A New Jersey neurosurgery and spine practice with multiple partners and locations
THE GOAL
Prove that marketing dollars were producing actual patients before expanding the investment.
THE CHALLENGE
Before Eighty6, the practice wasn't doing any digital marketing. Everything ran through a contracted sales representative, building in-person relationships with referring physicians. A valuable approach that worked for years. But not one they wanted to build their future on.
Medical practices are constantly pitched by marketing companies, and the partners here were rightly skeptical. Every agency promises leads. Almost none can prove which dollar produced which patient. So when the practice considered digital, the question was never "can you make ads?" It was "can you show us it's working?"
WHAT WE DID
We built the program around attribution from day one. Call tracking on every campaign. Every form submission and every phone call captured with its exact touchpoint, so nothing gets credited on a hunch. Reporting the partners could read in one page.
That level of tracking did something most medical marketing never does: it let the practice trace marketing activity straight through to surgery revenue. Not "we think the ads are helping." This patient, from this campaign, became this procedure.
Then we let the numbers do the talking.
WHAT HAPPENED
The first full month of tracking told the whole story:
924 tracked phone calls
626 of them are first-time callers
44 appointment requests through the website, 20 of those from paid search
Paid search calls averaging three and a half minutes.
That's not wrong numbers. That's patients talking to the practice.
Then we dug into the paid campaigns and found the bottleneck: less than 10% search impression share. Nine out of ten times someone searched for what this practice does, the ads weren't there. Not a performance problem. A budget ceiling.
That diagnosis is what made the expansion conversation easy. The partners saw exactly what the existing budget produced and exactly how much demand was going unclaimed. No sales pitch needed. They tripled their search budget the following month. And the numbers responded. Within six weeks of the increase, paid search call volume was running roughly 75% higher than before the expansion.
And they went further than search. The expanded program is a strategic shift, from a strictly search-focused approach to search plus awareness, built to establish a powerful local presence:
DIGITAL OUT-OF-HOME: digital signage and billboards in high-traffic North Jersey locations their patients frequent, including train stations
PAID SOCIAL: retargeting previous website visitors and using Meta's datasets to reach high-potential new patients
ADVANCED DISPLAY: demographic targeting, search retargeting that serves ads based on what people are actively searching for, and site retargeting
VIDEO: the doctors on camera, so prospective patients can see them, hear their expertise, and get to know them before the first appointment
The video work is the cornerstone. When the doctors are established as trusted local authorities before a patient ever walks through the door, the first visit starts with familiarity instead of a cold introduction.
THE SHORT VERSION
The expansion wasn't sold. It was shown. When every dollar tracks to real appointment requests, growth conversations stop being negotiations and start being math.
They are available for our office anytime we need them. They consistently go above and beyond to meet all our marketing/website needs. I could not recommend a better business to handle your marketing needs. Even in this economic downturn, they have stood by us and helped us accomplish things beyond their realm. Just to be of great service to us.
Shannon Gilgallon, MSN, RN
METROPOLITAN NEUROSURGERY BRAIN & SPINE
Ready to see what this looks like for your business?Reach out at eighty6.agency or call 201.589.2201.
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Data period: May – July 2026 | Based on CallRail call tracking and Looker Studio reporting
Channels: Google Ads (SEM), display, paid social, digital out-of-home, video