Online Pictures More Important than Ever

Looking at 9 weeks of data of 14,511 unique patient visitors to our medical search engine at DoctorBase.org revealed:

1) Patients were 3.8 times more likely to request the contact information of a private practice who had a picture over a maps listing in their profile.

2) Doctors whose profiles got contacted by patients were not necessarily the "better looking" providers but rather those who seemed to have well "Photo-shopped" pictures. This means solid backgrounds, proper lighting, and an overall sense that effort was put into the picture's post-production (read: Adobe PhotoShop can make you look 10 years younger!)

3) Even when a Doctor's profile did not appear at the top of the search results, those with high-quality pictures were more likely to get clicked than even the #1 or #2 listing.



During the course of this study our engineers ran an A/B Taguchi-Test with 2 different pages served up equally in order to create a Control:

A pages had pictures but no reviews

B pages had pictures with reviews

In measuring the results from the B pages (with reviews) we found that adding a link to patient reviews increased the likelihood that a patient would request to contact the doctor by over 53%!

While 9 weeks and five digits worth of unique patients is not statistically significant without a meta study across geographies and demographics, clearly there's an initial correlation with the increased share of overall patient traffic for dentist listings with pictures.

Our initial data may also indicate that adding a link to patient reviews to a doctor's listing can increase conversion ratios (the percentage of website visitors who become actual patient contacts) significantly.

More data to come...