Google Healthcare Insights

Last month, I hosted a Google Partners event where we took a little peek under the hood at Google’s data in the healthcare world. Before, during and after, our little group shared some experiences and insights and I’ll share 3 of them with you.

(at the bottom you’ll find links to the recording and the handout)

The big stats were that 1 in 20 of Google’s searches are health related and 43% of the public turns to the internet as their go-to source of health and wellness information. A massive shift when you step back and look at how things were just a decade ago. . . talking to friends, consulting doctors, and calling mom have fallen way behind Dr. Google.

With that in mind, here are three insights to share.

The first insight I want to share is that as consumers have moved to checking the internet first, and that is presenting an opportunity for cost-effective display marketing. They are searching for conditions, treatments and symptoms and most of those searches are without Ads.

So, be helpful and be early. It’s not a time to sell or close the deal, it’s a time to lift yourself up as the go-to source in your area. It was pointed out that this is especially true in rural clinic settings.

The second insight is that as consumers use mobile more and more, your website needs to keep up and be optimized for easy mobile use. That said, when users are searching, ease of use is only one of the considerations. Relevance is always going to be in the mix along with brand awareness. I think of it like this:

If you have relevance and are easy to use but they only see you once, you’re a shooting star. Who knows if they’ll remember you? If you’re easy to use and you’re everywhere, but you have no relevance to the user, you’re like spammy emails and no one cares. And if you’re relevant and present all the time but your site is a mess to use, you’re just annoying to use.

It’s only when you have all three conditions working for you that you become the Trusted Resource – the go-to resource for information.

The last insight is that all of this is great, but if you’re spending money on marketing, it needs to be attributed during the final acquisition. You need to track it. There are three tracking levels to consider.

The first is a gross tracking measure like “# of new patients” – tracked consistently over time it gives insights into marketing effectiveness and lets you dig deeper, into “new patients that are attributable” to specific last touch marketing or sales efforts. At the center are the patients we can track via multiple marketing touches. This comes from exit interviews and customer testimonials and one question in particular, “tell us about the time before you called/visited/engaged.”

Ultimately, your unfair advantage in the market will come from your tracking efforts.

We covered a lot more, but those are my three takeaways.

Here is the link to the presentation – it’s about 40 minutes long:

Attached is the handout with stats.

I’ll do more of these events in the coming years. It’s good to hear concepts and listen to how others apply them in their particular worlds.

Good stuff.