How a medical clinic should vet a marketing agency

Respiratory season is easing at most clinics. The CDC’s review of the 2024-25 season, published in MMWR last month, dated the end of that winter’s RSV epidemic to the last week of March, and an interim MMWR report released yesterday says this winter’s flu has been dominated by a drifted A(H3N2) strain called subclade K.

The quieter weeks before summer physicals are when owners look hard at the marketing invoice, and when agency pitches arrive, most of them written for any local business. A primary or urgent care clinic has several providers who each need a listing, privacy rules that reach into the website’s code, a state medical board with its own advertising rule, and a front desk that cannot always get to the phone. These six questions separate agencies that know this from ones that will learn it on your account. Put them to us as well.

Six questions to put to every agency

How will you set up each of our providers on Google?

Google’s Business Profile guidelines treat doctors as individual practitioners. A doctor who works in a public-facing role and can be contacted at your verified location during stated hours can have a profile of their own; support staff should not. Where several practitioners share a location, the clinic keeps its own location profile, and each practitioner’s profile title carries only that person’s name, with the clinic’s name left off. One practitioner gets one profile, not one per specialty.

A good answer names those rules and asks for your provider roster before your budget. A weak one talks about “optimizing your listing,” singular.

What will you install on our website, and on which pages?

Ask for a page-by-page list, and listen for the appointment request form, the patient portal and the telehealth intake. The HHS Office for Civil Rights issued guidance on online tracking in December 2022 and revised it in March 2024. On June 20, 2024, a federal judge in Texas vacated the part dealing with unauthenticated pages, the public pages anyone can open, and the National Law Review noted that the order applies nationwide. HHS appealed that August, then moved to drop the appeal ten days later, per Morrison Foerster.

A year earlier the FTC and HHS had warned roughly 130 hospital systems and telehealth providers about the Meta pixel and Google Analytics. The Texas ruling does not reach a portal, an appointment request or an intake form. The answer you want: no ad platform tags on any of those pages, and calls and forms tracked by vendors willing to sign a business associate agreement.

Do you know what HIPAA treats as marketing?

The Privacy Rule defines marketing as a communication that encourages someone to buy or use a product or service, and it requires the patient’s authorization before protected health information is used for it. It then carves out, when no third party pays for the message, communications about a patient’s treatment and communications describing the clinic’s own services. A flu-shot reminder to your own patients sits inside that carve-out. Handing the patient list to an ad platform does not.

An agency that offers in the first meeting to “upload your patient list and build lookalike audiences” has answered this question for you.

Have you read our state medical board’s advertising rule?

Ask them to name it. Two states show how far these rules reach into ordinary copy:

• Texas. Under 22 TAC 164.3, the Texas Medical Board treats as false or misleading any use of “board eligible” or “board qualified” in place of board certification, a testimonial without a disclaimer about the speaker’s credentials and a disclosure of any payment, models or actors not identified as such, and claims of free service when a third party is billed.
• Florida. Statute 456.062 requires any ad from a physician, osteopathic physician or nurse for a free or discounted service or examination to carry a statement, in capitals, that the patient may refuse to pay, cancel payment or be reimbursed for any other service performed as a result of the ad within 72 hours of responding.

That rule catches the discounted sports physical nearly every clinic considers in early summer.

What happens to a paid call that nobody picks up?

Local Services Ads have no medical clinic category; Primary care physician is the general-medicine one. It carries the Google Verified badge and requires National Provider Identifier verification, provider and practice checks, and professional liability or malpractice cover. Health care gets less: no message leads, no booking leads, no call recordings and no lead credits. Every lead is a phone call, billed whether or not anyone answers it.

CallRail’s January 2025 report found healthcare had the highest missed-call rate of the industries it measured, 32%. A Zocdoc survey quoted in the company’s December release found that one in three patients who could not reach their doctor by phone gave up on scheduling altogether. Ask what happens to the call your front desk cannot take.

Who writes our review replies?

Google’s review policy bans offering anything in exchange for a review and bans asking only the patients likely to leave praise. The FTC’s rule on fake reviews, announced in August 2024, bars incentives conditioned on a review expressing a particular sentiment. The replies carry the bigger risk. Mintz reported that the Office for Civil Rights reached a $23,000 resolution with a dental practice, plus a two-year corrective action plan, over patient information disclosed in its replies to online reviews.

Ask the agency to draft a reply on the spot to a one-star review about a long wait. It should be courteous, invite the person to call the office, and never confirm that the reviewer was ever seen.

What the first ninety days and the first report should show

Expect an order close to this:

• Weeks one and two: the script audit on appointment, portal and telehealth pages, and call tracking switched on.
• Weeks one to four: a profile for the location and for each public-facing provider, with hours, holiday hours and accepted plans set.
• Weeks three to eight: review requests for every patient, a reply routine, and site copy checked against your board’s rule.
• Weeks six to twelve: campaigns timed to summer physicals, and recall messages to your own patients.

The first monthly report should fit on one page: calls received and answered, appointments booked and kept by source, new patients by provider, and new reviews with their replies. If it opens with impressions, ask where the patients went.

What to do this month

• List every provider who sees patients and check whether each has a Google profile carrying only their own name.
• Ask your web vendor for every script running on the appointment, portal and telehealth pages.
• Print your state medical board’s advertising rule and bring it to every pitch.
• Call your own front desk at 11 on a Monday morning and count the rings.
• Reread your last ten review replies and rewrite any that confirm a visit.

An agency that answers all six without notes has probably worked inside a clinic. Our own answers are laid out on our page for medical clinics, and the provider profile work behind the first question is on our Google Business Profile page.