challenging parts was communicating with Google support, which took about two weeks due to the restrictions Google places on promoting medical services, making moderation particularly difficult.

However, we decided to advertise the laboratory itself, not the services, despite the ads containing other keywords.

Search campaigns proved to be the most effective based on analytics data across all advertising tools. It took us two weeks to determine this. Ultimately, conversions were the highest, and the cost of new leads was quite reasonable.

Results of other campaigns were unsatisfactory: high cost per conversion in some cases, and no leads with a large traffic flow in others (such as in the display network). Retargeting in search was also useless, as users were generally not inclined to pre-decide which medical services they needed.

Display banners were left as an additional tool: when connecting additional services, we needed more reach. We understood that the CPL would be relatively low, but this way, we could increase the brand awareness of the medical laboratory network and its services. However, this tool was used very limitedly due to the high cost of leads exceeding the project budget.

Initially, part of the campaigns used conversion optimization strategy, but we soon abandoned it. The algorithms couldn’t learn effectively in a constantly changing data environment, as was the case during the pandemic.

The results guided us in the right direction. We added new negative keywords, increased bids for effective keywords. If new leads were too expensive, we simply lowered bids. We also analyzed different audiences, taking into the account their age, gender, and device types from which they viewed the ads.

Initially, there was only one main service, PCR tests for COVID-19, but after three months, there were twelve of them. The situation with coronavirus quickly changed the needs of potential clients in other laboratory services. We had to react quickly, considering all possible external factors and launching highly relevant ads. This way, we could ensure high user demand.

We launched separate advertising campaigns for each new laboratory service and for each new laboratory office. In the first case, the campaign launched in just two days, lasting several months; in the second case, it launched every week. We decided to reassemble the semantics for each campaign, set up local geotargeting, and add geoqueries.

Additionally, we standardized the markup and made the reporting automated. This allowed us to control the overall dynamics and detail individual indicators. It was also convenient for our client: the medical laboratory management could freely monitor our activity and results.

Our advertising strategy proved effective:

All this gave us the key to further actions: since the results were stable, we continued testing new hypotheses. The most important task remained to quickly respond to changes in market factors and choose suitable advertising formats.

We remain focused on optimizing home visits for laboratory tests and will soon focus on display advertising and targeting foreign citizens.