Benchmarks for Plastic Surgery Marketing Online December 2009
January 8th, 2010 by
Plastic Surgery Internet References Benchmark for December Shows Overall Decline of Less Than 17% from Spring – The Busiest Season of The Year
We work with a number of plastic surgeons and have the opportunity to really get a sense for their zeitgeist. Right now many of them are feeling a pinch – our review had, to this point, been anecdotal rather than analytical. Suffice it to say we knew there was a problem but didn’t know if it was a lack of traffic, or a lack of conversion (window shopping but no buying).
One of our clients has been prompting me for some time to start providing benchmarks within his category (where we have some depth) as a yardstick against which we could measure his success. And then, in conversation with another client this evening, the topic came up again as we were discussing a former client who is really suffering.
For our benchmark we decided to look only at Google organic ranking and to compare a very specific date range, specifically a comparison of December 2009 versus May 2009. This date range seemed appropriate given the seeming decline in traffic and business, and given December is an historically low month compared to May.
Throwing out the high and the low in our sample, we found that the average decline in the studied group was 16.4% May to December. This is not a surprising number given the seasonality of the profession but it at least gave us a benchmark.
And in all, it doesn’t explain the massive decline in the client who left and in some of our continuing clients.
Below are screenshots from Google Analytics of the comparison:
Clearly we’re only looking at one metric, but there are clear correlations between the right kind of traffic and revenue.
View the whole set of screenshots at flickr.
My thanks to Dr. Paul Parker a Plastic Surgeon specializing in breast augmentation. New Jersey patients should visit his site http://www.parkercenter.net/.
Thanks also to Dr. Roy Kim a Plastic Surgeon specializing in surgeries of the face and body including breast augmentation and tummy tuck. San Francisco patients should visit his site http://www.drkim.com/.
And the moral of the story is: If you’re a plastic surgeon and your traffic is up December over May, good on ya. Give those monkeys a banana.
If you’re down, don’t sweat it. +/- a few percentage points beyond the mean is no big deal.
If you’re down 40% or more, look out. It may be time to reevaluate the model. If you’re down 40% or more and your web people aren’t scrambling then definitely change course.
