From Recovery Reach Live, featuring Derek Hyman, Founder and CEO of Scalable Growth.
It's 11:30 on a weeknight. After months of trying, a mom has finally convinced her teenage son to go to a mental health program. She searches Google, finds a program at the top of the results, reads for a couple of minutes, and calls.
Nobody picks up. She doesn't leave a voicemail, because she needs help now and the window is small. She goes back to her search, tries the next program, and someone answers within ten minutes.
The first program never knew she existed. To them, she's one more abandoned call in a tracking report.
That story opened our Recovery Reach Live session on closing the gap between click and census, and it set up everything that followed: most treatment centers have a visibility plan, but far fewer have a plan for what happens after the click. Derek Hyman has spent 15 years in behavioral health marketing, including leading digital at a large national treatment organization, and he walked through where families fall out of the funnel and the specific levers that keep them in it.
Here's what he covered.
For most programs Derek talks to, 80% or more of admissions come through business development, with little coming from digital marketing. Newer programs often lean on BD or paid channels because a website takes time to grow.
Derek's target for a mature program is 25% to 30% of total business coming from digital channels combined: Google Business Profile, SEO, paid search, Recovery.com, and increasingly large language models. At the national organization he worked for, his team reached 50% without taking anything away from BD. He's candid that 50% takes a significant budget, but 25% to 30% is realistic for most centers.
Getting there isn't only about more visibility. It's about converting the visibility you already have.
To show what the 11:30 p.m. story looks like at scale, Recovery.com pulled a cohort study for one treatment center Scalable Growth works with. The question: when a family called that center from its Recovery.com profile, what happened next?
In other words, families who reach a center's voicemail don't wait. They keep going until someone answers.
That's exactly what Recovery.com is built to do for families: make it easy to compare options and reach a program that can help. Derek's point for providers was simple. "Visibility gets you the call," he said. "Availability is what will get you the admission."
The callback still matters. Many teams work a missed-call report each morning and do reconnect with families. But by then, that family has probably already talked to someone else, and you're second or third on their list.
Whether a family finds you through an ad, your website, or a tap-to-call on their phone, Derek sees the same three gaps again and again.
Derek pointed to a 2011 Harvard Business Review study on online sales leads, which found that companies responding within an hour were about seven times more likely to qualify the lead. His gut says an hour is far too long for behavioral health, where people need answers immediately and attention spans have only gotten shorter.
He encouraged centers to run their own version: measure how long it takes to reach someone after a missed call, then compare that against whether they became a qualified lead or an admission.
The first lever lives on your website and doesn't require your admissions team at all.
In 2019, Derek's team built what he believes was the first real-time insurance verification checker on a treatment center website. They were surprised by how readily families were willing to enter their insurance information, and they kept expanding the tool from there.
Most insurance verification forms in this industry are just form fills that wait for someone to call back. Derek's recommendation is to actually answer the family's question on the spot:
You can go a step further and tailor the response when it's a payer you have a strong relationship with and good coverage for. People who have looked for treatment before understand how much good coverage matters.
Insurance is especially tricky because of carve-outs. Someone who selects Aetna doesn't necessarily have a commercial Aetna plan your program can work with, and most families have no way to know that. Filters help, and Recovery.com lets families narrow programs by insurance and offers an optional mobile prompt at the moment of the call. But a real-time check goes further, and it builds trust before anyone picks up the phone.
For smaller programs, this matters financially. Derek noted that a couple of admissions with a stronger payer, one way or the other, can meaningfully change a small center's financial position.
What if the family can't talk right now? Derek's answer is to let them pick the time.
He uses a busy CEO as the example. Picture an executive quietly scrolling Recovery.com on their phone during a meeting, looking for help for a loved one. They find a program they like, but they can't step out and call. Most treatment center websites give them one option: call now. So the program is left hoping they remember to come back after dinner, retrace the filters they used, and find the right profile again.
Instead, let them book a time, the same way they'd schedule a demo with a software company or a dinner reservation. Giving people control over the process also makes them more comfortable, which helps on its own.
Done well, the technology handles the hard part:
No one manages a calendar, and no one runs outbound dialing. You can use an off-the-shelf tool or build your own.
Someone in crisis often needs help immediately, and live answering stays the priority. But for families who are ready and simply can't talk at that moment, every extra step you put in front of them is a chance to lose them.
