Building an effective online presence for health professionals

Truelocal vs Yellow Pages - 1:10 traffic ratio?

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 10:55:00 +0000

If the news is right that is the ratio of users on those two sites in Australia. Our stats of visitors sourced from those sites follow a similar ratio (actually 1:35). I do wonder what the real stats are if you strip out the advertisers checking their ads or reviewing the competition (probably both lower).

TrueLocal is owned by News Corporation:

TrueLocal is an online directory of Australian businesses. We now have over 5.4 million searches per month and are continually growing¹.
What makes us different than other online business directories? A number of things, actually, how about these for starters:
Search results are listed by relevance and location so users can always find precisely what they’re looking for.
Ratings and reviews which lets users learn more about listed businesses and share their thoughts with other brilliant likeminded souls. It also lets advertisers keep up-to-date with what people are saying about their business and get referrals.
You can find us on mobile phones. TrueLocal is available on Optus, Vodafone, 3 and Virgin Mobile.
Business listings are automatically listed on Google Maps, Yahoo!7 Local Search, Optus, Vodafone, 3, Virgin Mobile, Virgin Broadband, Navman, Mio and over 125 websites across the News Digital Media Network.

Yellow Pages is owned by Telstra:

Yellow™ has been an extremely successful advertising directory business for over 80 years, and now helps an incredible 9 million¹Australians find the products and services they need each month.
Yellow™ Advertising Solutions - A Snapshot
Yellow™ Directory: 6 metropolitan directories and 52 regional directories.
Yellow™ Local: 31 local directories.
yellow.com.au: is one of Australia’s most visited directory sites which puts businesses at the fingertips of more people everyday.
Ninemsn's mylocal: Yellow™’s recent association with ninemsn, Australia’s #1 website, provides greater opportunities for both Yellow™ advertisers and ninemsn users. Now users of ninemsn’s MyLocal will have access to Yellow’s™ comprehensive local business database. This is great news for Yellow™ advertisers as they receive a free listing on ninemsn’s MyLocal giving them more exposure and reach online.

I could be cheeky and throw Google in there as well - although they don't charge for listing on their "search" directory and their model is to remove the intermediary and go straight to the primary source (ie the actual website).

It's very hard to break the hold of an established brand by going head to head.

Incidentally that's also why newspapers aren't going to disappear any time soon - unless they allow themselves to whither away. One good way is to ensure editorial independence, present both sides of an argument and engage in high quality journalism.

Progress over time: The law of diminishing returns?

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 08:14:00 +0000

I haven't posted for a little while. Partly this is a result of other activities keeping me busy partly reflecting about the graphs below.

Essentially, I think all our optimisation efforts are hitting a point of diminishing returns.

Graph 1 below shows the percentage of traffic generated from a range of sources over the last 12 months. Amongst other things it shows a useful reduction in reliance on pay per click advertising and people knowing about the site and entering the name directly (probably mostly staff). It also shows that over time search engines are now bringing in 60% of all traffic while directories and other related sites are bringing in a lesser proportion of visitors (although in absolute terms the numbers are up).

Graph 2 shows relative performance against a baseline of 12 months ago ie today our traffic numbers and total pages visited is nearly 60% more than a year ago. This is quite an improvement. Total visitors and pages viewed track closely as over time the number of pages viewed per unique visitor has not changed significantly. Unfortunately the other trend that can be observed from the graph is that the rate of improvement is slowing down - we are getting less improvements from our incremental effort.

Perhaps we are reaching the point where incremental effort is not justified. Overall ranking on search engines etc is improving as is shown by the relative improvement in traffic generated. There is still more work that can be done there but perhaps a fundamental shift to our approach is required to lift performance to another level. Have you experienced this phenomenon with your web optimisation effort? What did you do to break out of these limits?

More businesses advertising online than in print

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 07:55:00 +0000

Yet another indication of how industries can be transformed by technology comes from the US where the Kelsey Group reports there are now more small and medium businesses in the US advertising online than in traditional media.

Specifically 77% of US businesses use online advertising in August 2009 compared to 69% using traditional media. Last year the figures were about even.

However, the spending profile is different. Business is still putting more of their budget towards traditional media (nearly two thirds) although during the last year the share of online has increased from 22% to 37%.

That is a significant growth in an environment when overall advertising spending is down. ie while business cut back advertising they invested more in online. Perhaps this was largely driven by better proof points around return on investment or alternatively the relatively small amount of money needed to reach a wider audience.

