BRINGO Blog

Lots of chatter these days about how the Yellow Pages are dead — stocks are down 80-90% from a year ago for most of the major YP companies:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120399101723692463.html

UPDATE 3-6:  This MSNBC video also harps on the death of the yellow pages theme

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=676088789

I think that it’s still a bit premature to say that traditional yellow pages advertising is completely dead — I think they are still relevant in some markets. Overall YP references are down about 2-3% year upon year, but clearly the movement to online is accelerating, according to the Kelsey Group:

http://www.kelseygroup.com/press/pr080110.asp

http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=74131

While the YP companies are finally starting to move aggressively online, they’re just one of many effective media that patients use to find new dentists or healthcare providers (and fairly far back in terms of importance, after the search engines, local directories, and vertical directories).

How effective is your website in bringing you prospective patients?  Do you know?

According to a survey in 2006 by Advanstar, dentists are getting on board with building websites (over 65% had websites or were planning on building one within the next year).   Given what we’ve seen with prospective patient behavior (the Internet is the #1 resource patients use to search for dentists and other healthcare providers, surpassing yellow pages and other offline resources), this is a good sign.

However, it is clearly the early stages for many providers, as the same survey found that 35% of dentists with websites either did not know whether their website had brought them new patients, or said their site had brought them no patients.

This is consistent with what we’ve seen among our client base — which is why all our patient generation programs have measurement of the effectiveness of our campaigns built into the package.  We track everything from the visitors that comes to the website, where they are coming from (down to the campaign and even keyword advertising level), what they do while on the website, and, importantly, how many of those visitors actually pick up a phone (or fill out out a schedule form on the site) and attempt to schedule an appointment.  We also offer the option to record all phone calls generated by our campaigns, so that offices can tell how many of those calls resulted in new appointments, and how many were just kicking the tires.  Our most diligent clients will also take that to the next level and track whether those patients come in for their appointments.

By providing this data, our clients are able to see instantaneously how well the patient generation campaign is working, and get a full end-to-end view of the patient generation process so they know exactly how many patients are generated for their practices each month, and what that means to the bottom line.

Gathering this data is also important in that it allows us to optimize the campaigns that we run.  Much of online advertising is about experimentation and testing — the Internet world is changing constantly, offering both new opportunities to find new patients, but also making older tactics obsolete fairly quickly.  The only way to make sure you stay ahead of the game is to constantly test new things, and measure, measure, measure results.  We are able to instantly tell when a campaign isn’t generating as much patient traffic as before, and make adjustments accordingly.  In this way we constantly optimize the campaigns we run, in order to make sure our clients are seeing a great ROI for their online advertising dollar.