Getting to the Root of Media Effectiveness: An Advanced Attribution Case Study with Jefferson Dental & Orthodontics

The Brand

Jefferson Dental & Orthodontics (JDO) is a large regional dental services organization with more than 60 offices throughout Texas. The company provides high-quality, affordable, and convenient dental and orthodontic care with their advanced technology and comprehensive oral health plans for each of their patients. They call this their “Smile Roadmap”.

The Challenge

A new CEO and marketing leadership came on board in 2024 and had an inclination they were over-invested in certain marketing channels. They were having a hard time understanding the true unit economics of the media spend. They didn’t entirely trust what they were reading from Google Analytics or in their platform reporting.

Dental services organizations are also known for their notoriously incompatible systems. Patient CRM, patient billing, marketing, and everything else tend to be siloed leading to data fragmentation and debilitating opaqueness for leaders managing these businesses.

The JDO team was also in the process of onboarding a new agency partner and opined that it would be great to have new insights into media’s efficiency to get oriented on a new go-to-market strategy for the brand.

Exploratory Data Analysis

As part of the exploratory analysis, marketing measurement teams have to frame outcomes that marketing can be reasonably tasked to drive, like “Appointments Booked”, but also draw a straight line to unit economics that CFOs care about, like “Appointments Completed”.

The M-Squared team had several data sets to assess and synthesize. These datasets included media investment and delivery data across a diverse mix of channels and tactics going back 2 years. The media channels included Google Search (brand and non-brand), Facebook, CTV, and Direct Mail. The data analyzed also included scheduled appointments and completed appointments as the dependent variables. More than 60 Jefferson Dental offices throughout Texas.

The Approach

These large and diverse datasets needed to be processed and transformed to build the Analytics plan. The analytics plan developed as part of a structured Advanced Attribution Audit was designed to address the questions inspired by the business and entailed:

• Data Harmonization: Collection of the historical data (1.5 years) on appointments, revenue, and media which was reviewed and processed as per modeling needs.

• Preliminary Analysis:  Performing trend analysis, correlations, and a basic MMM to understand the fit of individual variables driving appointments and revenue.

• Media Mix Modeling: Running 1000’s of iterations and 100’s of tranches for the different segments to come up with the best-fit models explaining the drivers of appointments across new and existing patient groups.

• Triangulation: Using the MMM decomps, did a triangulation exercise to understand the impact of media and the value it brings in driving appointment bookings and completed appointments.

The Marketing Accounting Framework (MAF) was oriented around incremental scheduled appointments, completed appointments, and production (revenue) driven by media for new and existing patient cohorts. This was distilled into incremental ROAS (iROAS) by media channel/platform. This was a 4 P&L structure - meaning 4 different models were built - one for each of the appointment and customer types.

Learn about Marketing Accounting Frameworks with this short course from M-Squared:

The Results

1. Media drives incremental impact/revenue - nearly 5.8% of booked appointments on an incremental basis with a ROAS of almost 1.60 and 4.6% of completed appointments on an incremental basis with a ROAS of almost 1.50.

2. GA and ad platform reporting overstate media contribution by many multiples. The JDO team’s hunch was right that they were probably overspending - in part based on platform and GA reporting not accurately capturing impact.

3. Media contributes to both new and existing patient appointment booking - which is important in understanding the holistic value of media - and how it contributes to LTV.

Overall, the insights suggested there was a growth opportunity within the existing budget based on making some investment shifts to higher-performing (based on incremental appointments) media tactics. There also appeared to be an opportunity to tighten and validate some of the model insights through incrementality testing geospatial analysis. 

The Conclusion

The model outputs created a set of initial recommendations, and validated what the JDO marketing team’s “gut was telling them” but also raised a number of hypotheses that would need to be tested. These tests will serve to validate and/or further refine the models and in the shorter term can be used to update iROAS numbers to ensure a high degree of confidence before looking to scale many of the recommended investment shifts. As Jefferson Dental continues down the path of test-learn-grow M-Squared will continue to fine-tune the models to improve their fit and outputs. Along the way, the team will continue to find questions, form hypotheses, and test them in the market. Growth is always an ongoing and iterative process.