In Australia these figures are likely to be much lower although the same trend over time is likely to apply. Business already spends $1.8bn advertising online.

Free Medical Website creation services

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 06:37:00 +0000

Dr Colin Mendelsohn has published an article on free websites and directory listings in Australian Doctor (Aug 25) titled Free & Easy on free websites and directory listings.

These include:

Your Health - www.yourhealth.net.au. Which provides a free website when you sign up for their practice newsletter service.
MyDr - www.mydr.com.au. Which provides a free website but links back to CMPMedica's medical information and advertising funded website.
FamilyGP - www.familygp.com.au. Sponsored by MS&D.

Australian Doctor also publishes an interesting articleon 26 August titled WebPresence.com which quotes the cost of a website at between $3000-$10,000 so a free service can certainly save money.

The key of course is to carefully evaluate the benefits and shortcomings of any approach, the budget within which you are operating and what you are trying to achieve.

60,000 people pay for 'quack' medical information

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 07:45:00 +0000

This news item reminds me of the big change in consumer behaviour occurring with the availability of the Internet.

Not only are people willing to trust information on the internet about health conditions and treatment but they are prepared to spend money to gain access to that information if it looks credible.

You would think it is relatively easy to spot a scam in Australia if you know that doctors aren't allowed to advertise before and after photos. Nevertheless tens of thousands of people were sufficiently interested in that type of information (desperate?) and the promises made to go to the effort to pay to obtain it.

This is a niche that can be exploited by unscrupulous parties who use these new forms of media effectively. Looked at the other way it is also an opportunity to educate the information seeking public that is not being effectively used.

Yet another online medical directory: Aushealthpages

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:37:00 +0000

Cervin Publishing Ltd, a New Zealand company established in 1989, has recently launched AusHealthPages, the companion website to their printed Medical Specialists Australia directory.

The directory:

Includes Medical Specialists full contact details (practice addresses, phone, fax, email etc.)
Provides Medical Specialists areas and descriptions of specialisation
Regional breakdown of Specialists
Published annually, in 4 separate editions.
Comprehensive Medical Specialist index
Extensive breadth of speciality categories
High quality, attractive, full colour presentation
Consistently structured information to ease comparison and selection
Charts to see at a glance Specialists with a particular interest and skill
Draws together the entire industry, rather than a segmented geographic or category cut

The web directory is arranged by either searching for a specialty area or a particular name and claims 7,861 specialists entries - where do they get the time to get all this data from I wonder!

To claim an entry to correct it you need to pay. A number of specialists seem to have taken up this option and some sport detailed pages (see eg) with extended contact details, pictures, maps and text - effectively a mini-website.

Local address displayed in Google Ads

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:28:00 +0000

For those of you who want to display a specific address on your ads (see example below) you now can on Google Adwords.

The benefits are multiple particularly for those who operate in multiple locations but for most of us the primary benefit is to provide even more information to potential customers before they click through your Adwords Ad. This way customers can self select based on the location of your business.

More information about this feature can be found on the Google Adwords page.

Online advertising up 18.5% in Australia

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 01:36:00 +0000

It seems the trend is continuing a pace as an increasingly large share of advertising dollars are spend online and a 18.5% increase in online advertising to $1.8bn in Australia.

Search and directories accounted for 49% of total advertising expenditure, with general display accounting for 27% and classifieds 24%. Search and directories grew by 25%, general display grew 19.6% and classifieds by 6%
Finance, computers and communications and motor vehicles were the most dominant sections using general display advertising, and account for 45.5% of general display spend. The largest subcategory was motor vehicles - manufacturers, and comprised 9.8% of general display spending for the second quarter of 2009.

No breakout of medical spend but it wouldn't be surprising to see the same trend (off a lower base) in the medical industry.

It is unclear what sites would be included in some of these categories. Presumably Google and Yellow Pages are both included in the search and directories category where spending is growing at 25%. I doubt many medical advertisers (apart from pharamaceutical companies) would use display advertising or online classifieds to a large degree.

The original article on the Interactive Advertising Bureau Australia website.

Biggest Audiences and Impressions: The History of the Australian Web

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:48:00 +0000

So, how fast do things change online and how much have they changed over the last 8 years?

AIMIA has created a visual representation of where Australian's spend their time online.

