Behavioral Health Marketing Attribution: What Actually Drives Admissions (with CTM)

Why most facilities lack visibility into what drives admissions00:00

Gary Garth: Welcome back to The elev8.io Podcast — your inside look at what's really changing in behavioral health, from admissions to outcomes. In a space where patient acquisition costs can reach $3,000 to $10,000 per admission, many facilities still lack clear visibility into what's truly driving admissions. That's exactly what we're unpacking today: the foundations of marketing attribution — what you should be tracking, how to align marketing with admissions, and how to make smarter, data-driven decisions that improve ROI and census growth. Joining us is Bryan McKinstry, Lead of Strategic Partnerships at CTM, who works with behavioral health facilities of all sizes implementing call tracking, attribution models, and admissions intelligence. Welcome to the show, Bryan.

Bryan McKinstry: Hey Gary, thanks for having me. Good to see you.

Gary Garth: Likewise — you're crushing it. For context, I've worked with CTM for about 15 years now. When we first engaged through elev8.io, the partner program was nowhere near what you've built it into — the partner portal, the visibility, the support. And every time we bring a facility onto the platform, that white-glove setup is stellar. Give our listeners a little background on your role at CTM.

Bryan McKinstry: I've been with CTM about two and a half years as Lead of Strategic Partnerships. I focus on three types of partners. Integration partners — EMRs, EHRs, and other CRMs we share data with. Referral partners — agencies and consultants like yourselves who help with setup, configuration, and optimizing a CTM account. And agency partners — that one-to-many approach. Working with folks like you.

The biggest blind spots in marketing attribution03:30

Gary Garth: About a year ago we made a true commitment to CTM. Before that we'd work with facilities coming from CallRail or other call analytics platforms, and we weren't as firm in our approach. But we decided CTM is the superior platform. We collaborated on bringing 23 new facilities onto it, and they now have real data integrity and visibility from a marketing standpoint.

Gary Garth: Looking back at those 23 facilities and your experience in the market, what are the blind spots or operational mistakes folks make when getting call analytics in place?

Why call duration is a misleading metric05:00

Bryan McKinstry: A big one is that many facilities either don't have an internal marketing team or use agencies like elev8.io to be the subject-matter experts on the CTM setup. The common theme is a poor understanding of which marketing channels are driving patient acquisitions. Of all the campaigns and channels where the facility's logo and phone number appear, they have no idea where patients are finding them. CTM pinpoints which campaigns are working, which aren't, which lead to intakes, and where you need to add resources.

Gary Garth: We see it every day — that's why we make it a contractual requirement. If you want to work with elev8.io, you adopt CTM, because of the automations we've built with dashboard reporting and Google Ads optimization, and to make sure that when we get a qualified inquiry, that data is visible across every platform so better decisions can be made.

Gary Garth: Very often when we bring on customers, I see an agency has set up a conversion feeding back to Google for any call over 60 seconds. What are your thoughts on that — is it an outdated approach?

Bryan McKinstry: It can vary, but there are three or four key points. First, understand how patients are searching for care — what they're seeking and why they choose one facility over another. Simply looking at call duration ignores call quality. We always say call length doesn't necessarily attribute to a successful call. Long calls don't indicate an efficient call, and they don't assess the fit between the patient and the services offered. And there's no visibility into patient enrollment, time to enrollment, or connecting calls to actual results. Call length isn't attributing the conversation and quality to a conversion.

The disconnect between marketing and admissions teams08:00

Gary Garth: You're preaching to the choir. It's contextual — the quality of the lead and the path to admission. Sometimes on the surface a channel may not look profitable, but it's an important touch point in the research journey, or a credibility factor viewed somewhere. I love the depth the platform brings. So why is call analytics an absolute requisite for a marketing foundation going forward?

Bryan McKinstry: It's about maximizing the marketing budget and the intakes coming in. Many facilities don't have the largest budget. You can pinpoint where intakes come from based on the call and the marketing source. These intakes are expensive — treatment is expensive — so they want to be sure their marketing spend is driving patient acquisition.

Gary Garth: The clients who gravitate toward elev8.io have heard about our ROI focus and data-driven approach. It's easy speaking to a CMO about ROI between campaigns and budget allocation — but there are several other stakeholders in the organization.

Gary Garth: One important group is the admissions team using the platform and rating calls. Where's the gap between admissions and marketing, and what bridges it into one uniform system?

