Oregon Health Sciences University is a major medical training and research university and one of the primary healthcare providers to the residents of Oregon. Through its network of hospitals and clinics it offers a variety of emergent and non-emergent medical treatments. It is currently undergoing a merger with Legacy Health to expand its offerings and locations.

The COVID-19 pandemic put extraneous strain and stress on healthcare networks nationwide, leading to staffing shortages. OHSU was spending a fortune on traveling nurse contracts and engaging in aggressive recruiting efforts to increase its staffing levels of key roles and rely less on expensive and temporary nursing contracts. OHSU turned to D2 for its 20 years of PPC expertise as a way to drive applicants to apply for nursing and other jobs within the OHSU network

D2 received an account-level export from Google Ads established by another vendor and rebuilt the account to build a baseline of performance similar to what the client was receiving previously. After studying the results, all campaign elements were evaluated, analyzed, and optimized: keyword and ad group organizations, ad phrasing and calls to action, bidding strategies, target acquisition costs and more. After reorganizing and refining the keywords, ad copy was tightened up to reflect specifically to the keywords featured within the ad group, going as far as adding keywords from other ad groups as negative to force specific responsive ads to serve on specific terms. We discovered part of the performance issue was how bidding strategies and targeted acquisition costs were combined. The original account had target numbers way too high in order to maximize reach. By modifying the conversion definition and lowering the targets we saw an explosion in performance.