Internet Growth Acceleration Programme Ireland

WhatClinic.com were last night named one of three winners of this year’s Internet Growth Acceleration Programme pitch competition along with TunePresto and RendezVu, with DataHug named as runners up. The winners will go on to present at the Dublin Web Summit on June 10th in the RDS, and congratulations to all who took part.

For those of you who haven’t heard of it iGAP is a six month management development programme for internet companies aimed at helping them to expand internationally and scale their businesses. Run by Enterprise Ireland and lead by Brian Caufield, the programme which is in its second year has now helped 34 companies and is fast becoming a key part of the Irish internet startup ecosystem.

One of the judges, Colm Lyon of Realex, does a great job of summing up the programme in his recent blog post on the Internet Growth Alliance site. Based on the experiences that Caelen and Dave have had this year with the programme, we can certainly recommend that any internet company looking to take that next big step think seriously about attending the next iGAP.

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Blueface Business Plus VoIP Review

Blueface VoIP Logo

I’ve been using Blueface as my personal VoIP provider for the last four years, however I waited until two weeks ago to finally switch WhatClinic.com over to their Business Plus account, migrating from another well known VoIP provider.

Blueface has been in the personal VoIP market for about 5 years but despite having had something of a business offering it only seems to have really started to make progress with businesses accounts during the last 12 months.

I had been meaning to move the WhatClinic.com account for a while as we’d been experiencing intermittent quality problems with our previous VoIP provider resulting in the sales team loosing trust with them and using Skype in preference.

Setup

The setup was quick and easy and completed over the web without the need to talk to anyone in Blueface. It was easy to assign phone numbers to SIP accounts and setup the voicemail. Initially our account only came with four SIP addresses, which seemed a bit odd as it had 8 phone numbers. An email to their support department sorted this out 12 hours later at no extra charge.

We use SMON 320 phones and initially we could only make outgoing calls but not receive incoming calls. A quick look on the Blueface support forums quickly found the solution and we were up and running.

Another problem we ran into was calls were taking up to a minute to initiate, i.e. we would dial a number and it wouldn’t start to ring for up to a minute. This lasted a couple of days and eventually resolved itself without any obvious intervention. I suspect that if we had rebooted our phones it would have sorted the issue immediately.

Self Service

One of the major benefits of Blueface as compared to our previous VoiP provider is their self service interface. This allows us to monitor charges in real time as well as adding new phones and changing voicemail settings. Compared to calling a support line, this is a major time saver and gives us considerably more control. This ease of setup and control means we already have more phones working than we had with our old provider so Blueface is getting more of our business.

Quality

The primary reason we moved provider was because of the intermittent quality of our old setup. As a long term personal user I had high level of confidence that the quality was going to be good, and after two weeks of extensive usage we have found it to be consistently better than either our previous VoIP provider or Skype.

During the two week period we have experienced no quality problems, although like any VoIP provider we expect to have occasional regional outages and have prepared contingency solutions.

Price

The Blueface Business Plus package costs €69 a month and includes 8 direct dial numbers, unlimited UK and Ireland landline calls and 250 mobile minutes. Calls to our international customers are significantly lower than with Skype or our previous VoIP provider on a per minute basis. [It should be noted that Skype have several monthly subscription plans that offer significant savings over their per minute rates.]

Simply put, the price is low enough to make telephony charges to most countries a null issue.

Problems

The phone numbers we were assigned were not all in sequence and neither were our voicemail accounts. It would seem to me that this would be a normal requirement for most businesses and I’m sure I could get it sorted out by contacting Blueface support but I think it should be standard.

Overall

We are very happy so far and I would certainly recommend them based upon our experiences. Having said that we have yet to experience any outage yet and in my experience this is the true acid test of any telecoms provider.

 

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SearchMetrics OPI Graph For eHow.co.uk

SearchMetrics OPI Graph For eHow.co.uk

Just over a week ago Google’s Panda algorithm update was rolled out for all “English language Google users”. Given that our own traffic is largely English-language, and largely Google sourced, we paid particular attention to both our own traffic, which thankfully has increased since the Panda update, and any reports that were available about how other sites were being affected.

