[Oct 24] The Carbon Footprint of The Internet - Analysing the Carbon Emissions of the World's Most Visited Sites

In the fast-paced world of private healthcare, clinics often struggle with marketing agencies that fail to deliver tangible, measurable results. The relationship between marketing agencies and private healthcare clinics is frequently strained due to two significant issues: 1. Inaccurate Attribution of New Patients: Nearly 40% of new patient enquiries come from phone calls. Many marketing agencies lack the necessary tools to track these accurately, leading to incomplete and unreliable reporting. 2. Narrow Focus on Specific Marketing Channels: Many agencies excel in only one or two areas, such as Google Ads or social media funnels. While this can drive growth in those areas, it often leads to overlooked opportunities, such as website optimisation, which can severely hamper the clinic's overall growth success. Clinics are also often locked into 12-month contracts, wasting valuable time on a revenue growth that needs to be fully aligned with their growth objectives. This causes stagnation, with only the marketing agency benefiting in the short term. Clinic owners are frustrated and hindered in their long-term growth.

Quick Article Stats UK Search Engine Market Share in October 2024 Google: 93.61% Bing UK: 3.91% Yahoo UK: 1.37% DuckDuckGo: 0.6% Worldwide Search Engine Market Share in October 2024 Google: 90.01% Bing: 3.95% Yandex: 2.34% Yahoo: 1.35% Baidu: 0.81% DuckDuckGo: 0.65% Quick summary: Google continues to be the most widely used search engine in the UK with a market share of 93.61% despite the numerous privacy-related controversies, antitrust investigations, and other problems it has faced such as the feedback from the release of AI Overviews. As of October 2024, Google commands a 93.61% share in the UK, which is lower than the 94.42% held in August 2024, suggesting a very small decline in market share. In February 2024 Bing held its highest-ever search engine market share at 4.22%, It has steadily declined monthly to 3.38% in August 2024, before slightly picking up in October 3.91%. Google's growth over 2023 and continuing into 2024 is extra impressive after the release of ChatGPT 4.o - In early May 2024, Microsoft introduced a new version of its Bing search engine, which came equipped with an innovative ChatGPT feature. It will be interesting to see the impact of SearchGPT on Google's market share in the coming months.

It's all very well launching marketing campaigns that will bring in new customers, but if you don't know the cost to aqcuire a patient, how do you know what is working? And if you need to know what is working, how do you know where to spend for future growth? Put simply, you don't. Understanding your patient acquisition cost (PAC) is the most critical metric for clinics and their marketing agencies to increase their clinic's bottom line. It's common in healthcare marketing : ag encies invest in marketing campaigns without the necessary systems to accurately attribute their success. For instance, adding a chat widget to a site without clearly understanding which chats lead to conversions or labelling all calls from Google ads as 'leads'. This lack of precision can lead to misguided spending and missed opportunities. Identifying the leads that successfully convert into patients is the key to understanding what's truly effective in your marketing strategy. Without this knowledge, your spending may not be directed to the most beneficial areas, leading to wasted resources and a missed chance for sustainable growth. What is patient acquisition cost? PAC stands for Patient Acquisition Cost (PAC), which represents the amount spent on acquiring a new patient for your healthcare practice. You or your marketing agency must be well-informed about these figures to ensure sustainable clinic growth. It serves as the primary metric for evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing spend. The goal is to minimize this cost relative to your customer's lifetime value (CLV). It also serves as the foundation for your clinic's growth, as understanding exactly how much it costs to acquire a patient enables you to plan your clinic's growth effectively. How do you determine patient acquisition cost? It is essential to define the elements that contribute to deciding on PAC. Cost per lead (CPL): The cost to acquire a lead. Patient Conversion Rate (PCR): Your lead-to-sale conversion rate Patient Acquisition Cost (PAC): The cost to acquire a new patient To determine your patient acquisition cost, you use this simple formula: Cost Per Lead / Conversion Rate = Patient Acquisition Cost Clinics that partner with Klatch often experience a cost per lead (CPL) of about £25, resulting in a patient acquisition cost of £35.71 with a 70% lead-to-sale conversion rate. This informs you that if you spend £700 on marketing next month, you'll bring in an average of 20 new patients. If your customer lifetime value is £500, this will result in £10,000 of new business. Future planning and marketing spending becomes much simpler when you know your true PAC and can adjust your marketing spending based on your growth goals. Why is getting an actual patient acquisition cost so difficult for clinics? This all begins with setting up the correct lead attribution. You can only obtain a valid CPL if you track new leads effectively across all routes, including calls, forms and emails. With a valid CPL, it's possible to determine your clinic's PAC. This is the primary reason we have set up our unique lead tracking software : to enable clinics and their marketing agencies to obtain a valid CPL by tracking calls, forms, emails, chat widgets, etc. Once this is in place, you can determine your valid PAC. How can understanding your actual PAC fuel growth? When you understand precisely how much revenue you generate from your marketing spend, your marketing actions become much more accountable. It becomes more of a 'put this much money in' to 'get this much money out' scenario. It's a very nice scenario for a clinic owner and much less arbitrary than most current approaches. On top of that, you can start to decipher channel performance MoM and plan accordingly. Let's say your Google Ads PAC increases 20% to £42 MoM. As a marketing agency or clinic owner, this is extremely powerful as you know exactly where your previous month's inefficiencies lie and can plan accordingly. This ensures that lead figures are much more stable and sustainable over time. At Klatch, we use PAC as our clinic's north star metric, which enables us to understand marketing performance and truly build sustainable clinic growth.

