Surgeon Advertising on the Internet and Web Site Statistics

As a plastic surgeon undergoing an extensive Internet marketing campaign, it is imperative to understand basic Web site statistics. Web site statistics and Web site traffic reports are common deliverables given to clients (or rather, should be given to clients) from their contracted marketing firms. What follows are cursory descriptions and summaries of Web traffic statistics that also can be utilized by surgeons and Web masters that maintain their own advertising and search engine optimization campaigns.

Web site traffic statistics can basically be broken into four separate categories: unique visitors, sessions, page loads and hits. Each of these are quite different from each other and are important metrics for determining the marketing effectiveness of your plastic surgery practice Web site.

The number of unique visitors is the most important figure to look at when evaluating your marketing output. The unique visitor is a single visitor labeled by his or her IP address. Unique visitors are counted only once when accessing any number of pages on your Web site. If the same person from the same IP address were to visit all of the pages on your site, it would only be counted as one unique visitor. Unique visitors are counted once within a set timescale. You can therefore monitor your unique visitors on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

Sessions (or just plain “Visitors”) are counted as the total number of series of requests handed to your Web site over a given period of time. One unique visitor can revisit your site multiple times in one day. In such a case, they would be logged in your traffic report as one unique visit and n amount of sessions - where n is the number of times they requested access to your site. Visits can, and normally, contain multiple page loads and Web site hits.

Page loads are the single requests sent to a server to access individual pages of your Web site. This is in contrast to hits, were no distinction is made for the type of file being requested (pages, images, scripts, etc.).

So, if one unique visitor comes to your page five different times in one day and accesses five pages during each visit, this visitor can be said to have acquired: one unique visit, five sessions, twenty-five page loads, and, quite frankly, a hit count that can be rather exorbitant dependent upon the construction of each page requested.

With this in mind, both page loads and hits are rather unreliable metrics to base your marketing effectiveness on. Rather, you should focus your intent on the number of unique visitors that your Web site receives on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. However, the number of unique visits to your Web site does not speak fully of visit length and the visitor-to-action conversion ratio.

It is with utmost importance that plastic and cosmetic surgeons scrutinize the deliverables received from their marketing firms, lest they be taken by skewed and faulty metrics. In the end, statistics are only numbers. It takes research and measure to figure out what these figures mean and how you can further your marketing effectiveness based on the data held within these reports.

For more information on cosmetic surgery marketing and how you can monitor the success of your plastic surgeon advertising campaign. Visit cosmeticSEO.com and subscribe to our Advanced Internet Marketing Blog for Cosmetic Surgery Practices.

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