Two reports in particular got a lot of attention from bloggers and on Twitter. They were from SearchMetrics and Sistrix and they attempted to give some indication of the drop in “visibility” of particular websites after the algorithm was rolled out.

Two Problems With “Visibility”

The first problem with both of these reports is that they measure whether or not certain websites appear in the search results for a number of keywords that the companies are tracking. SearchMetrics for their part say that “Over 55 million domains and 25 million keywords are continuously monitored“. Sistrix say that their report is “based on a dataset of one million keywords“.

But what about the visibility the websites in question have for keywords these two companies aren’t tracking? How much of the websites’ visibility is invisible to SearchMetrics and Sistrix? The answer to these questions started to come quite quickly from companies who appeared on the “biggest loser” lists.

Demand Media, owners of eHow.com issued a press release aimed at their investors and an accompanying blog post both decrying the inaccuracy of the reports. Doug Scott of DiscountVouchers.co.uk went a step further and published pictures of his Google Analytics account to show how “we have lost none of our traffic“. A number of other companies have since raised their hands and said that they haven’t been affected nearly as badly as the loser lists suggest.

Out of interest, I looked back at our own organic traffic since January 1st and looked at how many different keywords were used to find our website. We have had over 1.4 million unique visitors to the site since the start of the year, and they used 1 million distinct keywords to find us. There is no way that either SearchMetrics or Sistrix could hope to measure our visibility in the search results accurately with that many different keywords in play. The only people who could release accurate data about any website’s visibility would be the search engines themselves, and they’re not likely to do so any time soon.

Visibility Does Not Equal Traffic

The second problem is that readers were confusing visibility losses with traffic losses, and SearchMetrics and Sistrix didn’t do a lot to correct this misconception at the time. In fact SearchMetrics mentioned “the statistical value of traffic distribution” and Sistrix mentioned “click-through rate on specific positions” as elements of their visibility indices, i.e. they were trying to calculate the websites’ traffic for the tracked keywords based on their search results positions.

As with our own example, many of the sites mentioned will have very high numbers of distinct keywords bringing in small amounts of traffic each, meaning that the SearchMetrics and Sistrix visibility indices bear little or no relation to the sites’ actual traffic. In fact, wary of some of the criticism coming their way SearchMetrics have now published a new blog post saying that “Searchmetrics OPI does not calculate the real traffic coming in to web pages“.

Why Publish A Visibility Index Based On Incomplete Data?

So why would these companies publish visibility loser lists knowing as they must how people would misinterpret them? The answer is clear: links and online mentions. A quick look at Yahoo Site Explorer shows that the SearchMetrics article has over 670 external links in, and the Sistrix article has over 150. SearchMetrics generated 111 comments on their post along with 225 ratings, and Sistrix managed 15 comments. There were also lots of Twitter mentions, although these are harder to measure because of the different URL shortening services used. [Figures correct as of 19th April 2011 @ 10am]

SearchMetrics and Sistrix both managed to hop on a rapidly moving story that was being closely monitored by some of the most-likely-to-link people in the world, the SEO community, and they succeeded brilliantly in creating classic link-bait. Their data sets were used to fill a temporary gap in knowledge and spread like wildfire. I even tweeted about the SearchMetrics report in relation to the loss reported for Qype.co.uk because it was so astonishing. What a pity then to find out that the data behind the reports couldn’t hope to tell the whole story in relation to the mentioned websites’ total visibility and traffic.

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Google Analytics Fast Access Warning

[Update: May 10th - This warning originally read "This report is based on sampled data". Google have now explained that the warning appears any time you report on more than one dimension in Analytics on a date range containing more than 500,000 visits. See the Google Analytics Fast Access Mode help page for more detail.]

Everyone loves Google Analytics. It’s free, full of great features, and most of the time it works like a charm. We use GA data regularly in WhatClinic.com to make important decisions about everything from internal linking structures to on page keyword priorities, and it really comes into its own when something on the site is broken and we need to track the problem down.