Bryan McKinstry: In any organization, not everyone's always on the same page. Admissions needs to understand where marketing is placing dollars to find patients. Different departments use CTM in different ways, so everyone should be involved in some capacity, even in a different role within the platform. At the very least, every department should be included.

Gary Garth: I love it as an operational tool. When I speak with the admissions team, there's often a "now this guy is telling us how to do our job" reaction and the worry about extra admin. I say: help us help you. You don't like going back-to-back on calls or getting spam or, in a commercial-focused facility, a lot of Medicaid calls. Help us send the right message to the right people at the right time. That only happens through collaboration between marketing and admissions, and that buy-in is critical for CTM adoption.

What separates advanced call tracking from basic tools12:30

Gary Garth: What separates CTM from other call analytics platforms?

Bryan McKinstry: Customization, far and away. Todd and Lori Fisher started CTM in 2011, so we're at 15 years. You and the elev8.io team were early adopters. They're still very involved — Todd's the CEO, Lori's the COO. We take customer feedback seriously; it's not beyond Todd to hear what a partner needs and build it over the weekend so it's live Monday. A lot of folks come to us after outgrowing other systems. Some providers are good in specific niches; we do it all, and well. If you want customization, multiple facilities, an in-depth call tree or routing, people leave those platforms and come to us.

Gary Garth: I remember the Dialog Tech and Mongoose Metrics days, back when I was preaching call analytics. Now it's a blatant mistake if you're really running a marketing program. I see facilities spending hundreds of thousands saying "we've got CTM," but it's not set up with the right framework or integrated with the right platforms — a hope strategy. As an executive, I'd want those metrics in my scorecard for quarterly reviews. And your API connections and native integrations are second to none — for Google Ads we default to CTM to pass data back in-platform, because you don't lose the click ID the way you do elsewhere. What integrations do you recommend out of the box?

Bryan McKinstry: Our largest integrations are Salesforce, HubSpot, Google, and the backend nucleus of the facility — the EMRs and EHRs, where we integrate with nearly all of them and are constantly building. We just added Luke to the partnerships team to lead new product and integration builds. Your Kipus, Sunwaves, Lightning Steps, Alleva — those are some of the big ones we integrate with.

Speed-to-contact and capturing high-intent moments16:00

Gary Garth: It's key that it's natively integrated and configured properly. Having visibility that the EHR is connected so you understand your bed board — do you have scheduled admissions? — lets that feedback loop run from operations back to the front end, so you know to ramp the budget slightly with an expected cost per admission to fill extra beds. Little details can be the difference between profitable and breaking even. We find that very helpful.

Gary Garth: Say I'm a facility owner on CallRail considering CTM. What are the important steps — besides calling elev8.io?

Bryan McKinstry: First, get your tracking numbers in place and onto your campaigns — that's where elev8.io's white-glove service shines, getting numbers mapped to the right campaigns so you understand where the dollars go. Then we map out who handles calls and what the call tree looks like, so patients reach the right person right away. The biggest thing in behavioral health: when people call, they're vulnerable and want help ASAP. It's a small window from "enough is enough, I need help." The fewer delays, holds, transfers, and phone trees, the better.

Gary Garth: I'm so glad you said that. So many facilities do "press one for this, press two for that." You're spending a fortune on marketing — dial them straight into the admissions team.

Bryan McKinstry: Exactly. You don't call 911 and start filling out a questionnaire either, right?

Gary Garth: Who should own CTM — marketing, IT, admissions?

Why attribution should be treated as an operational system20:00

Bryan McKinstry: Everybody. Marketing uses CTM differently than intake does, so involve all the key stakeholders from the jump. You can set up different roles within CTM by department. Short answer: everyone who's going to interact with it.

Gary Garth: Same for us — in the first month of onboarding, besides research, audit, and strategy, we run an admissions enablement session: set the structure, explain the systems, get buy-in on the lead-rating system, and show them the dashboards. It's life, health, emotion — not buying a product — so there may be several touch points before a lead becomes a viable opportunity with the right insurance. If it's treated as marketing-only, it's isolated. It starts from the top: I tell owners we'll handle the marketing side, but you should invest someone in-house and treat this as operational software. It's an expense line on your P&L — marketing, BD, alumni follow-up, admissions effectiveness — it all connects. As an executive, I'd put full focus on it. Shifting the mindset from "marketing tool" to "operational tool" has helped us a lot, especially with smaller facilities.

Gary Garth: Good segue to larger facilities — a multi-location, 200-bed operation with different levels of care across the US. How can they leverage CTM?

