Healthcommunities.com found 25 percent of its ad revenue with Google AdSense. Case study : Healthcommunities.com : www.healthcommunities.com
Privately held Healthcommunities.com, Inc. is an online community comprising 15 channels of medical specialty information for health care consumers and professionals. The six-year-old company, based in Northampton, Mass., features medical content developed and monitored by physicians. Healthcommunities.com has an extensive network of physician members through its Physician Website Management System, in which customized physician practice websites are created, maintained, and promoted to browsers through its proprietary search engines. Health care consumers are able to find medical specialists through its MDLocator network, learn about physicians, download forms, and access a variety of resources that facilitate their health care decision making.
Challenge
Healthcommunities.com realizes revenue from sponsorship partners and physician members. The site also runs ads “very selectively,” says Senior Business Developer Tom Lund. “Being an objective medical information resource, we are particular about our advertisers. And it’s important to avoid an overwhelming number of ads,” he says. Given the need to closely monitor ad appropriateness, Lund says a number of the 15 channels – which include neurologychannel.com, visionchannel.net and pulmonologychannel.com – had unused ad space that yielded no revenue. In hopes of changing that, Lund decided to test Google AdSense™ on several of the site’s channels. He inserted AdSense code to run ads targeted to specific topics and content on certain pages.
Results
“I didn’t expect to see such relevant ads,” Lund says. “Both our physician and our consumer users are looking for very specifi c clinical information about medical subspecialties. Now the AdSense ads we see are very targeted to this content.” Beyond the relevant ads that dovetail to specific medical content, Lund notes that the revenue Healthcommunities.com now receives is “a pleasant surprise. It makes a positive difference.” Perhaps more signifi cant, he says that today, “25 or 30 percent of our ad revenue comes directly from AdSense.”
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