However, like a lot of great free web services GA suffers from being too popular. The amount of data it has to crunch for our website alone is staggering, so imagine the load when you add in the tens if not hundreds of millions of other websites that use it too. Unfortunately the strain starts to show as soon as you really dig into your data.

The Dreaded Fast Access Mode Message

One of my most used features on GA is the Advanced Segment, which lets me filter the traffic I’m reporting on in a myriad of different ways. I can report on only the people who landed on our search pages, or only the people who came from Canada, or pretty much any set of people with an analytics parameter in common.

Google have a problem with this great feature though: in order to give you an answer to your query in a reasonable length of time they often fall back on using sampled data, or “Fast Access Mode” as they now call it, if you are using a date range that contains over 500,000 visits.

Google Analytics using sampled data

Sampled Data

Using sampled data is absolutely fine when your data points don’t suffer from a lot of volatility, but if they do then the results can be very unreliable. Take a look at the data set above. It uses sampled data because I’ve created an Advanced Segment with two parameters (user location and page URL) and I’m looking at a period of three and a half months which contains far more than 500,000 visits. Analytics is reporting a conversion rate in April of just 2.65% for the set of visitors I’m looking at.

Now look at the data set below. It is reporting a conversion rate in April of 4.36%. The difference is that it isn’t looking at sampled data because the period of time is much shorter and the visitors number is less than 500,000.

Google Analytics not using sampled data

Real Data

Our conversion data can be very volatile in places because of the niche or long tail nature of what we offer and what I need to report on from time to time. For instance. We might get 1,000 enquiries for dental clinics in Dublin in a week, but if I look at just the visitors who were looking for clinics in Rathmines that figure might drop to just 10, and those ten might have been made up of 3 on Monday, none on Tuesday, 1 on Wednesday, and so on. It’s the same when you look at American visitors to our Mexican dentists pages, or UK visitors to our Turkish cosmetic surgery pages.

Be Sure To Perform A Sanity Check

As with the case above, when something looks like a problem we all tend to look into it and see what’s going on, but when something looks good we tend to let it slide. My advice is any time you see the Fast Access Mode message in GA you should sanity check it by using shorter periods of time. This takes a little time but it will give you a far more reliable picture of what’s going on.

WhatClinic.com left hand side nav screen shot Vs. WhatClinic.com right hand side nav screen shot

 

Most of the time people run A/B tests in order to try and improve a single metric such as their site’s conversion rate, and they do this on the basis that even if the test fails to show an improvement that they can go back to their original setup and everything will be OK. But what if the original setup isn’t OK in the first place?

In the past we have made the mistake of assuming that just because we tested a theory once in the past that it holds true forever. It’s probably not a surprise to find out that this isn’t always the case, especially on a website that has changed it’s layout and functionality as many times as ours has! So every now and again we test a big change on our site for a few days just to make sure the some of our basic assumptions still hold.

Site Navigation On The Left Or The Right?

For the purpose of this test we wanted to see if having the main site navigation links on the left of the page or the right of the page affected our overall conversion rate. We had run this test in the past and having the links on the left outperformed having the links on the right. Seeing as so much had changed on the site in the meantime we decided to try it again.

Google Website Optimiser Results

The original left hand side navigation layout was a clear winner.

The results thankfully were pretty clear. Moving the navigation bar to the right hand side resulted in a drop in conversion across the site of 11.8%. So the navigation is staying where it is on the left hand side. We’re in good company too – Hotels.com in Europe think the left is the correct side for the navigation on their search results pages too, but maybe Airbnb.com know something we don’t? Their navigation is on the right hand side.

What was the last big change your A/B tested, and what was the result?

Irish Dental Council Fees Guidelines

The Dental Council of Ireland has issued its first ever documents aimed at patients and members of the public. The three PDF documents cover the display of private dental fees by practices, advice on choosing a dentist at home or abroad, and information about the different roles of a dental team.