Many clinics come to Klatch because they need to acquire more patients. Acquisition is often called the first stage of a customer's journey, followed by activation, retention, referral, and revenue. These stages are proposed here as subsequent stages of a simplified marketing funnel, sometimes referred to as the AAARR framework in marketing. One of the most immediate and impactful ways to grow your clinic's revenue is to acquire new patients. Building out your clinic's growth process has three phases: High-level strategy Quarterly planning In-quarter execution Stage 1: High-Level Strategy When starting with Klatch, the first and crucial phase is defining your growth model, mapping your customer journey, and identifying your growth channels. By mapping growth metrics to the customer journey and adapting channels and tactics accordingly, clinics can create effective marketing strategies to fuel growth. Klatch's expertise in all growth channels makes us uniquely positioned to leverage our knowledge and focus in the right places to grow your clinic. When looking at acquisition for clinic growth, which is usually the biggest opportunity to grow revenue for clinics, we're focusing on the channels and tactics you use to introduce patients to your service and make them convert: SEO PPC Social Media Website optimisation (CRO)

Chiswick-Physio was founded in 2008 by Nathan Carter, an established and well-respected musculoskeletal physiotherapist with long-standing ties to the local community. Nathan has been based in the Chiswick area since 2002 and has helped countless individuals progress through their recovery back to full health. Chiswick-Physio required an optimised website as they had outgrown their existing website built with Squarespace. Klatch was tasked with managing the website migration progress to ensure an effective foundation for future growth. Below, we run through the steps we performed for their website migration, contributing to 55 new leads from organic search alone in the first full month of their website going live.

