Progress over time: The law of diminishing returns?

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?

Are you monitoring your reputation online?

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.

Business Online Optimisation: Nifty little Google presentation

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.

Internet Marketing Academy - Internet Marketing for Business People

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.

A Marketing Funnel: Rediscovered, Improved, Magic or Dead

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!

Training for those who need a little help getting started

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.

One Page Online Marketing Guide

Can't see the wood from the trees with your online marketing efforts? I've put together a highly compressed version of my advice around online marketing on one page. 

For beginners it is a readily accessible overview of online marketing and should only take a minute to read. For the more advanced user a bit of a checklist and perhaps an index they can use to jump off to other information sources. All the links should work so it saves a lot of running around or remembering URLs.

It is in colourful PDF format. If you have access to a colour printer why not print it out and keep it handy as a reminder of the things that matter to you so you don't spend too much time on unproductive distractions?

The One Page Online Marketing Guide (1.7MB) covers:

1. aims and expectations of online marketing
   
2. on site optimisation
   
3. off site optimisation
   
4. paid advertising
   
5. measuring results
   

I'll also post an online collaborative version once I've determined the best format to enable linking to the more detailed articles on the topic and collaboration with others more generally.

To some degree this is a response to all the verbose advice out there particularly from SEO firms who are all trying to put up too much content to rate in the search engines. Too many words too little information.

Tell me what you think. It's not easy to compress it down to one page :-)

Update: One Page Online Marketing Guide is now available as a clickable document.

Online and offline marketing ideas

Following on from the last post have a look at this useful Google funded site which tries to help you through the issues of building a marketing plan and analysing the likely return you can get. Through a 10 step process that takes about 20-30 minutes it will explain some of the key concepts about search engine marketing. It also walks you through what you need to do to set up a website if you aren't even at that step yet.

Of course it also tries to make you a Google Adwords convert. Be warned!

http://www.trysearchmarketing.com.au/

In doing my own research I walked into a newsagent the other day and lo and behold there were 5 publications claiming to deal with pregnancy and pregnancy related advice! It is fascinating to see there is so much marketing money being spent funding these magazines. Although not directly competing a lot of the advertising dollars also end up finding their way online and competing for Adwords keywords! Damn those pharmaceutical companies... :-)