Using Google Adwords to Size Your Potential Market

Google Adwords (and similar tools) can provide incredible insight into the potential market you are not reaching. Why? Because it allows you to get access to a page 1 listing on Google and also contextual advertising on a whole range of directories and content sites without spending up big. Why is that important - well it allows you to size your total potential search market - after all everyone sees page 1. You can then use this data to get some key insights into how you can attract more visitors through organic search (ie not paying).

Let's demonstrate the principle by looking at some more real data.


This data was collected over a recent full month of Adwords advertising. I've rounded the results and also averaged them to express all traffic measures as visits per day - this makes it easy to compare to other statistics about visitors per day. The numbers are also quite low as we do very specific targetting of our market. I have three separate grouping of advertising words let's call them pregnancy (PR), gynaecology (GYN) and obstetrics (OB). By multiplying out the visits per day by the CTR you can see that on average I'm getting about 10 visitors per day through Adwords.

Calculating visitors per day

So using these stats indicates that if you optimised for all the words in my groups you could have about 1550 visitors per day! This is of course not going to happen as not everyone is going to click thru.

What click thru rate to apply

Applying the click thru rates (CTR) from my advertising campaigns shows you could get about 10 visitors per day (just multiplying out the stats). Doesn't sound great does it? Well, more visitors will visit you if you are listed on the search results compared to advertising (although I'm saying nothing about the quality of your customers). Remember the stats I showed about click thru on page 1?

Basically you can expect 3-42% of traffic to visit your site depending on your position on page 1. Applying these statistics to my data you'd get 47-650 visitors per month from search. The higher your listing in the rankings the more visitors you'd get.

How would this increase traffic?

These stats show you can increase your visitors by 4-65 times (from my 10 per day stats) through search optimisation. What value do you put on this traffic? That will depend on how your visitors convert into paying customers.

How much money is this saving you on advertising?

If the average cost per click is $1 then this is saving you between $4 and $65 per day. (Not that you're likely to see the same volume of traffic per day through Adwords as it has lower click thru rates).

Summary

You can use the same approach with your own campaigns. The approach in summary is:

1. Possible Visitors per day =
Average Adwords visitors per day x Click thru rate for page 1
eg (500 + 500 + 550) x 3% for lower bound and (500 + 500 + 550) *42% for upper bound giving a range of = 47 to 650 clicks per day

2. Value of Page 1 listing =
= Possible Visitors per day * Average cost per click
= 47 * $1 for lower bound and 650 * $1 for upper bound

Final Notes:

You may find while your visitors increase your conversion rate drops through native search engine ranking as you may attract a lot more information seekers rather than potential customers.

Don't forget that Adwords reach is actually wider than Google Search so you won't be able to completely kick the Adwords habit.

What is PageRank and why should I care?

Google (currently the most popular search engine with 88% market share in Australia according to Hitwise with MSN/Live Search with 6% and Yahoo with 4%. Note that the results from US searches show a different distribution with Google having 70% and Yahoo WITH 19%) uses two main measures to rank search results: 1) relevance to the words you are searching for (ie the more matching words in the right order in the right context) and 2) the relative importance of a site (as measured by the number of times other sites link to this site and their relative importance).

PageRank is the term that describes the relative importance of a site to Google. It is also a Google trademark and a patented process at the core of the success of Google. It is also a play on words - the 'Page' is from Larry Page, one of the founders of Google.

Let's look at a few medical and non-medical sites and understand what this really means:

Medical Website PageRanks compared as at August 2008 (these will change over time as the sites put on new content and Google adjusts its algorithms)

PageRank 10: There are only 6 sites that have this ranking, 3 of which are US Govt sites, one for the World Wide Web Consortium and 2 for commercial organisations.
PageRank 9: Wikipedia
PageRank 8: Google.com.au, News.com.au, DMOZ
PageRank 7: The Victorian Government's Better Health Initiative
PageRank 6: The Australian Medical Association (AMA), The Medical Journal of Australia, Royal Australian College of GPs, The Womens Hospital
PageRank 5: Royal Australian College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists, Australian Doctor, MyDr.com.au, Virtual Medical Center, Health Directory
PageRank 4: Menstruation.com.au, Pulse+IT Magazine
PageRank 3 Frances Perry House, Health Engine
PageRank 2
PageRank 1
PageRank 0: Obstetrics & Gynaecology Consulting Group (I'm not too sensitive about this - see comments below about how this reflects a historial rating and our website is still very young - but always on the lookout for tips to improve this).

Feel free to suggest other names and I can put them in the table for comparative purposes. If you are in another health related industry or country your can easily find the big sites by doing a Google search for common words or looking up the DMOZ directory for some sites.

Incidentally did you see in the Hitwise research that about 40% of people use a search engine to find information on health and medical topics? That is more than any other category surveyed and this hasn't changed significantly over the last year. Clearly people search the web for these topics quite often so it is worth focusing on promoting your site in search engines.

How do I find the Page Rank of my site?

The easiest way I have found to get a feeling for a sites Google PageRank is to install the Google Toolbar which has a PageRank gadget. It displays the PageRank as a green bar for the page you are visiting and if you hover the mouse over the bar it will display the ranking out of 10 for the site. If you are just starting out you will have a PageRank of 0. The scale of PageRanks is logarithmic meaning that it gets exponentially harder to achieve a higher ranking.

It is believed the PageRank for a site is only updated every 3 months for display by the tool (ie it is a historical measure of your PageRank rather than being the exact figure used by Google to rank your page at the time of doing a search. As such it is an indirect measure of success of your search engine optimisation activities.

Popularity vs PageRank

There are other ways of ranking sites such as the number of people who visit a website (hits). This may be useful to describe how many visitors there are to a website but it has no direct relationship on the PageRank. For example Virtual Medical Centre is ranked at number 1 in terms of visitors by HitWise but its PageRank is 5 - less than some other health related sites. You will need to determine how you will measure the success of your website. More on this later.

You can find information about the concept of PageRank and get a basic understanding of the process and why Google's approach revolutionised search from Wikipedia.

Who already has a website?

So, let’s have a quick look at how many medical practitioners in Australia have websites. I couldn’t find any statistics on this kind of measure myself so I’ve had to revert to first principles.

According to the Australian Institute of Health the number of registered medical practitioners in Australia in 2005 was 68,000. Take out those who are registered but not working in medicine or those still undergoing their training or are working only in the public system and you get down to about 35,000 doctors who might be interested in operating a website. Applying a rough ratio of 2 practitioners on average per practice (assuming this is the unit that would advertise) you get to about 17,000 practices that might want to promote themselves online.

The reality is much less. By searching the yellow pages or the web in general for doctors that have websites you realise that the number is probably less than 100. ie less than 1% of practices advertise.

Most who do have a website are larger or specialist practices.

Why? Perhaps there is more of a need to promote yourself when your potential market is smaller (ie you are drawing potential patients from a wider geographical area and can’t rely on the GP shortage to drive a constant stream of business). For larger practices the decision is more obvious - they understand that they are operating a business and the need to promote it and often will have the staff to do this (eg a practice manager to co-ordinate the exercise).

Of course being a medical practitioner is not all about generating new business. Other sites focus on profiling the doctor, their publications, research and other interests. Sometimes these sites seem to be a little like vanity publishing or raising their prestige amongst their colleagues. Another set of sites seem to have been set up by the doctor themselves as a hobby (if they have an IT bent). Sometimes obviously so ;-)

So the bottom line is there aren’t many medical practitioner websites in Australia so if you set one up you will stand out!