In the last ten years, healthcare marketing has undergone several significant changes that have altered its fundamental principles. According to the Journal of Medicine and Life , the dynamic evolution of life has inevitably impacted the healthcare system, making healthcare marketing an essential component of health brands. It is crucial for healthcare companies to adopt effective marketing strategies to ensure continued growth and patient success. Klatch employed an integrated digital marketing strategy that helped a healthcare client expand from one to three practices, resulting in a remarkable 366% growth in a span of just 24 months. In this article, we will outline the exact steps and processes that were taken to achieve this astounding growth. Table of Contents What is an integrated healthcare marketing strategy? What is SEO? What is PPC? What is CRO? Leverage the entirety of the search engine results page (SERP) Lower the barrier to enquiry Showcase authority, credibility and proof Create a problem-focused content strategy Make sure your pages load fast Implement effective tracking across all enquiry routes Tracking marketing return on investment Tracking organic search performance What is an integrated healthcare marketing strategy? An integrated healthcare marketing strategy optimises a healthcare clinic's online presence to get more visibility and leads from search engine users. According to Google Health Vice President David Feinberg , about 7% of Google's daily searches are health-related. With over 70,000 search queries every minute, this translates into over 1 billion daily. Effective digital marketing can help various healthcare providers across the healthcare industry. This includes healthcare professionals from doctors to chiropractors, e-commerce websites, medical software, and pharmacies. But getting more traffic is only half the story. You'll need to ensure that your website performance and conversions are optimised. That's where leveraging SEO, PPC, and CRO comes into play. What is SEO? SEO is about improving your website to rank higher on search engines like Google, making it easier for people to find your site. What is PPC? PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, is an online advertising model where advertisers pay a fee each time their ad is clicked, driving traffic to their website. What is CRO? CRO, or Conversion Rate Optimisations, is improving your website to increase the percentage of visitors who take desired actions, such as submitting a lead or booking a consultation. Leveraging these three pillars of acquisition, SEO, PPC, and CRO can help your site generate cost-effective leads quickly and sustainably, limit costs and drive leads to increase patient numbers. Leverage the entirety of the search engine results page (SERP) Search engine ads: Google Ads and Bing Ads Leveraging search engine ads enables you to tap into high-intent searches immediately. Here are some keyword examples are below: Dentist near me (301,000 searches a month, London, UK). Physical therapy near me (1,300 monthly searches, Los Angeles, California). Sciatica Treatment (27,100 searches a month in Bristol, UK). The increased high-intent traffic also enables you to start looking into CRO improvements through tools like Hotjar. Ensure an effective and holistic local SEO approach Local SEO focuses on a business's online presence to attract more customers from local searches. There are two primary ways to attract high-intent traffic through local searches: Location relevant queries Google My Business profile You can dominate search results and drive traffic by leveraging SEO and Google Ads effectively. Below, you can see how Klatch has utilised all search real estate for their client's benefit. Google Ads Google My Business Location #1 Google My Business Location #2 Organic position #1 

Klatch is excited to announce our partnership with Dr. Voice, the world's leading voice surgeon. Dr. Voice, or Ismail Koçak, has been a voice specialist since 1993, starting his career as a musician and now specialising in professional voice treatment and vocal coaching.

