The digital journey to wellness: how users select a hospital in the US
Google partnered with Compete, Inc. and fielded over 500 hospital researchers to understand what influences hospital selection and what role digital plays in the journey. Here are some highlights from the study:
- 84% of patients use both online and offline sources for hospital research.
- Search drives nearly 3x as many visitors to hospital sites compared to non-search visitors.
- Patients primarily search on symptoms and condition terms towards the moment of conversion.
- 44% of patients who research hospitals on a mobile device scheduled an appointment.
- 53% of patients who did not watch a hospital video were unaware they existed.
Fuente: thinkwithgoogle.com
Popularity of ad sizes
According to a Doubleclick/Google research, the medium rectangle, leaderboard, and skyscraper comprise the vast majority (78%) of ads served in 2011. All three keep growing at a good rate. On the other hand, mobile optimized sizes experienced record growth among publishers. The 320x50 grew 186% in 2011.
Fuente: services.google.com
Our Mobile Planet
OurMobilePlanet.com is an excellent source of information about the mobile world and, specifically, the global mobile consumer. You can access the full set of data from a research commissioned by Google through a powerful chart creation tool or the direct download of full country-level data files.
Our Mobile Planet is available in more than 20 languages and provides data for 40 countries through a very easy-to-use chart creation tool.
The Our Mobile Planet research was commissioned by Google and conducted by Ipsos MediaCT in partnership with the Mobile Marketing Association and the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
Fuente: ourmobileplanet.com
Google Browser Size Tool
Test your website in multiple window sizes in a single shot. Vey useful for ensuring that important parts of a page’s user interface are visible by a wide audience:
Fuente: browsersize.googlelabs.com
Google is fostering semantic web adoption
Semantic Web enables a form to represent semantically structured knowledge. The semantic web is a vision of information that can be readily interpreted by machines, so machines can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, combining, and acting upon information on the web.
Now Google plans to provide more relevant results by “incorporating semantic search technology, the process of understanding the actual meaning of words.”
As reported on SemanticWeb.com, Webnodes AS content management system version 3.7 with schema.org support resulted in tests showing a 30 percent increase in organic search-engine traffic to websites using Microdata or similar technologies.
From a GoodRelations case study: “There is preliminary evidence that search results with respective extensions get a 30% higher click-through rate (CTR).”
As soon as Google gives more relevance to the Semantic Web, more people will realize how critical it will become to get good positions in search results. And therefore the adoption of this way of representing data will increase dramatically.
Welcome, Semantic Web!
Fuente: searchengineland.com
Google BBS Terminal – What Google would have looked like in the 80s. Brilliant!
Fuente: theverge.com
Google sitemaps in Tumblr
Creating Google sitemaps in Tumblr cannot be easier; as it is already done! Tumblr creates a sitemap.xml file automatically in the root of your website. But, even more, it includes a reference to the sitemap in the robots.txt file of your website. That way, search engines can track better the whole content of your Tumblr blog.
To be more precise, Tumblr can create up to 3 sitemaps linked to your website:
- sitemap.xml - This is an index that links to the other sitemaps.
- sitemap1.xml - This contains a list of your posts.
- sitemap-pages.xml - This contains a list of your pages.
This article is based on my own investigations as it is difficult to find up-to-date information on this topic. When you search for Tumblr sitemaps in Google, you easily find 2009 dated information about external tools like TumblrMap. Based on what I have just explained, those tools are not needed any more!
