Acacia Clinics is an industry-leading mental health provider specializing in cutting-edge TMS technology. Acacia is globally known for taking on the most severe cases of treatment-resistant depression. They hired APAS to help their marketing team reach more individuals who were specifically searching for solutions that standard mental health providers can’t offer, and to do so in the most efficient and compliant way leveraging the entire APAS Cloud infrastructure. A real success story. Read the full case study below…
Acacia Clinics is an incredible organization that is on the forefront of cutting-edge mental health treatments. They’re a very smart group of Stanford-educated neuro specialists who have been part of many research studies that led to unique treatment protocols, such as the SAINT® protocol. They’re also the most experienced in SAINT® treatments, as well as any other form of Accelerated TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) by having performed more successful treatments than any other provider in the world. They have patients fly in for treatment from all over the US, and from across the world.
While we were introduced to Acacia back in 2021 through a visit from NeuroStim TMS Centers where we did a presentation on our patient acquisition system, Acacia didn’t hire us until February of 2024. Up until that time, David Ling, their CMO, was managing the Google advertising and did a great job showing up for the most relevant searches. However, David’s background and skillset are in brand marketing, not in direct-response advertising, which is why he hired APAS. At the time, the SAINT® brand was gaining momentum and Acacia wanted to capitalize on the search volume nationally. We took over the advertising and launched ultra-specific PPC campaigns on Google as well as Bing that did very well in bringing in high-quality leads. Later on we added Meta social ads as well.
We started with a $10k advertising budget, but quickly scaled this to $20-25k a month, which is quite impressive for a single clinic organization. Transparently, the advertising itself was a walk in the park as David had built an incredible brand with Acacia Clinics. We wouldn’t have been able to be as effective without it.
In addition to taking over the advertising, we built an advanced and HIPAA-compliant tracking and analytics system, including a Google BigQuery data warehouse for data unification, utilization, and activation. As Acacia wanted to scale as efficiently as possible, we built the entire APAS Cloud infrastructure.”
APAS Cloud engineers kicked this project off with a detailed inventory of all existing strategies and systems to identify performance and compliance gaps. The team followed up with a comprehensive measurement plan that outlined exactly what was needed, taking into account the client’s desired end goal of being able to increase both the volume of SAINT® inquiries, and the quality of the inquiries.
The APAS team removed all existing Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics 4 setups and replaced these low quality, non-compliant tracking and measurement systems with a more advanced, custom-built and HIPAA-compliant data system leveraging Cloudflare Enterprise, PostHog Analytics, a Supabase database, and Google BigQuery. These HIPAA-compliant platforms were chosen strategically to work together in a cohesive measurement strategy, building on top of each other, allowing the team to capture, store, enrich, and activate data precisely at the right moment, exactly when it is needed.
To implement this solution effectively, we developed a multi-layered data architecture:
First, we utilized Cloudflare Enterprise’s HIPAA-compliant edge servers to capture and store campaign data in Supabase before browser processing begins, maximizing our ability to attribute conversions later.
Next, we leveraged PostHog analytics to track each form submission, utilizing their unique ability to identify individuals and their events upon calling their API in the form, and capturing our proprietary APAS click ID (apasclid) with every submission. This strategy allows us to query Supabase later on when these submissions turned into opportunities and patients, and extract all campaign data associated with that particular apasclid.
All this data is then streamed to Google BigQuery in real-time where it’s unified with their Salesforce data. We established an independent data stream from their salesforce account, scheduling queries to extract data about treated patients and their revenue in real-time, then unifying this with the PostHog and Supabase data.
The resulting enriched dataset consisting of only actual treated patients with associated revenue is activated in Google Ads for superior account optimization, in full compliance with HIPAA. This reverse ETL process drives exceptional performance month after month, giving Acacia Clinics a significant competitive advantage in patient acquisition efficiency.
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