Apart from anything else it is a beautiful piece of art that allows you to explore the underlying data in a highly visual format, filter results, stop and start the timeline, hover on the circles to drill down on the data, highlight/follow a particular website and experiment with different axis of information.

How is this knowledge relevant to you?

Well, apart from telling you where everyone visits online and how much time they spend there it demonstrates:

the web is making new winners all the time (where was Facebook before 2007)
...and losers (where is Altavista today?)
consumers are changing the activities they engage in online (eg the rise of social media sites)
pageviews are often just a representation of navigational arrangement of the sites concerned and doesn't necessarily mirror time people spend on the site or the number of unique visitors
filtering for search engines only you get a fascinating insight into search and directories:

Insight for Search and Directories

In 2001, Google was a distant third to Yahoo and NineMSN
Yellow and White Pages still have nearly constant audiences
Niche directories like TrueLocal and HotFrog have a lot of ground to make up in audience (reach) and page impressions
Audience and PageViews generally follow a linear relationship but time spent on a website can vary significantly.
None of the medically oriented directories warrant a mention in the "mass market" data (at least I couldn't find one!)

Are you monitoring your reputation online?

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 07:21:00 +0000

Unless you have a superabundant stream of disinterested patients channeled to your surgery via some magic BigCompany process your reputation is important to you. Your reputation is your personal brand equity that brings people to your door and the basis on which people refer to you (or not).

So what have people being saying about you?

Well do a Google search on your name (between inverted commas eg "Dr John Smith") and find out! Or you can consult one of the proliferating doctor rating websites that provide a whole range of tools to provide ratings and commentary about your Doc: RateMDs, DrScore, or the Australian centric Word of Mouth on the Net.

Most comments, the good and the bad, do not find their way back to your burning ears. However, with the Internet, they are indelibly recorded for time immemorial. If they are glowing endorsements and you have let yourself slip recently it is likely to work in your favour; however if they are bad or inaccurate you are likely to gain unfair currency.

What's driving the trend?

The whole phenomena has grown as general usage of the internet amongst the population has grown, and the number of sites that provide user ratings has increased as it is one of the newer ways people try to differentiate between a whole range of information provided online, and people seem to be less inhibited about putting sometimes embarrassing, derogatory, scandalous or even defamatory material online.

Users also like to feel they are part of a community and are more likely to purchase if they can see that other users have had a good experience.

The good, the bad and the ugly

Most of the time you would have to pay someone or introduce some process to get the kind of feedback you see commonly posted on these fora. So, in that sense it is free feedback from your patients.

However, anyone can usually post a comment, even if they aren't a patient (some comments I'm sure are left by a well meaning relative or worse the doctor themselves). There is no guarantee for end users that the commentary was accurate or representative of the service provided.

Inevitably a small proportion of patients will have a bad experience and if they are the ones who feel strongly enough to post online you are in for some trouble. Sometimes it is even possible to identify the patient concerned from the comments they provide. Which always leaves open the option of taking the issue further with them directly; or finally addressing their grievance and asking them to then update or remove their entry.

Conclusion

Ultimately, like most feedback, you should give it due consideration with an open mind. However, if believe the information is wrong or worse you can take it further with either the website owner or should that not be feasible, you might consider asking your more representative patients to read it and contribute their own opinions to provide some balance.

If the sample size of online comments is sufficiently large then I think over time the value of these sites will diminish as most doctors will tend to gravitate towards a mean (hopefully a high standard!) with a few outliers slightly more positive and more negative than them. At the moment most of these sites have comments from a vocal few so there is the greatest potential for a patient to be misled by a deliberate strategy aimed at increasing or decreasing a practitioner's ranking.

Deep Dive: HealthEngine Medical Search Directory

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 06:03:00 +0000

Let's have a look at the recently out of beta HealthEngine medical search directory, run by Dr Mike Cadogan and two colleagues. For those who haven't explored it (please do and give me your feedback) it is essentially an online search engine and directory for doctors, medical clinics and hospitals. If you look harder you will see it also has a whole range of information for the general public on medical qualifications, tests and general information.

It is a more systematic than Health Directory, a more comprehensive listing than drsref.com.au and a more focused endeavour than the Yellow Pages. It is also search engine friendly as Dr Cadogan has invested considerable time and effort on understanding how this works. In fact, some people might find a HealthEngine listing a more cost effective method than setting up their own website.