Multi-location vs single-location attribution23:00

Bryan McKinstry: We work with the whole gamut, from one location to multi-facility, multi-state. The biggest difference is the sheer number of campaigns. A smaller facility runs fewer campaigns and shows up in fewer places; a larger one has the budget for many campaigns, online and offline — Google Business Profile, SEO, ads. Budget is realistically the biggest difference.

Gary Garth: Any best practices or things to avoid when implementing CTM? We just took on a multi-location client — savvy, in business for years — but it was almost a jungle of phone numbers. What's your view on an ideal structure?

Bryan McKinstry: The crawl-walk-run approach. You can use CTM as your call center, your dialer, and for attribution — but you don't need to do it all at once. We're pay-as-you-go, so you pay for what you use. If you're only using us for attribution and you're comfortable with your phone system, we won't pull you away from it. Eventually it may make sense to bring everything under one roof. The best thing we hear is a client saying, "I didn't know you guys could do that" — then we have the conversation about how to make their operation smoother.

Gary Garth: We're creatures of habit; moving platforms is never easy. But it helps to show the case study and the promised land — the perceived value per department and how the tool helps them get there.

Gary Garth: A few features I like a lot: the transcript functionality — admissions teams use it for a quick overview and analytics — and the forms. Most folks want phone calls, but they also have a form fill or chatbot, and 40% of potential calls get cannibalized by form fills. Lead-to-speed, from the minute someone submits a form, is a critical metric given the emotional state of someone seeking recovery. On many platforms a callback comes 30 minutes later. What I love about CTM is the form submission pops right up in the overview with a notification. What other features would you highlight?

Bryan McKinstry: On forms, we can automate phone calls or texts for scheduling. Someone may fill out a form and not be able to take a call, or want to be around loved ones first. We set triggers — within 10 or 30 minutes, automate a text with an intake specialist's scheduling link, or automate a call patched to whichever intake specialist is available. After hours, our voice AI can collect general information and route it to an on-call specialist or queue it for the morning. And if you don't want that feature, we integrate with partners like Rollover Rep, Answering Service Care, and Dialed for 24-hour coverage.

Forms, transcripts, and reducing lead-to-speed27:30

Gary Garth: We work closely with Rollover Rep too. In our dashboards, one metric is missed-call rate — you should be answering all calls. We have a feature where if it goes over 5%, it notifies the account manager to enable that service. A missed call is a missed opportunity, and a person who could've been helped.

Gary Garth: Good segue into AI. As a teaser, there's a second round coming with one of your colleagues. Today we've laid the foundation — I always say you need the processes, framework, and playbook first; then AI can support and enhance. Who will we speak with on round two?

Bryan McKinstry: The AI features we're implementing aren't meant to replace — they're meant to enhance. The AI gathers data so admission reps can focus on patient care and de-escalation rather than general information gathering. For part two we'll have my colleague Bryan Beringer — nearly five years at CTM, formerly an account manager, now our senior solution engineer and product specialist. He'll dig into the platform and the functionality behavioral health facilities are using, and should be using.

Gary Garth: Excited for that — it reminds me of conversational-intelligence tools like Gong; all of it can live in one platform to help reps coach, spot patterns, and shorten the admission cycle. So what does the future look like for admissions and call analytics? Will AI answer the phones?

AI in admissions: enhancement vs replacement30:00

Bryan McKinstry: There's still a huge human-element piece, especially in behavioral health — a familiar voice, because sentiment matters. AI is changing rapidly, but on the call side, within addiction treatment and behavioral health, sentiment and tone still matter. I'm not sure we're at a point where you can fully replace humans for intake. It'll help streamline, but I don't think it'll replace.

Gary Garth: I agree. These tools can increase the quality of the call and catch details a human may forget — but the rapport and trust, especially since many intake specialists are people in recovery, connect at a deeper level. The best specialists build a relationship; they were part of that first step and speak again six months later: "Thank you for answering that phone call." Hard to replace with AI. But if AI and CTM increase effectiveness so more people access the care they deserve, that's a surplus — and that's why we should embrace it. Tune in for round two. Bryan, thank you for being on the show.

Bryan McKinstry: Thanks for having me. If any facilities want to reach me, call the CTM hotline or email me directly at [email protected] — we'll learn about your facility and how we can help.

Gary Garth: Make sure to do that, folks — it's a great investment, and we can help along the way. Bryan, thanks again.