Patient Conversation Media, Inc. (PCMi) empowers communication between patients and health care providers via a network of sites. Their ‘digital front door’ offers personalized patient education, appointment services, and easy-to-understand health content.
With 10 million unique users and 220 million impressions per month, Patient Conversation Media recently upgraded its ad server to OpenX Enterprise and plugged into OpenX Market, a global ad exchange. Their eCPM for trusted health content inventory has been soaring ever since. To learn more, Amy Deavoll spoke with Daniel Chow, Director of Advertising Operations at Patient Conversation Media.
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Amy Deavoll [AD]: Tell us about Patient Conversation Media.
Daniel Chow [DC]: Patient Conversation Media’s mission is to reduce health care expense by 5%. We have built a nationally recognized and trusted network of virtual health solutions. Our sites merge patient education, tele-therapy and appointment services to provide what we call eHealth
3.0. This helps patients and physicians improve the overall health care experience.
AD: Your flagship sites are 1-800-Therapist.com and DailyRX.com – what type of traffic do your sites receive?
DC: They receive more than 6 million unique visitors per month. We received over 10 million unique visitors across our entire network of sites in January 2012, which translates to around 220 million monthly impressions.
AD: Patient Conversation Media started out using OpenX OnRamp, then upgraded to OpenX Enterprise. What prompted the switch?
DC: In general, we wanted to make our advertising more relevant to the individual health information seeker. And we needed to take our digital advertising strategy to the next level, especially since we started selling direct. The ability to target ads to specific conditions and keywords is important to our advertising partners, and OpenX Enterprise allows us to do that quite easily.
AD: Prior to OpenX Market, how did you sell your non-guaranteed inventory?
DC: We had a lot of relationships with remnant networks, so we basically had a daisy chain. One of the key benefits of upgrading to OpenX Enterprise is that we were able to get rid of that daisy chain and send our non-guaranteed revenue to OpenX Market.
Learn how Patient Conversation increased their CPMs over 68% with OpenX Market
Daniel Chow, Director of Advertising Operations at Patient Conversation Media
AD: How is OpenX Market working for you?
DC: Our CPMs for general health inventory have gone up an average of 68% after switching to OpenX Market. That’s just the average – sometimes it really spikes. For instance at the end of 2011, we were up 150% thanks to OpenX Market. Plus, our ads are delivered to each user more quickly, which of course leads to better performance.
AD: Have you experienced efficiencies using OpenX Enterprise and OpenX Market together?
DC: Absolutely, especially since OpenX Market is thoroughly integrated with OpenX Enterprise, all we need to do is set a price floor and forget about it.
OpenX Enterprise has a very simple interface. For instance, it’s very easy for us to target our advertising, manage multiple campaigns across multiple networks, and deliver the same campaign across those networks.
We’re also pretty excited about the interface because we quickly determine the status of our campaigns at any given time.
And the real-time reporting is fantastic. We look at those reports multiple times a day.
AD: How would you describe OpenX support?
DC: The OpenX Support team is superb. For any problem we’ve had, our support team responds immediately. They jump right on it!
AD: Any advice for other publishers looking to better monetize their inventory?
DC: I can sum it up in two words: OpenX Market. Access to this ad exchange via OpenX Enterprise is superb: just turn it on and watch your revenues grow.
And the simple interface enables us to make quicker and better informed decisions. We expected to hire additional staff, but have yet to do so as these efficiencies have allowed us to keep our costs down. That gives us a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Check out the case study with Patient Conversation.