Find a Doctor

Here is the main search interface which allows you to search by name, language, gender, location, body area or specialty.

Detailed Doctor Profile

Here is the information that is generally available on each doctor (in this case it is showing a premium listing). The tabs below the picture show the wide variety of potential information that can be included such as contact information, qualifications, languages, interests but also articles and research.

Find Health Information

This section focuses on tests, procedures and an explanation of medical specialties and qualifications.

Analysis

Health Engine is off to a great start with about 50,000 page views a month and 500-1000 unique visitors a day.

Here are some of the features that I think make it quite different:

depth of information and structure of information is tailored specifically to medical practitioners
search by body area is a unique approach and more intuitive for the general public who don't know the medical speciality
ability to drill down not just by specialty but then by subspecialist area

I suspect it may take a long time to get significant traction amongst the health profession as:

the average medical practitioner is, if you believe the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, quite old and set in their ways
generally they are a "hands on" bunch relying on word of mouth and traditional print directories rather than trying online techniques
there are still a large number who don't have any form of web presence

For those health professionals who do understand the potential of the Internet, a listing in HealthEngine may just give them an edge over their more established colleagues in attracting the types of patients they are seeking - after all it can hardly hurt!

HealthEngine listing is free (premium listing is also available) - so why not search for your name or clinic and see whether you can be found on it, and if your entry is accurate. If not, you can contact them to correct the information (usually completed within 24 hours).

HealthEngine is listed as one of the top 100 Aussie Web Startups by TechNation.

Interesting online medical services in Australia

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 09:02:00 +0000

There are a range of interesting websites for medical practitioners that primarily provide a service online in Australia. I've provided a brief overview and categorisation. If I've missed any you find useful please add them to the comments and I'll periodically incorporate them in the body of the post.

Sites for finding doctors, dentists, chiropractors or other allied health professionals:

www.healthengine.com.au - find a doctor or specialist
www.dentalsearchengine.net.au - find a dentist
www.findachiro.com.au - find a chiropractor

Sites for engaging in social discussion

www.multimedix.com.au - facebook for Doctors

Information to Doctors

www.pulseitmagazine.com.au - medical IT news
http://www.mediadoctor.org.au/ - analysis of medically related news
www.medicalupdate.com.au - online CME attendance
http://www.thinkgp.com.au - more online CME courses
http://www.simply4doctors.com.au/ - general information (run by AstraZeneca)

Online Prescription Exchanges

http://www.medisecure.com.au (backed by RACGP)
http://www.erx.com.au/ (backed by Pharmacy Guild)

Medical Advice online

www.ozdocsonline.com.au - consult a doctor online
www.teledr.com.au - consult a doctor online

Miscellaneous

surgeonline.com - easily record and bill patients where you have assisted online

Business Online Optimisation: Nifty little Google presentation

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:24:00 +0000

Here's a resource I found recently that is a back to basics approach on designing a website to attract visitors online. Page 29 says it all very succinctly.

Speeding up your website - Yslow and Page Speed

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 07:46:00 +0000

There are a number of tools you can use to improve the speed of your website. Why are they important? Well as a user you would appreciate that a slow loading page is always a turn off. If you have to wait too long you may go elsewhere.

Yslow (Yahoo) and Page Speed (Google) both have Firefox plug-ins you can use to have a quick appraisal of key pages on your website so you can make them run faster.

Here's one such report from Yslow:

C, well not bad but not best practice either.

Here are the recommendations made by the tool where we didn't score an A:

Use a content delivery network to speed up delivery of content to people in other places: our server is located in Melbourne primarily for a Melbourne audience so I'm happy to ignore that one.
Add expires headers: You can select information to expire in a certain duration which means that a subsequent visitor won't reload that content unless it has expired. This seems a sensible suggestion.
Compress components with gzip: It is suggesting I actually compress key files so that less data needs to be transferred so pages can be loaded more quickly. It also increases the burden on the recipient browser. I'm not about to rush out and do this but I might investigate it.
Configure Etags: This is about identifying to a recipient that part of a page hasn't changed since they last browsed by giving it a unique ID. I think this sounds like an overkill for a site like ours.

There is also a whole lot of statistics it generates as well as tools you can use to reduce the size of your files - removing whitespaces like carriage returns and spaces, and using lossy compression on images.

