Your home page is the most valuable piece of  “real estate” on your website. What do you want to do with it? Place a billboard on it or open a storefront?

Home pages with gorgeous photos are impressive when you first encounter them but they often are a waste of space in the long run. They function like a billboard. They try to get your attention to give you a message but they can become a bit annoying and devolve into mere clutter after you have seen them a few times. Designers try to avoid this by rotating images but that’s just postponing the inevitable. If someone is coming to your site, they are already interested. Let them DO something.

Remember those Flash intros from a few years past? When you arrived at a site you were presented with a Flash animation that was intended to entertain and impress. They eventually became known as “skip intros” because most people just hit the “skip intro” link to bypass the presentation.

Make the most of your home page and let visitors get right down to business. The Granite Medical Group home page, shown below, is patient-centered. There is no obvious advertising here. It tells patients what is going on right now at Granite Medical.

The page is about the patient. It says, “here is some information you might find useful.” It does not say, in the obscure language of marketing,  “we have many things to offer our patients.” Instead it offers these things on the page.  It does what your English teacher used to say, “Don’t tell me. Show me.”

This is in itself a kind of marketing. It engages you and shows you what there is for Granite Medical Group’s patients and suggests that maybe you would like to become one of them.

We were working on an annual budget for advertising for a medical practice today. I have been doing this for 25 years or so and the process is much easier today. We have tons of data for any online ads. Someone clicks on a link and that is recorded and a bit of data is created.

Looking at the numbers, it was clear that our Google AdWords ads produced much higher results than the banner at a regional newspaper at a much lower cost-per-click.

To an accountant, the decision would be easy. AdWords is most effective on paper, so spend a little more on AdWords and cut the banner ad. But we are not accountants. We wondered if the data did not give the whole picture.

What is the value of having your practice name in front of potential patients? The banner ad must contribute something toward brand awareness and lots of people must see the banner and not click on it. I know the name of a bank in a nearby town although I have never had an account there. I see their ad every morning in an e-newsletter I get. I have yet to click on that link but if I ever need a new bank or have to recommend one, I know they exist. (Advertising people would say, “They are in my decision set.”)

We will keep an eye on the situation but I think it is important to know exactly what the data captures and what it does not capture. It tells you how many people clicked on your ad. It does not tell you how many people noticed your ad and will be aware of your existence. That’s worth something.