According to the American Heart Association (AHA), February is American Heart Month.

February is American Heart Month.

Since more than 82 million American adults are estimated to have one or more types of cardiovascular disease, or 1 in 3 people, (and speaking from someone who has been hospitalized for cardiac arrhythmia before), it is important to get your heart checked out. Are your users able to easily find a cardiologist (or any other doctor) on your hospital’s Website?

Listen to Your Heart or Take Our Advice

To answer that question…they need to be.

By implementing a physician finder tool on your hospital’s Website, you’re giving users (potential patients) the opportunity to improve their heart health (and reduce the grim statistics), and search for specialized doctors affiliated with your hospital in an easy-to-use and effective way.

AVID Design’s Physician Finder (part of the Best-in-Class Hospital Website tool kit) might be just the answer for your hospital’s Website, as it boasts several capabilities for your visitors:

• Recommend to a friend email function – have a friend or family member who has high cholesterol or smokes and your worried about their heart health? With a click of a button email them the physician recommendation.

• Interactive online maps for practice locations – for ease in navigating where each physician’s practice is located, whether you get active and walk there or drive your car.

• Standardized search capability– enables you to search for a physician by name, of a certain gender or one that speaks a certain language.

• Request an online appointment form with a particular physician – found your ideal cardiologist and now you want to come into their office so they can help you manage your blood pressure.

On the backend, the physician finder allows hospitals to neatly and easily manage content and track user clicks.

It’s beneficial for both you and your users!

Heart-Shaped Box (of Chocolate) in Moderation for Valentine’s Day

(as a side note) Don’t forget….Valentine’s Day (which we associate with hearts) is right around the corner, so make sure you remember your sweetheart! AHA has compiled a helpful list of some pretty cool heart-healthy Valentine’s Day tips, gifts and date ideas. Check ‘em out!

AVID Design’s custom physician finder is a dynamic tool that can be implemented quickly and designed to your hospital’s specifications. Contact us to learn how we can implement this tool into your hospital’s Website.

Tweet This Post

Earlier this week, Adweek reported on a Webtrends report that suggested “the performance of the average Facebook ad is abysmal.”

Although it made for a hot headline, it was perhaps not the most accurate—or fair—statement. And in the context of using Facebook ads to promote hospitals online, it might be completely misleading.

The metric used to gauge “abysmal” Facebook ad performance was CTR, an acronym for “click through rate,” which is a popular metric for analyzing PPC (pay per click) advertising. Most simply, CTR is a the percentage of clicks an ad gets in comparison to how many times it appears (these appearances are known as “impressions”). So, if an ad appears 100 times in day and 10 people click on the ad, the ad has a CTR of 10.0 percent.

The report said the average CTR for all industries 2010 was 0.051 percent, which declined from 2009’s 0.063.The worst performing CTRs were for healthcare ads, which reported 0.011 percent.

Regardless of year or industry, those are some very poor numbers. Abysmal, even.

But are they enough to say Facebook ad performance was abysmal in big bold headline letters? Not quite. Here are two reasons—with a particular emphasis on considering Facebook ads for hospital marketing and advertising.

Low CPMs: Brand Exposure for Pennies

Facebook offers two pricing models for its ads. The first is the more traditional PPC model of CPC, or “cost per click.” It’s exactly as it sounds: Every time somebody clicks on an ad, the advertiser is charged anywhere from a few cents to several dollars.

The other model is CPM, which stands for “cost per thousand” impressions (the “M” presumably is a nod towards the Roman numeral for “1,000”). Rather than paying per-click (with a presumed end-result of a “conversion,” such as a sale being completed on a retailer’s Website), the advertiser is essentially paying for exposure, with lower expectation for clicks.

The report said that CPMs were “relatively low,” although the article failed to quantify that statement. Regardless, for hospitals, “low CPM” is a valuable hint that there’s an opportunity to get your hospital’s name in front of a lot of people, which is especially attractive for hospitals that don’t have (and perhaps don’t want or can’t afford) PPC campaigns with Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

Quality, Not Quantity: Conversion Rates?