Two sets of benchmarks came up during the session.
Scalable Growth's partners. Across the admissions teams Derek's agency works with:
That last number is good news. You can fix your daytime answer rate first and treat after-hours coverage as the second project. His team also helps partners forecast call volume as digital spend grows, so admissions is staffed before the phones get busier.
Recovery Centers of America. Clint Mally, VP of Content at Recovery.com, shared numbers from an interview with RCA's senior director of performance advertising, Nicolas Portonova. RCA runs:
The centers performing best watch those three numbers closely: how fast they answer, how often they answer, and how often a call slips through.
Derek's warning: a lot of marketing reporting runs on vanity metrics. Website traffic is the classic example. At the national organization he worked for, just 6% of site traffic drove the majority of admissions.
The metrics he'd build a measurement system around instead:
Once those are in place, even a 5% to 10% improvement in conversion at each step compounds all the way to the bottom of the funnel.
Derek showed two campaigns with the same budget. On a cost-per-lead basis, Campaign A looks like the clear winner. On the outcomes that matter, it isn't.
Campaign B produces more admissions and frees your team from 50 extra conversations with people who aren't ready. That staff time is a real cost that rarely shows up on a marketing report, and when admissions is tied up on low-intent calls, that's when high-intent calls go unanswered. Pull one lever, and watch what it does somewhere else.
We polled attendees live:
That second number impressed Derek, since many centers can't answer it. His advice: make sure your site has the content to attract commercial-intent searches. Top-of-funnel blog posts like "what is cocaine addiction" may bring in traffic, but AI is increasingly absorbing that research phase. A search for cocaine detox near you is where the real conversation starts.
Yes, and Derek thinks they'll matter more as AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity become how people research treatment. Those tools have to pull information from somewhere, and your website is a database of content about your program.
He also gave a rough ranking of channels by cost per acquisition, best to least, as a generalization:
The catch with Google Business Profile: it won't rank for non-branded searches like "cocaine detox" unless your website has content proving you offer that service. Google evaluates your whole ecosystem, not each listing on its own.
The website also supports your Recovery.com profile. A meaningful share of families click from a profile to the center's website to learn more before they call. Without a site that educates them, there's nowhere for them to go.
Clint shared findings from Recovery.com research on AI search. The team ran commercial-intent prompts across the major AI platforms, things like "What's the best rehab in LA?" and "What's the best rehab near me that takes my insurance?" Recovery.com was the most cited third-party source. AI models frequently lean on third-party sources to validate options, and centers with complete, up-to-date profiles tend to show up better.
Clint added one tip to Derek's advice about building a page for every service line: make those pages local, too. Smaller centers may never outrank national brands on broad terms, but local service pages give them a real shot in both search and AI answers.
Derek layered on one more point. Today, a page also needs to be specific to your program. Anyone can generate a decent article on cocaine detox in seconds, and hundreds already exist. Yours has to explain how your program handles cocaine detox. As Clint put it, if your differentiators are individualized treatment plans and evidence-based care, so are everyone else's. That's the bare minimum.
You can, and it helps if you're running sophisticated multivariate tests by page type. But it takes time and engineering resources, so Derek doesn't consider it essential.
What matters more is knowing your commercial pages (the ones that generate admissions) and designing a smooth path to them, which might take three or four steps. Every page answers the searcher's question first, then weaves in commercial and navigational elements through program-specific content and well-placed calls to action. Accordions help condense content for mobile readers without hiding it from search engines.
Clint's shorthand: blog posts are usually informational. Pages about cost, location, or specific treatment modalities lean commercial. Navigational intent is mostly branded search, people looking up your center by name.
To make this easier, Recovery.com offers a location page playbook, covering the elements of a high-converting commercial page from sticky navigation and tables of contents to how you explain what makes you different. One more tip from the session: don't bury reviews or accepted insurance on separate pages. Put them on your location pages too, where families make decisions.
Derek closed with a short list of low-hanging fruit any center can start on now:
His parting advice: don't try to boil the ocean. Every center and every admissions team is at a different stage. Find the gap you're stuck on, and start there.
You can follow Derek on LinkedIn, where he posts daily on these topics, and subscribe to the Scalable Growth newsletter for weekly lessons on SEO, paid search, AI visibility, and ethical marketing.