comScore released its health related search information yesterday. (GO) Here are some of the highlights:
The average monthly unique visitors online in the US is up 4% to 176 million visitors. The average monthly unique visitors looking for health information is up 12% to just over 55 million. WebMD leads the pack with NIH.org, MSN Health and Yahoo! Health (experiencing a significant jump over last year) following close behind.
When planning your Search campaigns, think Yahoo and MSN, particularly if you are engaged in display ads and sponsorships. In terms of search, Google is the ominous leader, however folks are using Yahoo and MSN as a health resource, so you can see how this may present a problem to Google - even though the co-op was supposed to solve this. Perhaps the reason that Yahoo and MSN are doing so well (they are the in top ten portals for visitor loyalty at roughly 17% each, NIH and WebMD are 22% and 29% respectively) is that the interface gently funnels the user into a health vertical and there are interesting value adds for the user like Yahoo Answers and MSN’s Ask the Experts.
Research demonstrates a significant increase in search query volume, click through rates and conversion after a consumer has viewed a display ad. Therefore, it is essential to make sure your online media shop is coordinating efforts with your search shop to maximize that synergy.
According the study, the top searches are: Pregnancy, Cancer, Fitness, Cold and Rash. I would venture to say that Flu, Fitness and Cold are seasonal. Flu and Cold, as it is flu season Q1 in most of America, and Fitness as the warm weather is coming? Next on the list is Nutrition and Weight loss, no surprises there. Finally the list wraps up with Diabetes and Depression. The recent Avandia news notwithstanding, I have to give GSK kudos - even if they’re not a client - because they are ranking page 1 in Google organically for both those keyphrases. I would estimate the one listing for each of those highly searched keyphrases brings the site about one million visitors a year. GSK had the foresight about ten years ago to purchase both depression.com and diabetes.com. What URLs do you have in your closet?
7 Comments
Heather, my calculations show if you have the #1 spot in Google for Diabetes, I would expect that position to generate about 4.4 million clicks a year. For Depression the #1 position is worth about 5 million clicks.
I just hope you didn’t use Overture, dude.
No, we use proprietary tools for that data!
Clever boy. Of course you do!
David,
I used comScore data for my query volume. However that brings up a great point, we as an industry need to come up with a source for reliable query volume.
I agree Heather. What I was looking at was the CTR you would expect to get if you had the #1 position on Google. My calculations show that that position is expected to get 42.1% of click throughs.
42% you are brave to estimate that high for a pharma site, braveheart!
One Trackback
[…] New comScore health search data is out. Guess what? People use search engines for to find health related info!?! My stars, what will they think of next? (Catalyst Search Blog) […]