Google's Page Speed is another tool which at first glance seems to perform the same function:

There are many other best practice hints and tips these tools generate. You should carefully consider which you wish to implement and in what priority order. Some will definitely increase page speed and others may take you unnecessary time and heartache.

Summary

There are definitely benefits of providing a faster site for your users and the web in general. Consider for example the cumulative effect of these improvements if everyone implemented bandwidth and speed saving techniques on their websites: we'd have a faster web, people would be able to download more before hitting their limits and people on slow connections will have a better experience. Well worth striving for I say!

Google Analytics on an iPhone or PDA

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 22:39:00 +0000

I've recently been fiddling around with using Google Analytics on an iPhone.

For those that are unfamiliar with the iPhone (and similar PDAs that are entering the market) they allow a near full screen browsing experience on a portable touch screen device.

The big benefit is you can access your analytics wherever you are provided you are prepared to pay for the data involved in downloading the page.

What are the options?

1. You can browse to Analytics using the Safari browser at analytics.google.com which shows you your familiar viewing experience.

Benefits: - all data available; if you also install the Google Mobile app on your iPhone you will be automatically logged into your account when you browse to the URL.

Disadvantages: charts do not display properly on the iPhone

2. You can use a specific iPhone application that uses the touch screen functionality to its fullest potential eg browse to http://www.apple.com/webapps/utilities/googleanalyticsforiphone.html and access for free or pay for this app through itunes - http://analyticsapp.com/.

Benefits: displays information graphically

Disadvantages: limited data available

Final thoughts

Apart from showing others your analytics, or doing a quick check when you have a spare moment, I don't think this replaces the full screen browser equivalent you'll want to use when doing a deep dive on your data.

Is your site infected or marked as malicious by Google?

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:37:00 +0000

It happens. Even to the most careful. Someone somehow gets access to your hosting account and injects malicious code into your site that tries to compromise the experience of visitors to your site. Maybe its not even you but someone else who hosts with the same company which brings your web host into disrepute.

How do you find out?

Maybe you've had a complaint from a visitor, maybe your browser warns you your own website is not a safe site or...

you can periodically find out yourself by typing the following into the URL on your browser:

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://yoursite.com.au/

where you replace yoursite.com.au with the web address of your website.

The result

It displays a range of information including the status of your site, when it was last scanned, whether your site has distributed malicious software, whether you're in a bad Internet neighbourhood etc.

What do you do if you are?

You need to have a look at the code on your site, remove the malicious code and then change password to your hosting company (or even the hosting company itself) if it keeps reoccurring.

Now wouldn't it be nice if this was a default part of Google Webmaster tools. Maybe some day.

Easy Browser Testing - what does your site really look like to visitors?

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 08:08:00 +0000

So you've made some changes to your website but want to see whether they render properly in popular browsers. How do you do it?

You can install the major browsers and try it yourself or you can use a tool like Browsershots which is a free online service that displays screenshots of how your website looks for different website visitors.

Here's an example screen shot from browsershots. You can select the screenshots to drill down or download them all to examine later.

Browsershots allows you to do browser testing by selecting:

the operating system
the browser (and it covers some niche browsers and also different versions of popularly used browsers)
the screen size
the number of colours
whether Java or Javascript is enabled/disabled on the browser
what Flash version is installed on the browser

You can select all options to test however that will take a long time. Do you need to test all these options? Well not really, have a look at what most of your visitors use in a tool like Google Analytics. Chances are their profile will look something like ours:

the operating system - PC, Mac
the browser (and it covers some niche browsers and also different versions of popularly used browsers) - IE, Firefox, Safari
the screen size - mostly large screen ie 1024x768 and over
the number of colours - 24bit and greater
whether Javascript is enabled/disabled on the browser - enabled
what Flash version is installed on the browser - v9 or v10

What to look out for:

misplaced text, tables or graphics
text that overwrites existing text
suboptimal layout - eg your main call to action on the page is below the fold (not on the screen that displays)
anything that offends your design principles

I suggest you use a service lke Browsershots whenever you redo your website in a significant way. When making small changes you might want to at least test your website on several browsers (eg Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari).

PS. If you do use Analytics you might want to study it briefly. Here are a few little things I noticed: Chrome visitors are the most likely to convert, followed by Firefox and IE). So perhaps I should focus more on the best customers (or maybe try to work harder on those not converting as well). You will need to decide what your approach is.