Let’s return to CTR for a moment…and let’s presume that Facebook ad CTR was high, such as with the earlier example of a 10.0 percent CTR.

Each one of those clicks cost money. Naturally, the more clicks, the more the ad costs (and that’s without introducing the concept of how ad rates fluctuate).

So, for a CPC ad, how do you determine its return on investment (ROI)? The short answer: conversions, or more specifically, cost-per-conversions, also known as CPV.

Lower CTRs generally result in lower CPVs since a high CTR is not a guarantee for success. For example, an ad with a headline that reads “Free iPads!” will presumably get LOTS of clicks. But when visitors reach the destination Website and don’t find free iPads, guess what? They leave—or put another way, they don’t convert. So yeah, you can have a 100 percent CTR and a 0.00 percent CPV, but still get stuck with the bill for all of those clicks!

Although there’s an impulse to suggest that “CPV talks and CTR walks,” CPV cannot be fully related to a PPC campaign because, as illustrated in the “free iPad” example, the quality of the destination Website is a significant factor.

Still, when considering the performance of an online ad service—especially if the focus is going to be put on CPC models rather than CPM models—it’s critical to appreciate how the means relate the ends, which AdWords fully fails to do in this article.

Tweet This Post

So, you want to drive your hospital’s Website conversions.  Not only to help bring new patients into your hospital doors, but to also encourage them to be involved and interact with them on your Website.

Drive your hospital's Website conversions!

Lucky for you…or your hospital, AVID Design offers award-winning e-healthcare Website conversion modules that are effective as they are easy to use.

We specialize in the following Website conversion modules for your hospital’s needs:

• Career Center

• Classes and Events

• Donate Online

• e-Newsletter

• Gift Shop

• News and Headlines

• Physician Directory

• Video Player and Hosting

These conversion modules are designed and built to integrate within your hospital’s Website strategy, programming and content management system (CMS), and are tested to ensure proper functionality and usability.

And the best part about them is that they can be customized for you hospital Website’s specific needs.

Pay Per Click and Conversions…We Do That Too

In addition, AVID Design also crafts proficient PPC ads and PPC landing pages, and can help you implement a PPC campaign into your current healthcare Website strategy to drive conversion rates.  Just ask us how!

Interested to find out more, contact AVID Design to find out how our hospital Website conversion modules and PPC content services can improve your Website’s conversion rates!

Add to Technorati Favorites

Tweet This Post

It’s a no-brainer that hospital Websites (or any Website for that matter) must have clear goals in order to obtain an effective return on investment (ROI).

Score! Having clear, accessible conversions (or goals) will greatly benefit your hospital’s Website.

In order to meet these goals, conversions need to be put in place, along with a clear Website marketing strategy.

This strategy usually includes identifying your hospital’s target market through optimization techniques, like utilizing keyword rich and highly optimized content.

Hospitals, in particular, have several different ways they can “convert” the visitor, or make the visitor “take action” and “drive information” before they leave the Website.

Here are ten hospital Website conversions (or goals) that you probably should think about incorporating into your Website:

• Online bill pay

• Job application

• Email a patient

• Online donation

• Physician directory

• Calendar of events

• Online preregistration

• Support group sign-up

• Request an appointment

• e-Newsletter/publication sign-up

Want to know more about hospital conversions? Check out June’s edition of AVID Insight, our monthly e-newsletter, featuring: The Magic Metric: How to Improve Hospital Website Conversion Rates.

While you are checking that story out, sign up to receive AVID Insight and get the latest on healthcare marketing advice, trends and more!

AVID Design offers several e-healthcare conversion modules such as Find a Physician, Classes and Events and Online Donation.  Contact AVID Design today to learn more about our e-healthcare suite and conversion modules, and to develop a Website marketing strategy plan to include highly optimized healthcare content for your Website.

Add to Technorati Favorites

Tweet This Post