The 3 Forces Aligning to Eat Your Website Traffic

When we publish content or buy ads from Google or Facebook, what are we actually trying to do?

I’d wager that most health care marketers are trying to drive traffic to their website. It’s quantifiable, it’s reportable and it can lead to real business outcomes like increased patient volume.

But website traffic is getting harder to come by every day. I’ve been looking at a lot of data on the topic, and I believe we’re in the midst of a digital marketing sea change. One that will compel health care marketers to reassess their assumptions about how to approach digital marketing. The reckoning marketers have to face is the disappearance of web traffic from three forces.

1. Facebook Wants to Keep You on Facebook

Facebook changes all the time. In the last couple years alone, Facebook has devalued unpaid marketing posts, added live streaming (aka Facebook Live), embedded video and introduced ever-more engaging ad formats like carousel and canvas.

All of these features make Facebook’s engagement machine ever-more addictive and all but eliminate the need for a user to click through to your website. That’s the first force that’s eating your web traffic.

2. Google Wants to Keep You on Google

Google, which has been the doorway to the internet for almost 20 years now, continues to release features that ensure a greater share of users who open that door end up in a room that Google owns.

Google AdWords, for example, has lots of features that make a click-through unnecessary. Call extensions allow mobile users to call an advertiser right from within an ad. Message extensions do the same for text messages.

That’s just one platform. Add Google Maps, Google My Business, Google Knowledge Graph and the fascinatingly creepy Google Duplex to the mix, and websites start to seem outdated fast.

3. Voice Assistants Will Make Websites Obsolete

My boss has Apple’s Homepod in his office. For kicks, he and I struck up a conversation with it the other day. It went like this:

Boss: “Hey, Siri, what’s the best hospital near me?”
Siri: “I found two options. The first is X hospital, which is two miles from you and is rated two and a half stars. Would you like directions?”
Boss: “No, thanks.”
Siri: “The next option is Y hospital. It’s 3.4 miles from you and is rated two stars. Would you like more information?”
Boss: “No, thanks”

And that’s where the conversation ended. Siri had no more information to offer, so she said nothing further.

Thing is, there are five hospitals within 15 minutes of where we were sitting. If we had asked the same question in a browser, we would have the option to click into those hospitals’ websites.

Conversations like this are quickly becoming common. Some reports suggest that voice assistants could reach 55% of U.S. households by 2022.

A New Model, An Old Lesson

As all these shifts make web traffic harder to win, marketers will need to replace the already old mental model of how digital marketing works. At a high level, the new model looks something like this:

What’s interesting about this model is just how large the center is, where search, social and what I’ll call “owned web” overlap. It’s not crazy to think that we’re approaching a time when all your key content formats should have a presence on all three platforms.

The implication of this model is that driving traffic to a website is no longer a valid strategy. The new strategy is to simply give patients the resources to choose their own path across whatever platform(s) they like.

This new model shouldn’t surprise us. In fact, it’s just a reminder of a lesson marketers have learned and relearned for decades: We can’t expect patients to follow our lead. We have to follow theirs. It’s as simple, and also as complicated, as that.

About the Author | Braden Russom

Braden Russom is an account planner for Smith & Jones. He ensures the advertising Smith & Jones creates for clients gets a great first start by delivering strategies that consider the client’s broader business goals, the feelings and biases of consumers and what’s working best in marketing (i.e. media or delivery formats).

Smith & Jones is where health care brands come to get better. We help our clients create meaningful and desirable health care brands, align their internal teams, engage new and existing patients and drive downstream revenue.