There is also an interesting tab in Analytics that lets you see the most frequently used combination of browser and operating system. The most popular is not surprisingly IE and Windows. For us number 6 was Safari and iPhone. So perhaps you also need to consider how your website renders on PDAs!

Internet Marketing Academy - Internet Marketing for Business People

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 06:32:00 +0000

I was lucky enough to attend one of the Melbourne sessions of the Internet Marketing Academy last week. There were probably about 50 people there of varying backgrounds and degrees of expertise. No one walked out before the end of the 4 hour session so that shows you it had something for everyone!

What did I get out of it?

Well, for a start, I think these kinds of sessions are very useful for those about to plan any form on online marketing activity because of the broad overview of the whole online arena they provide. The guys from the Online Circle certainly don't push search engine marketing, or even search engine optimisation above good old fashioned marketing principles - understanding your customers and getting them to respond.

Amongst all the useful background to search engines, marketing, social media and PR and all the examples they gave of their client's experience there were probably two main things I had reinforced:

1. Users are like you and I - try to put yourself in their shoes. What would they search for to find your subject matter (what is their vernacular), what words resonate with customers about to make a purchasing decision (you'd prefer to attract people ready to buy rather than just general information seekers), how to people really interact with a website and find the material they want.

2. Don't presume to know what will work best for your visitors - you need to make an assumption and test it against another proposition to see if you can improve the appeal of each page. I'll write a bit more about this in subsequent posts. Basically this is about A/B testing key pages to get the copy, layout and atmosphere as close to perfect (as measured by customer's response) as you can. You need to keep performing these little tests on an ongoing basis to refine and improve.

In the course of the session I was also reminded of a whole number of hygiene issues that I probably haven't given enough attention to such as:

Making sure all variations of a websites name redirect a user (at the server) to the same page
Ensure your robots.txt file excludes all pages you don't want search spiders to index
Doing thorough keyword research and not just going for the most popular keywords
Setting Google Alerts for your website to monitor where it shows up online

Thanks again Jeff and Lucio and keep up the great work. They still have a number of training sessions planned for those in Victoria in August and September if you are interested.

Yellow Pages clicks vs Google visitors

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 07:31:00 +0000

If you are a Yellow Pages online advertiser and your Yellow Pages clicks don't match your Google Analytics statistics of visitors you are not alone.

Our Statistics

For our site over a few months we had a report of 150 clicks from Yellow Pages however Google Analytics shows just over 100 referral visitors from Yellow Pages over the same period. What's happening to the missing 50%?

Well there could be a range of reasons including:

Non arrivers: People did click on a link from Yellow Pages but bailed before your complete web page was loaded (and the analytics code is at the end so it didn't fire). This could arise because your page is taking too long to load or has errors in it.

Double counting: I suspect Yellow reports the total number of clicks whereas Google is looking at visitors. A visitor during one month may click the link twice so be counted twice in one and once in the other.

Other stats include we had 3,500 appearances, a total of 300 clicks (including to review just the online ad). So basically 10% of people that are shown the ad click on the ad or click through to the website link.

There were even a handful of people who showed up in Google Analytics who had searched for us in Google and found the special Yellow Pages entry.

Microsoft updates its search engine - enter Bing exit Live and MSN search

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 23:53:00 +0000

Microsoft has recently updated their search engine offering and rebranded it under the name of Bing. They have quickly redirected and updated their other online properties to direct traffic to this new interface including www.live.com and www.ninemsn.com.au.

Why have they done this?

Despite dominance worldwide in operating systems, office productivity tools, internet browsers and other areas Microsoft has struggled to unseat the market share and popularity of both Google and Yahoo, the internet upstarts who have managed so far to protect their franchise.

Bing has a lot of ground to catch up. Looking at our stats in terms of traffic to our site the ratio of searches in Google, Yahoo and Microsoft search are: 140:7:1

Yep, for every one visitor from a Microsoft property (formerly Live/MSN) we get 7 from Yahoo and 140 from Google.

Bing looks a lot like Google (although it has a nice background graphic instead of the spartan Google search page), but has a few nifty features you can't find in the other search engines like a site preview (textual summary) from the front page of the site you mouse over.

Ultimately its success will depend on whether users see that the results it delivers are better (more relevant/accurate) than its competition.

