We absolutely love technology! It’s amazing that you can get information on just about anything on the Internet. So, when we started to see a lot of news circulating in cyberspace about various new websites being developed focusing on fertility, we just couldn’t help but turn to the Internet to gather information about all the existing websites. You see...as professional public health educators and researchers, we wanted to get a better handle on what’s currently out there, how these sites are being utilized by patients, and how to identify any gaps or weaknesses that may exist. This way, we could compare the new strategies with the old, and our two-cents would be based on actual data rather than just assumptions.
We looked at a whole bunch of websites that compile statistics on other websites to further investigate overall usage trends. We decided to start with the biggest and most popular independent organizational websites that predominately address general fertility education—a nice mix of non-profits and for-profits, including the AFA, RESOLVE, INCIID, ASRM, SART, Infertility.about.com, Fertility Lifelines, IntegraMed, IHR, Conceive Online, ARC Fertility, haveababy.com, and IVF.com. We collected all of our data during the months of January and February 2009 (note: this is during the height of the octomom media craze which not surprisingly, drove a little more traffic to some of these fertility sites compared to previous months!).
After we sifted through all of these data, crunched some numbers, and got down to the nitty-gritty, WOW…were we surprised! The Internet behaviors of infertility patients were not at all what we expected. Let us explain in more detail…
Where are all the infertility patients?
Amazingly, with over 7.3 million women out there struggling to become pregnant, not that many people are visiting our sites. The number of unique visitors to each site ranged from about 2,000 to just under 40,000 per month with the average being a miniscule 15,000 people per month. Most
likely these statistics are under-reported, but this still only represents 0.2% of our target population!
Some of these sites invest a lot of money in advertising. How much money? A few of the larger fertility for- profits spend hundreds of dollars per day on the best Google placements, but there isn’t a strong relationship between spending the big bucks and getting tons of visitors.
How does this compare with other sites, especially those that aim for a similar target audience…for the most part
well-educated, highly-motivated, professional-type women mainly in their 20s, 30s, and 40s? The “What to Expect” pregnancy site saw about 750,000 people within the same time period. Planned Parenthood had around 439,000 visitors, and Autism Speaks! had just over 107,000 (and remember that autism only affects about 1 in every 150 children, while infertility affects 1 in 6 couples).
What about other reproductive issues somewhat related to fertility? Endometriosis.org saw approximately 30,000 unique visitors last month—this is close the maximum number that any of our more “general” fertility-related sites saw. Even the National Vulvodynia Association took in a respectable 8,000 (just in case you are curious…vulvodynia is defined as “chronic vulvar discomfort or pain, characterized by burning, stinging, irritation, or rawness of the female genitalia in cases in which there is no infection or skin disease of the vulva or vagina causing these symptoms.”) Just to put these numbers in perspective...the vulvodynia site attracted more people than half of all the fertility sites.
Nearly all the fertility-related sites had a hand-full of days in which they logged in no visitors—about the same amount that our friends at the National Vulvodynia Association experienced as well. Endometriosis.org never had a slow period and stayed consistently busy every single day of the month.
Why don’t people come back?
Another important point to consider is not only how many people visit your site, but also how many return to your site. Most websites strive to have the majority of their visitors return to their site. This shows that people like your site and will return again for more information. In web-statistics speak, “addicts” are those people that visit your site 30+ times during a single month; “regulars” visit somewhere between 2 and 29 times; and “passers-by” will only come once.
Some fertility sites fared better than others in terms of having visitors return. Still, it wasn’t great. On average, 85% of fertility website traffic consisted of people who only stopped by once -- never to return again (at least during that particular month). Only 15% of visitors were considered “regulars” and virtually no one saw “addicts” -- meaning no one came back more than 30 times (or about once a day) in a single month on any of these fertility-related sites.
In comparison, for the “What to Expect” pregnancy site, 57% of visits came from people who returned to the “What to Expect” pregnancy site for more information (and 13% of these were “addicts”). Likewise, the majority of visits to Planned Parenthood and Autism Speaks! were from people who had visited them before. For Endometriosis.com, 35% of visits were from people visiting again while nearly 38% of the National Vulvodynia Association were repeaters.