As expected the issue of private dental fees has gained the most coverage in the press today, with dental practices keen to highlight how many more people will be subject to private fees thanks to the recent cutbacks to the PRSI dental scheme and the Medical Card dental scheme.

The display of fees at all practices will at least help those in need of dental treatment know what to budget for, and allow them to compare the fees at different practices for the same services. It is interesting to note that in the case of services with variable fees such as root canals and extractions that maximum fees must be set.

The second document released provides valuable information about what to look for when you want to choose a new dentist. It also pays particular attention to how to choose an overseas dentist if that is your choice, and it’s great to see a document like this from a respected body such as the Dental Council that avoids resorting to fear, uncertainty and doubt to dissuade patients from travelling abroad. It raises all the serious issues patients should consider when making their decision and should be a great help by way of guidance. We covered a number of these on our own document from 2008, “10 Questions To Ask Before You Travel Abroad For Treatment“.

The final document goes into detail about the different roles that each member of a dental team is supposed to perform, and helps clear up any confusion that patients might have about who they expect to be treated by when visiting a dental practice.

It’s great to see the Dental Council of Ireland engage with patients like this and hopefully there is more engagement to come in the future. Share your thoughts on the Dental Council’s new advice documents in the comments below.

 

 

Be careful how you handle negative reviews

Online reviews have really taken off over the last 5 years and there are countless studies (here, here, and here [pdf link] for example) showing how they influence consumers’ purchasing decisions.

Similarly, patients looking for a new doctor or dentist are being influenced by other patients who review their treatment online. These reviews present both an opportunity for and a threat to the businesses of doctors and dentists. In this article we will look at how you can protect your reputation and career from negative reviews online.

The Four Types Of Reviewer

  1. Members Of A Review Community (Yelp, Qype, etc) – They have reviewed large numbers of businesses and services and their review style can be easily profiled. Looking back at their previous reviews it is easy to see if they are fair and reasonable, and their reputation is built upon being consistently unbiased. Their reputation in turn adds considerable weight to the strength of their reviews. Some doctors have over 100 reviews on Yelp.
  2. People Who Are Encouraged To Write A Review – Businesses often ask previous customers to review the product or service delivered. For instance WhatClinic.com asks patients to review their treatment experience. As you’d expect there is a fairly normal distribution between positive, neutral and negative reviews.
  3. Superfans – They have had such a great experience that they actively want to share their experience with other people online. These people are very rare and are usually created when a clinic far exceeds the patients’ expectations.
  4. The Very Unhappy – People who for one reason or another feel they have had an exceptionally bad experience.  Thankfully these are also very rare, but in many instances they will try and post their review on as many sites as possible. Unfortunately this means their negative review can affect you and your clinic’s reputation disproportionately.

How To Protect Yourself Online

Everyone gets bad reviews at one stage or another. It’s never nice to see someone talking negatively about your clinic, and it’s even worse when a colleague or patient is the one to bring it to your attention. The secret to protecting yourself from bad reviews though is to start to build your online reputation before this happens.

Negative reviews only have real significant power if they stand alone. Believe it or not single negative review in a sea of positive reviews actually adds authenticity to the positive reviews!

As a clinic owner or manager you should start soliciting reviews now. Find the websites that Google sources its reviews from (including WhatClinic.com) and point your customers to those sites. Print a message asking them to review your clinic online on the back of your receipts and reminder cards, and remember that repeat patients are your best bet for favourable reviews. After all, if they didn’t like you they wouldn’t be coming back. Develop your online reputation now before someone else starts doing it for you in a negative way. Don’t wait until it’s too late.

What To Do When You Get A Negative Review

Most negative reviews occur because the patient feels like they have been mistreated somehow. How you respond to the negative review can either compound their grievance or potentially convert them into a positive advocate for your company. There are two clear steps to follow:

  1. Reply To The Review Online. You need to publically acknowledge the grievance in the same place that the review appears. In fact you should try and reply to all reviews, positive and negative. By replying to negative reviews you are demonstrating that you care about the patient’s issue and that you want to address it rather than hide from it. You should apologise, tell the patient that you are upset that they feel this way, and that you would like to speak to them personally about their issue.
  2. Contact The Patient Directly. You need to let the patient speak at length about why they feel the way they do. You need to listen carefully and suggest a way that you might be able to address their grievance.