Have a look at Bing and do some searches for your keywords and see how different it is. I did get a good laugh when searching for "obstetrics". No medical practitioner sites but at least two sites dealing with medical negligence claims. You would hope a small number of people searching for obstetrics would actually want to see medical negligence pages.

Time will tell whether they can evolve their algorithms to make results more relevant and whether it is worthwhile to spend resources attempting to rank well in this new search engine. Until the market share of the search engines changes significantly it is certainly not worth the effort.

Google updates Local Business Centre (but not for Australia - yet)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 20:26:00 +0000

Google has just announced some neat new features for its Local Business Centre service - where you can already customise the way in which your Google presence is displayed particularly in Google Search but particularly in Google Maps.

The new level of reporting available looks incredibly useful and solves an issue highlighted previously.

See the video below for the depth of analytical information that is available including the searches (and trends) that are bringing business your way and where these customers are coming from.

Local Business Centre as your own Google mini-site

Effectively it brings you a similar level of reporting to that available in Google Analytics that was previously unavailable for Maps. By doing so, it effectively allows you to monitor your Google "mini-site" (ie Local Business Centre listing) which has structured data about your business including opening times, payment methods accepted, pictures, reviews, coupons/vouchers.

Having this mini-site (with a Google Maps URL) allows you to study customer behaviour for another configuration of your business information on the website. The insights you learn can then be applied to your general website.

What data is available?

The information they promise to make available is as follows:

Impressions: The number of times the business listing appeared as a result on a Google.com search or Google Maps search in a given period. [NB: This may be quite different to your organic results for other pages]
Actions: The number of times people interacted with the listing; for example, the number of times they clicked through to the business' website or requested driving directions to the business. [This data gives you insight into the behaviour of searchers that might not be available on your main site]
Top search queries: Which queries led customers to the business listing; for example, are they finding the listing for a cafe by searching for "tea" or "coffee"?
Zip codes where driving directions come from: Which zip codes customers are coming from when they request directions to your location. [hopefully this works as well for postcodes!]

Let's hope it is not long before this level of reporting is available for Australian businesses.

You can read the complete announcement:
Official Google Blog: The Local Business Center dashboard opens its doors

Getting the best bang for buck with Google AdWords

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:13:00 +0000

If you were running a business of selling search advertising you'd tell people in these current economic times how to spend less money and get better results, right?

That is exactly what the Google Adwords team is doing at the moment.

Some would say this is counterproductive and only going to reduce their revenue. However, they'd much rather keep you as an advertising customer than lose you completely or have you spend more of your budget on other advertising media.

And let's face it when you get right down to it, that is where search engine advertising excels - demonstrating ROI over other options by bringing people who already have an interest in the keyword you are advertising for rather than spraying the message out to a large audience who may have no interest.

The six Adwords tips come with visual prompters (I like them as a way of being clear about the concept in a succinct way) and links to more detailed resources. They are obvious steps you should already be implementing and a few tips thrown in for these economic times and thepublic's changing needs.

A Marketing Funnel: Rediscovered, Improved, Magic or Dead

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Wed, 27 May 2009 10:22:00 +0000

Despite the facetious title (yes people do all make claims to that affect about marketing funnels - and I don't want to know where you lost your funnel or what is in your funnel either :-)) the traditional concept of a marketing funnel can be a useful tool to appraise your online marketing efforts.

Firstly, put away your "magic" funnel - you won't need it here. What you will need is a bit of imagination and a willingness to consider your customer generation activities as a funnel. Ironically, the analogy of a funnel is not quite accurate as what goes into a funnel inevitably comes out the other end whereas your chances of converting every lead to a customer is next to zero - you've got a porous funnel and it will leak your challenge is to limit the extent of leakage. I digress.

The Marketing Funnel

The diagram (funnel) is a representation of ideal customer behaviour arising from marketing activities. In theory marketing activity (eg a website or online advertising) generates awareness of your services/products, generates interest in those who see it, they think about it weighing up the benefits and disadvantages maybe comparing it to other options and choose to buy it. If you are lucky they will tell others about it too!

So you are effectively trying to address the needs of your potential customers and recognising that the general public effectively need to go on a journey before they become customers. Providing different forms of information for people at different stages of this process is a sensible way of catering to these needs. For example, a potential customer in the evaluation phase may want to know the benefits and disadvantages of particular surgery, whereas someone with a medical condition might not even know of some of the forms of treatment available so simple statements to the effect that there are options may be sufficient to generate interest.

