By Michael Dorausch, D.C.
The following is a planetc1.com chiropractic traffic report for the month of April, 2009. I’m sharing this information in hopes of educating chiropractors as to some important factors used when ranking websites (not just chiropractor sites, but all websites). The information provided is intended to serve as a guide for publicizing chiropractic traffic reports. My motivation for sharing site data is this… To help chiropractors avoid becoming victims of companies or individuals misrepresenting online chiropractic marketing and chiropractic website information.
It would be easy for a chiropractor to glaze over the information I’m to present here, thinking it unimportant. But what baselines and standards do chiropractors use when online chiro-centered marketers present themselves via e-mail, telemarketing, faxes, pay per click advertising, and other avenues? How does one separate genuine online chiropractic marketing ideas from dishonest, misguided, and even fraudulent information? It’s my intention that by sharing here, and in the series of posts that are to follow, we will help chiropractors develop a better understanding of chiropractic website traffic statistics, and become more Web savvy.
The following is a screenshot image showing chiropractic website traffic statistics for Planet Chiropractic (planetc1.com) for the 30 day month of April 2009.
Being mostly black and gray and full of numbers, I’m fully aware that the information shown above may not seem very interesting or important. However, we have to begin somewhere. It’s a screenshot (a picture taken on my computer screen) of website traffic related information for the month of April. There are five different columns including Day, Number of visits, Pages, Hits, and Bandwidth. I’m not addressing details of Hits or Bandwidth in this article, as I don’t find they are important to this discussion.
The Day category shows the date of the month. The Number of visits category shows how many times people visited the website on a particular date. The Pages category shows how many webpages were shown on a particular date. Pages are sometimes also referred to as Page Views.
Setting a Baseline — It’s not the best traffic ever for Planet Chiropractic, but April 2009 was a good traffic month for this chiropractor centered website. The largest numbers are included at the bottom of the image, they show the Average and Total for Visitors and Page Views during the month of April.
Average number of visits each day = 5382.40 (~5,382 people per day)
Total number of visits for the month = 161472 (161,472 visitors for the month of April)
Why not use Hits? Can you see how different it would be if I was to tell somebody that Planet Chiropractic had 2,719,844 Hits in the month of April? Personally, I think companies that use Website Hits as a form of metrics when communicating with the public, either don’t have a clue what they’re talking about, or hope the audience they are addressing doesn’t. As Keri Morgret of Morgret Designs reminded me, HITS = How Idiots Track Success.
So, is an average of over 5000 visitors per day good for a chiropractic website? Is that the normal number most chiropractic websites do? This isn’t an issue of yes or no, it’s an issue of keeping track. Up until this point, how have you as a chiropractor measured website statistics, especially when an online chiropractic marketing consultant wants to sell you on a product or service?
Something that exists throughout the Internet, but in my opinion is suspiciously absent from online marketing to the chiropractic profession, is transparency. How many chiropractic websites have openly shared their traffic statistics? I’m not claiming Planet Chiropractic is the most popular or most trafficked website amongst those that exist in the chiropractic industry, but wouldn’t you agree that persons or companies making such claims should be able to back them up with verifiable data?
When a company (or chiropractor) claims they have the #1 chiropractic website, the fastest-growing chiropractic website, the website that gets the most chiropractic patients (get my drift?), wouldn’t it be nice if you could review them publicly, before handing them your money?
In my next post of this chiropractic website series, we are going to review some free online tools (which chiropractors can use) to help better determine whether website claims are friendly or fraudulent, direct or dishonest, missiles for smart marketing strategies, or simply misguided bombs. Make plans to be a more Internet savvy chiropractor, and thanks for taking the time to read through this. Here’s to your success!
planetc1.com-news @ 10:48 pm | Article ID: 1241675349
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