Typically if you can manage to resolve the issue the reviewer will be happy to revisit their review and either edit it or amend it. Even if they don’t your online reply at least informs potential new patients that you care enough to try and resolve issues when they come up.

Don’t Make These Mistakes

It’s very easy to make a bad situation worse by reacting without properly thinking through the consequences. Here are some of the most common mistakes you need to avoid when replying to negative review:

  • Do not breach patient confidentiality. Even if the patient publishes personal medical information online, you may not.
  • Do not be confrontational or aggressive.
  • Do not suggest that they are lying or call into doubt any aspect of their review.
  • Do not engage in an online conversation. Reply to the review once and contact the patient directly, you should not discuss with a patient in a public forum even if they want to.

Going Down The Legal Route

If a review is defamatory, then a letter from your lawyer may get the review taken down. This only applies if the website operates in certain jurisdictions though. Most notably it won’t work if the website is based in the US.

Even if you do manage to get the review removed, this kind of action typically animates the reviewer into publishing similar reviews on multiple websites. This not only makes it more likely to be found, it also means you have very little chance of turning the patient’s opinion around. On balance, going down the legal route carries as much a risk of worsening the situation as it does of relieving it.

Actively managing your clinic’s reputation is more important than ever. Be sure you give your happy customers every opportunity to tell the world that they are happy, and start doing it now. When you are unfortunate enough to receive a negative review, deal with it publicly, professionally, and politely, and whatever you do, don’t panic. Share your experiences with online review in the comments below.

Is Google Declaring War On Link Building?

Link building

Following on from JCPenney’s very public punishment by Google last week, this week it’s the turn of OverStock.com to get raked over the coals. To me their infringement seems much more grey than JCPenney’s though. The full story is in the Wall Street Journal and on Search News Central today, but here’s a quick overview.

OverStock.com offered certain sites, including a lot of .edu sites, a 10% discount code for their visitors in return for a placing a link heavy piece of text on their sites. The sites themselves don’t get any money (*) in return for adding the links but it seems Google has called foul on this as being akin to buying links and have taken “corrective action” as they like to call it.

(* Because there’s a discount code being used there is a chance that the sites get a kickback, but in this case it seems the same discount code is being used on many sites so it is unlikely.)

Where to draw the line?

The problem I have with this is that it becomes very difficult to see how any overt link building exercise can be safe anymore. Say for instance that you have a web app that saves users a considerable amount of time by automating something that previously took a lot of manual effort.  It doesn’t save the user money per se, but it is still provides real value to them. Otherwise they would either have to spend their own time or pay someone money to do the required work.

Now, it is seen as perfectly white hat to go out and ask people to link to your useful free web app. The sites that link don’t get any money but the end users will save time. The sites that put up a link to your web app are in effect saying “Go here and save yourself some time”, but I disagree that this is materially different from linking to a site and saying to people “Go here and save yourself 10%”.

The only thing I can see that OverStock.com have done that might be considered dodgy is the inclusion of a lot of links with very optimised anchor text in their block of text. This will obviously improve their SERP rankings for these keywords, but again where is the line? Most people who build links will at least try and optimise their anchor text, even if it is only one link being asked for. So if one optimised link is OK, how many is not OK? Three? Five? Ten? You get my point.

Organic Vs Built Links

It seems to me that Google are moving the goalposts as to what’s acceptable and what’s not in terms of link building in response to being caught out at being gamed by JCPenney, OverStock.com and others. Their ultimate intention seems to be to only count organically gained links, and discount built or asked-for links. That sounds like a relatively hard problem to solve but it makes sense for them to try in response to the constant criticism they’re receiving at the moment about spam (or gamed) search results.

