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.
After 8 weeks of collecting enough data to begin drawing conclusions, D2 got to work implementing its recommendations. Within 1 week of launching the new campaigns click costs declined 75%. Within 5 weeks it was down 90+%. Engagement and conversion rates also improved. In the same time frame engagement rates tripled from under 5% to over 15% and peaking at 23%. The reorganization led to jumps in quality scores that allowed ads to serve in the top position more often and garnering more of the total query engagements than ever before. Conversion rates also dramatically improved. During the initial collection phase the conversion rate hovered around a respectable 5-7%. After optimizations it jumped to nearly 25%.
After the campaign rebuild was complete, D2 considered audience mindset in how to draft and tweak ad copy. One opportunity was shift options. Nurses early in their career will often have to work night shifts. D2 decided to cater ads to that audience by including a day-part set of copy focused only on night-shift nurses running from 7p-7a with ads featuring day shift. Similar tactics were used on holidays to capture nurses looking for better scheduling opportunities on holidays as well with ads automatically enabling/disabling during the holiday itself. While several would apply immediately, launching such ads resulted in higher engagement and conversion rates during the day shift after-the-fact. We suspect nurses look for work during their break, but then after hours at home update their resumes and look for the opportunity they found earlier to apply.