"We are in the midst of sea change - a tidal wave might be more accurate - with the medium of photography. While the lens is still firmly fixed to the camera body, the body itself appears to have imploded. The inner workings, that is—the guts of the camera from Talbot’s days (when cameras were called “mousetraps” by his wife who was always tripping over them) have changed faster than anyone expected." "The digital camera, the D-SLR, has become the new tool for lens based professionals and artists almost overnight. Everywhere. We all have them now. But the pictures have not changed. Nor have the ground rules for making them. The need for pictures that make a mark on our lives, that give meaning to experience, that park themselves deep in our consciousness, the way new music always does, has never been greater, the appetite for lens based visual culture stands above most other mediums of communication hands down." "In the art world, photography has stepped forward as the most important art medium of our times." "Roberta Smith, writing for New York Times a few years back, put it this way (and I am paraphrasing here): “In the last 30 years no medium has had a more profound effect on art than the medium of photography.” This, mind you, comes from one of America’s foremost critics of sculpture!" "There is a bus station in Helsinki I want to introduce you to, a bus station just next to Eliel Saarinen’s famous train station. Surrounded by Jugenstil architectural gems like the National Theater and the National Art Museum, the bus station makes a cool backdrop for Magnum wannabees armed with D-SLRs and vintage Leica’s." "You might find yourself there sometime, too." "But getting back to the bus station and what makes it famous, at least among the students I teach at UMass Lowell, the University of Art & Design Helsinki, École d’Art Appliqués in Lausanne, or the many workshops I give in Tuscany, Maine and Santa Fe, is the metaphor it offers students and professionals alike for creative continuity in a life-long journey in photography, the metaphor it provides to young artists seeking to discover their own unique vision one day." "The Helsinki Bus Station: let me describe what happens there." "Some two-dozen platforms are laid out in a square at the heart of the city. At the head of each platform is a sign posting the numbers of the buses that leave from that particular platform. The bus numbers might read as follows: 21, 71, 58, 33, and 19. "Each bus takes the same route out of the city for a least a kilometer stopping at bus stop intervals along the way where the same numbers are again repeated: 21, 71, 58, 33, and 19." "Now let’s say, again metaphorically speaking, that each bus stop represents one year in the life of a photographer, meaning the third bus stop would represent three years of photographic activity." "Ok, so you have been working for three years making platinum studies of nudes. Call it bus #21." "You take those three years of work on the nude to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the curator asks if you are familiar with the nudes of Irving Penn. His bus, 71, was on the same line. Or you take them to a gallery in Paris and are reminded to check out Bill Brandt, bus 58, and so on." S"hocked, you realize that what you have been doing for three years others have already done." "So you hop off the bus, grab a cab (because life is short) and head straight back to the bus station looking for another platform." "This time you are going to make 8x10 view camera color snapshots of people lying on the beach from a cherry picker crane." "You spend three years at it and three grand and produce a series of works that illicit the same comment: haven’t you seen the work of Richard Misrach? Or, if they are steamy black and white 8x10 camera view of palm trees swaying off a beachfront, haven’t you seen the work of Sally Mann?" "So once again, you get off the bus, grab the cab, race back and find a new platform. This goes on all your creative life, always showing new work, always being compared to others." "What to do?" "It’s simple. Stay on the bus. Stay on the f*cking bus." "Why, because if you do, in time you will begin to see a difference." "The buses that move out of Helsinki stay on the same line but only for a while, maybe a kilometer or two. Then they begin to separate, each number heading off to its own unique destination. Bus 33 suddenly goes north, bus 19 southwest." "For a time maybe 21 and 71 dovetail one another but soon they split off as well, Irving Penn is headed elsewhere." "It’s the separation that makes all the difference, and once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire (that’s why you chose that platform after all), it’s time to look for your breakthrough." "Suddenly your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it." "Your vision takes off." "And as the years mount up and your work takes begins to pile up, it won’t be long before the critics become very intrigued, not just by what separates your work from a Sally Mann or a Ralph Gibson, but by what you did when you first got started!" "You regain the whole bus route in fact. The vintage prints made in twenty years ago are suddenly re-evaluated, and for what it is worth, start selling at a premium." "At the end of the line—where the bus comes to rest and the driver can get out for a smoke or better yet a cup of coffee—that’s when the work is done. It could be the end of your career as an artist or the end of your life for that matter, but your total output is now all there before you, the early (so-called) imitations, the breakthroughs, the peaks and valleys, the closing masterpieces, all with the stamp of your unique vision." "Why, because you stayed on the bus." "When I began photography I was enamored with the work of Ralph Gibson, Duane Michals, and Jerry Uelsmann. I was on their platforms. Each told me that it was possible to use your mind to make pictures. As a copywriter on the Minolta account (before I became a photographer) I wrote: “What happens inside