In this video, Etna Interactive CEO Ryan Miller explains why elective healthcare practices that rely on paid advertising need to make decisions now to capture peak demand in early 2027. Google and Meta campaigns begin in a machine-learning phase where performance is unstable, and costs run high, so the work you do this fall determines how efficiently your ads perform when spring demand arrives.
Follow along to learn why patient research starts weeks or months before the consultation, what sends a campaign back into learning mode, why the end of January is a practical deadline for most practices, and how to audit, test, or launch campaigns now for lower cost per lead and better patient acquisition costs.
Video Transcription:
Hi again, Ryan Miller here with Etna Interactive. We’re here today to talk about pushing the peak, about making decisions now that will help you in early 2027 to grab peak consumer demand in elective healthcare. Specifically, we’re going to look at decisions you can make today as it relates to your paid advertising to grab more opportunity in the new year.
Now, Etna Interactive, we’re a 25-year-old agency. We have data going back more than, well, more than 20 years, and with the exception of the pandemic and the years that immediately followed, the cycle in elective healthcare demand has been really consistent.
Each year, we see a slump in demand during the summer months. We see a little bit of a rebound as we go through the holidays, with the surge coming along with the new year. Now, in general, patient volume, the majority of the surgical case demand is going to be present in the first half of the year, with spring being the busiest season. This isn’t really news, I think, for most of us. This is just something that’s already on our calendar. It’s something you’re already aware of.
But a moment of reflection will make you realize immediately that actually the decisions that patients are making are preceding when you see them or feel them inside of your practice. For most patients, their journey is going to start on search, and that’s happening weeks or months before they actually make it into your practice.
By the time you’re feeling the patient, you’re seeing them in consultation, they’ve already made their decisions, and it’s important that we recognize that we need to be in front of those patients at the time they’re doing that research in order to win the consultation.
And really—this is the news inside of the short recording for you—is the understanding that if you’re going to rely or simply use paid advertising to reach those patients, you need to be making decisions now, because the majority of paid advertising starts in a learning mode.
It shouldn’t really come as any big surprise that the most sophisticated advertising platforms in the world, like Google and Meta, use AI or machine learning to automatically optimize campaign performance. And during that learning period, performance is unstable, read: expensive.
In general, what we say is that the campaigns are never going to be less efficient and more expensive than during the first few weeks and months of operation.
Now, that learning runs on data, on sharing your ad creative to specific audiences in the effort of tooling performance, in the case of Google, assigning quality scores, and that takes time and volume, right? Again, read: money. It takes expense to run those ads during that period to inform the learning.
Now, you can disrupt campaign performance; you can reintroduce learning mode at just about any time by making major campaign shifts, such as big increases in your spend or decreases in your spend, changing your campaign creative, altering audience targeting, changing your landing pages.
All of those things can send a campaign back into learning mode, and in general, it takes about 50 conversion events. These are typically phone calls or form completions to get out of that learning period. And depending on the level of your spend, that’s going to take weeks or months.
So for most practices, we like to recommend that you think of your deadline as the end of January to get out of that learning mode and be ready for capitalizing on optimal performance during peak demand. Now, you can compress the learning mode a little bit by spending more.
Bigger budgets means more impressions. That means faster conversion events, accumulation, and, you know, compressing down that timeline, but it doesn’t erase it entirely. And the folks who are going to get the best performance when demand is peaking in late February, early March are the ones who already went through the learning mode earlier in the year, or at the end of calendar year 2026.
So, at the end of the day here, what’s the message?
If you’re already advertising, now’s a great opportunity to audit the campaign-level performance, decide where you want to increase investments, and where you’re going to be running some tests or trials, introducing new campaign groups, testing new creative or landing page, so that you can get out of learning mode and be ready for the peak demand.
But if you’re contemplating advertising anew, now’s the time to make the decision, not later during the first quarter, so that your campaign can be built and optimized and ready when the patients are there.
What’s the payoff?
So, ultimately, it is lower cost per leads, which result in lower cost per consultation, and ideally, better acquisition costs for every new patient. Allowing your budget to stretch further so you can book more consultations, and take the demand that’s present in the first half of the year, not only delivering a really strong spring, but pushing demand into your summer schedule and all the way out into fall.
If you have any questions about how to optimize your paid advertising or prepare now for the new year, my team and I are here and ready for you.
Best of luck in the new year.
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