If things do pan out that way it means that a lot of sites are going to start seeing their rankings fall, and dramatically.

Black Hat SEO And What It Can Cost You

JCPenney Blackhat SEO

JCPenney Were Caught Using Black Hat SEO Techniques

Over the weekend the New York Times ran a story about how they had uncovered a scheme by retailer JCPenney to game the search engines by buying lots and lots of text links. In fact they discovered 2,015 text links relating to “dresses” alone. SearchEngineLand went on to show 774 pages linking to the JCPenney Comforter Sets page.

With Google taking plenty of flak recently about spam filled results they were particularly quick to act and happy to talk about taking strong “corrective action” in this case. On February 1st the average Google search results position for a JCPenney page for the 59 keywords the New York Times were tracking was 1.3; after Google were notified the average position of the JCPenney results dropped to 52.

There are a few interesting points raised by this story. First of all, by Google’s own admission, this link building campaign had been going on for months unnoticed. It’s probably less noticeable when a big company gets number one in the search results for a generic term like “dresses”, but 2,015 text links from spam link sites should have raised a flag earlier. For a company so fond of algorithms it’s odd to hear them say they only have 24,000 employees by way of a defence.

Second, even though Google have now taken their corrective action, i.e. punished JCPenney for violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, I wonder just how much money they made over the lucrative Christmas shopping season by gaming the system? Certainly more than the links cost them to buy. Do a quick back of the envelope calculation. Let’s say each of the 59 tracked keywords averaged 500 paid links each (less than either of the keywords talked about above), and that each link cost $10 to buy. That would cost $295,000, or a small fortune to you and me, but given that the keyword “dresses” alone has an average of 11.1 million searches per month suddenly you can see the value.

Third, as mentioned in the New York Times article, JCPenney claim to only get 7 percent of their traffic from organic searches. For an online retailer as big as JCPenney that is just unbelievable, but it’s easy to see why when you look at their on-site SEO efforts in any detail, as Alain Bleiweiss did in this post.

Finally, just as incredible as JCPenney’s poor on-site SEO is that of the New York Times itself. Despite knowing the name of the paper, the name of the company at the heart of the story, and the topic of the story, it still took me a number of searches to find the article. In the end I had to add a “site:nytimes.com” to the end of my search. Admittedly I should probably have done this at the start but I thought just having NYTimes in the search string would be enough. Hugo Guzman discusses the NYTimes.com site’s poor SEO in this blog post.

So, the black hat SEO discussion goes on with no real answer one way or the other. JCPenney are clearly paying a price now for what they’ve done, but I’d be very surprised if they didn’t come out ahead in money terms at least. As for Google, they will probably frighten a few people into avoiding black hat techniques by talking publicly about this case, but I’m sure plenty of others will see it as proof that gaming the system isn’t that hard and that you’re not likely to get caught for quite some time.

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How Do Clinics Manage Their Appointments?

Breakdown of clinics diary usage

How Clinics Manage Their Appointments

We recently ran a survey about what system our clinics use to manage their appointments. The  results revealed quite a lot about how fragmented the industry is and about the difficulties that technology solutions face when replacing paper and pen solutions.

29% of clinics that responded use some form of clinic software to manage their booking. What we found amazing is that out of ALL of the respondents only 3 clinics used the same software. We were also surprised at the number of clinics that were using bespoke software.

The most reveling statistic is that over 50% of all clinics still use a desk diary to manage their appointments. When we followed up the survey with some telephone interviews we found a general belief that no software could match the flexibility of a desk diary and that software solutions couldn’t be used without training. In fact many respondents that used a desk diary had previously bought a software solution but no longer used it.

Unsurprisingly we found that Microsoft Outlook had reasonable penetration at 13% and its integration with the email client was quoted as a key benefit.  Google calender had far less penetration that we were expecting which we speculate is because of the lack of an offline standardized client.

Do you have trouble persuading clients to ditch old fashioned solutions? People still demanding IE6 compatibility? Fax integration? Let us know in the comments.

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