There are more men than we think.
Since infertility is not just a woman’s problem, we can’t assume only women are searching out fertility on the Internet. The percentage of male visitors on the fertility sites ranged from 38% to 57%. There are many more men on fertility sites than we ever expected either looking for themselves or their partners. By the way, roughly the same percentage of men were gathering information from the “What to Expect,” endometriosis, and vulvodynia sites as well. Who knew men were so interested…and helpful?
Young women want information too!
Infertility is often viewed as an issue primarily for “older” women, or at least among women well into their 30s and 40s. You know -- those the media describes as all those women who “forgot” to have babies. Instead, nearly half of visitors to fertility sites are under 35 years old. This is consistent with our other data that show infertility diagnoses are growing among this age-group as well.
Website visitors are a diverse group.
Infertility is often seen as more of an issue among the white population. While about three-quarters of the visitors do identify as “white,” there is still a large percentage of African-Americans (about 10% to 15%); Latinos (about 5% to 10%); and Asians (about 5% to 10%) seeking information from fertility websites as well.
Socioeconomic status is important.
Infertility is expensive—costing as much as a car or a home in some cases. Still, it is not only those in higher-tax brackets that are searching for fertility information on the Internet. Only about 20% of site visitors earn more than $100,000. As for the rest, 30% make between $60,000 - $100,000; 30% make between $30,000 - $60,000; and the remaining 20% earn less than $30,000—not nearly enough money to afford most fertility treatments.
Many families already have children.
We often think of families experiencing infertility as having no children at all and market accordingly. However, 30% of visitors looking for information on these fertility websites have at least one child at home.
People are educated.
Whenever materials are designed for your website, you always want to be aware of the readability of the information you are posting. But does the information also match the educational needs of your readers? For people visiting fertility sites, they are generally much more educated that your average health care consumer. In fact, 20% hold graduate degrees; 50% are college graduates; and 30% do not have a college degree.
What are we to do?
Internet education and marketing strategies targeting fertility patients are skewed and based on out-dated assumptions and generalizations. Most fertility websites are failing to reach the vast majority of those experiencing infertility. The people they do reach aren’t returning to these sites. In other words, spending resources to drive traffic to your site is wasted when those folks never come back or you aren't attracting the right people in the first place. While you can try to guess what infertility patients think, need or want, nothing beats solid data upon which to base your next steps.
Where are the 7.3 million women and their partners who experience infertility getting their information? How do you drive more people to your website as well as "convert" new customers and patients? How does the information you present on your site accurately reflect the diversity of visitors? How does your website stack up against all the other fertility sites? My Fertility Plan has all of this information and much more!
The odds are good you need to evaluate your website in terms of marketing and education. Instincts aren’t enough anymore. Run your website like you run the rest of your organization or business – research-based and data-driven. For definitive answers and more information about how to attract and keep more fertility consumers, contact My Fertility Plan at 877-509-PLAN or info@myfertilityplan.com.
All of the information and data contained in this report are the exclusive property of My Fertility Plan (copyrighted April 2009). If you are interested in using or reproducing any part of this article for print or electronic purposes, please contact us at info@myfertilityplan.com for explicit permission.
MY FERTILITY PLAN
Thank you for posting this information!! As the co- owner of Infertility Answers, Inc. (a web site geared toward those interested in a simplistic web bowsing experience regarding Third Party Family Building) we strive to answer the questions from our visitors. I can see that if the biggest and the best are not reaching a huge percentage of the population then we also need to step up our game and try to reach even more web users then in the past. Your hard work is really just the start of knowing what works in educating the public and now we just need to take that a step further and find out how we can fully serve those needing information from our sites. It would be great if we could have input from the actual visitor...I know that we can have polls but who stops to actually click on those? Makes you think!
Posted by: Sharon LaMothe | April 05, 2009 at 11:31 PM