About
We come from performance marketing, where the math is the whole job.
Translational Growth exists because patient recruitment is usually bought like brand media and judged like brand media — while the sponsor is paying for an enrollment curve.
Why this agency exists
The metric mismatch
In performance marketing, nobody gets paid for traffic that doesn't convert. You buy against a number you can defend, you find out quickly whether it works, and you cut what doesn't. That discipline is unremarkable elsewhere in marketing and surprisingly rare in patient recruitment.
Recruitment media is usually reported in the vocabulary of the ad platform: impressions, clicks, cost per lead. Meanwhile the sponsor's operations team is reporting a completely different set of numbers — referrals worked, screen failures, randomizations against target. The two reports rarely reconcile, and the gap between them is where recruitment budgets go quietly missing.
We built this agency around closing that gap. Not by promising outcomes we cannot control — site capacity, protocol difficulty, and seasonality are all real — but by refusing to optimize toward a number that does not predict enrollment. In clinical-trial recruitment that can mean screening and enrollment. In virtual care it may mean completed consultations or treatment starts.
The problem
Cheap leads are the most expensive thing you can buy.
Every metric an ad platform optimizes toward sits upstream of the number that actually funds the trial.
Lead volume is a vanity metric
Ten thousand cheap form-fills mean nothing if none of them screen in. Cost-per-lead hides the number that funds the trial: cost per enrollment.
Unqualified leads burn site capacity
Every ineligible referral your coordinators chase is time stolen from patients who could actually randomize. Bad leads have a real, compounding cost.
Screen-fail waste eats the budget
When targeting ignores inclusion and exclusion criteria, you pay full CPA for traffic that was never eligible in the first place.
Most vendors are blind past the click
Without downstream data, agencies optimize to whatever the ad platform rewards. We wire spend to screening and enrollment outcomes instead.
How we operate
Four principles that decide everything else.
Buy on unit economics
Every channel gets a payback threshold before it gets budget, so scaling and cutting are documented decisions rather than arguments.
Screen before you spend
Exclusion logic is a media lever, not downstream cleanup. The criteria that filter hardest shape the targeting and the pre-screener from day one.
Close the loop, however partial
A lagged weekly reconciliation still beats optimizing to a form-fill. We take whatever downstream signal exists and wire it back into the buy.
Design around the coordinator
Referral volume that exceeds what sites can work is not a win. Throughput is capped by people, and we plan the funnel against that ceiling.
Honest constraints
What we will and won't promise
Being specific about the limits is more useful to a buyer than a claim would be, and it is the part of a pitch most agencies leave out.
What we commit to
- A written economic model before spend, and a payback threshold per channel
- A pre-screener and exclusion framework built from your protocol's criteria
- Reporting that reconciles to the numbers your operations team already uses
- A direct recommendation when a channel, or the whole program, isn't working
What we won’t promise
- Guaranteed lead volume — inflating volume is what erodes quality in the first place
- Guaranteed enrollments; only a study team decides who can join a trial
- Benchmarks borrowed from unrelated studies and presented as your expected result
- Case studies or figures published without written client approval
Our approach
Performance-media discipline, applied to a regulated funnel.
We come from performance marketing, where nobody gets paid for traffic that doesn't convert. That discipline is the whole product.
Unit-economics-first testing
Every campaign is a controlled test with a payback threshold. We scale what clears the math on cost per enrollment and kill what doesn't — fast.
Quality over volume, by design
Pre-qualification and exclusion criteria are built in from day one, so the leads we deliver are the ones your sites can actually enroll.
Optimized to downstream conversion
We reconcile downstream outcomes back to source and use them to guide targeting, bidding strategy, creative, funnel work, and budget allocation.
P&L discipline, applied to acquisition
We set economic thresholds before launch and treat media as an investment against downstream outcomes — not a volume target.
Next step
Tell us what you're trying to acquire.
Show us where patients come from, what qualifies, what happens after the lead, and the economics you need to hit. We'll tell you honestly whether we're the right partner.