The Conversion Funnel

Another use of the funnel is as a way of representing the steps a potential customer must complete before becoming a customer. Tools like Google Analytics provide representations of the paths that customers follow to achieve a goal. For example below is a process representing four steps before a purchase from a website. In this instance the user must start the registration process, complete it, and then enter payment information.

At each stage a percentage of users do not proceed - for various reasons such as they don't have enough time, they lack all the information they need to complete that step now or they change their mind. Of the 110 people who started the process only 14 completed it a conversion rate of 12%. If you started the funnel with people who visited the website the % converting would be even smaller.

Our stats

I've been looking over our statistics and can provide two statistics by way of comparison:

- a conversion rate (the % of website visitors who visit our 'contact us' page as measured by Google Analytics)

- a booking rate (the % of website visitors who make a booking and turn up at the clinic as measured by completion of a patient registration form that specifies they found the clinic from the OGCG website)

The conversion rate is 19%. However our booking rate is only 5%. Why the discrepancy? Obviously there are several more steps between looking at the contact information and turning up at the clinic to complete the patient registration form. In fact we lose three quarters of people between the contact us page and those that book and turn up at the clinic. Mmm room for improvement. Perhaps a percentage of people are just curious about where the practice is but will never make the call, perhaps some call but realise the services don't meet their needs, perhaps some make a booking but never turn up and perhaps some do turn up but have also heard about the practice from other sources so don't select the website option on the form.

Anyway, you get the idea and can apply it to your health business's conversion process. A 5% response rate is considered pretty good by advertisers in general. See the Direct Marketing Association's industry stats for direct ordering, lead generating and traffic building.

A word about referrals

In the health market I think there is something fundamentally wrong about soliciting referrals from you customers - after all they are patients, who would, given the choice, prefer not to be seeing you and probably don't care to disclose to all and sundry what kind of medical practitioner they were seeing for what kind of illness.

So discretion folks. If people truly had a great experience they will mention it to their friends and colleagues in an appropriate context without you needing to prompt them!

GP Website Option: Your Health newsletter service

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Fri, 22 May 2009 07:19:00 +0000

Here is one way to get a medical website built for you for Australian GPs.

YourHealth is actually a subscription newsletter service that you pay for so that you can send relevant news in a hardcopy newletter format to your patients four times a year if you are a GP. As part of this service they provide "a free, personalised practice website". That includes:

Personalised practice information
All past articles from Your Health newsletter in a searchable database
Reliable health links
Extensive evidence-based health information, such as a guide to medicines, medical dictionary, health tools and calculators, healthy recipes etc.
An appointment booking facility
Health Update emails. Patients can register to receive updates of relevant health news by email....

Details of the service

Cost: Depends on the number of newsletters you wish to distribute. ($585-<$5000 for 250-5000 copies per quarter)
Technical expertise required: None - they will create the website for you although you can also add additional pages of practice information, images and maps.
Benefits: As well as a website you get a professional looking patient newsletter including a newsletter management facility and integration between your website and newsletter (ie if you change doctors or doctor's details on the website it flows through to the newsletter).
Limitations: The website has a standard look and feel and it is not currently optimised to be found on the web.

They claim the service is already used by over 300 GP practices. You can see samples and more information at the Your Health website.

Training for those who need a little help getting started

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Mon, 18 May 2009 10:47:00 +0000

For those not yet ready to take the plunge into search advertising on their own or want a broader perspective on marketing beyond just search you might want to consider attending a training session on the concepts.

If you are in Victoria you might want to consider attending the Internet Marketing Academy which is running at several locations around Melbourne during the next few months starting in Melbourne on Friday 21 May 2009.

The sessions are run with support from Yahoo and Google and the presenters describe themselves as follows:

Jeff built his first website over 10 years ago and has been involved in the industry ever since. He has a strong background in Marketing Communications Strategy development and has helped more than 150 Australian businesses of all sizes during his career.

Lucio is one of Australia’s leading Social Media and Search Engine Optimisation professional. He developed and manages www.marketingeasy.net, repeatedly voted one of the best marketing blogs in Australia. Lucio was recently elected one of top 5 most trusted SEO /SEM professionals in the world in an independent poll by Internet Business Magazine.

The full agenda for these sessions shows that they will be packing a lot in over the 3 hour session. If you are interested in attending drop me a note and I will see if I can get you a discount to attend.