Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions)
We will go first to Heath Terry with Credit Suisse.
Heath Terry - Credit Suisse
Great. Thank you. I was wondering if you could just talk about what kind of changes, what you are seeing as you move up in the rankings on Google and we've certainly noticed that, how immediate is the change that you are seeing in traffic from the search engines, the [natural] search engines?
And do you have the kind of granularity to talk about the differences in traffic that you are seeing in keywords or subject areas where you have high ranking on certain search results versus those where you are still lagging?
Wayne Gattinella
Yes, Heath, this is Wayne. We have seen, since we implemented our new technology platform in the first quarter, a continuing and a steady increase in our search engine optimized traffic as we continue to focus on moving WebMD up in a sort of the free related search results.
One of the impacts is that the ?pages per user? you could see it has come down a little bit over the past couple of sequential quarters, because the optimized traffic that you get from search engine referrals typically goes directly to an article on the site rather than the homepage on the site. And the result is you tend to see slightly less page utilization, although over time, we expect that to turn around as we create new WebMD users.
We have focused primarily on the areas where sponsors are most interested in driving their promotion and ad programs. So to your question as to where we've kind of invested most of our initial time and effort, it's been in those key areas in targeted terms that are most relevant towards the biopharma market, so in key condition areas, key lifestyle, health and management areas and sort of the long tail terms that relate to that.
But we’ve been pleased with the progress to date. It's a continuing process. It's not something that is by any stretch sort of a checkbox and complete. It's an area that we will continue to optimize and improve and it over time will become a more significant part of our revenue mix as we focus on it.
Heath Terry - Credit Suisse
And since the partnerships that you sign generally aren't directly tied to page views: how long does it generally take for an increase in revenues or increase in page views, say, you see a 10% increase in total page views across the site to show up in revenue?
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