your mind can happen inside a camera.” I took that credo and made it my own. Not with multiple images like Uelsmann or in sequences like Michals. But it was Ralph Gibson’s images that haunted me." "There was this one picture in particular of hands coming up over the prow of boat he made in 1970 that I loved. I had picture of my foot coming over the prow of a Finnish rowboat the other way made in 1976. I am sure his image had inspired mine even though I wasn’t thinking about it when I made my picture." "In 1989, there was a show in Antibes called Three Masters of the Surreal with Eikoh Hosoe, the great Japanese master, Ralph Gibson, and humbly, myself. At the party after the vernissage, I told Ralph about my trepidations when I first began photography. He nodded his head and said," “When I first saw your work (this was in 1975 or thereabouts), I had that feeling of something familiar.” But then he was quick to add: “But you know, it didn’t take you long to find your way.” "I had found the difference. Ralph went on to photograph women and walls, color and surreal light. I continued my bus route less haunted, more assured." "So, our best chance of making our voice and vision heard is to find that common attribute by which the work can be recognized, by which audiences are made curious. It can happen early, as my teacher Harry Callahan stated it: you never get much better than your first important works. And they come soon." "At an auction in London at Sotheby’s a few years back, one of my pieces came up for bidding. It shows my upside down face with mouth wide open on a boardwalk in Narragansett, Rhode Island. When the auctioneer announced the piece, certainly he or she didn’t describe it as a student work, which, in fact, it was. I had made it for Harry’s class." "And it is why I teach. Teachers who say, “Oh, it’s just student work,” should maybe think twice about teaching." "Georges Braque has said that out of limited means, new forms emerge. I say, we find out what we will do by knowing what we will not do." "And so, if your heart is set on 8x10 platinum landscapes in misty southern terrains, work your way through those who inspire you, ride their bus route and damn those who would say you are merely repeating what has been done before. Wait for the months and years to pass and soon your differences will begin to appear with clarity and intelligence, when your originality will become visible, even the works from those very first years of trepidation when everything you did seemed so done before." "We can do a whole lot of things in art, become ten different artists, but if we do that, there is great danger that we will communicate very little in the end. I say ride the bus of your dreams and stay the course." "In closing I now want to take you to Switzerland where I also teach." "Stand back, stand back, far enough so you can see your own mountain top, then head straight for it knowing it will disappear from sight for most of your life as you meander the hidden forest trails that lift you ever higher even as many sections force you to drop down into the mountainside pockets of disappointment or even despair, but you will be climbing soon enough and always headed towards your goal." "There will be those special occasions, and may there be many of them, when the fruits of your labors are suddenly made visible, to be celebrated, when you will again see that peak, only closer now, giving you the confidence to step forward ever more briskly and bravely." "At one point the tree line will thin out the way hair on the top of old man begins to bald away but air will be clear and the path sure." "At the top you will delight in what you have accomplished as much as become aware of peaks far higher than what you had ever dreamed of, peaks that from the distance when you first saw them were hard to judge for their heights." "But now you see them way up there but your climbing days are done." If you look up to those lofty peaks with raging jealousy, you will end your days in sadness and regret. "If you look down at the path you came up, you can become proud or even arrogant if you like of every step you took." "But if you skim the horizon with your eyes and take in the gorgeous sweep of panorama before you, you will know peace and rare humility." "We do not have to be number one in this world. We only have to be number one to ourselves. There is a special peace that comes with such humility, one that showers respect on you from your peers both above and below you." "When you reach this peak in life, you’ve reached highest peak of them all." God can’t bless both sides of a football field anymore than she or he should bless one country over another. "You can’t be number one without having a number deux, tres, quatro, or funf." "It’s a lesson we are back in the classrooms of America learning I think. I hope." "When I see bumper stickers that read my son made the dean’s list, I see all the sons and daughters that didn’t. Tracey Moffatt has this poignant series of works dedicated to athletes who’ve come in fourth place: no gold, no silver, not even bronze. Being number uno? Stardom is no dream to chase. We just need to be good. And make good work." "So, be the caretaker of your vision. Make it famous. And above all, remember, that art is risk made visible." "Good luck and see you out there. You’re going to be great." (STAY ON THE BUS is excerpted from the commencement speech at delivered at the New England School of Photography in June 2004)

Quick internet carbon emission stats: The Internet as a percentage of global greenhouse gas emissions: 3.7% Average internet emissions by person: 414 kgs of carbon dioxide per year per user Total kgs of greenhouse gas emissions globally: 1.7 billion tonnes Source: Climate Impact Partners, 2024 Gary Cook said, "The internet is the single biggest thing we're going to build as a species." in The Environmental Toll of a Netflix Binge. Additionally, nearly 70% of the planet’s population—about 5 billion people—access the internet daily, powering countless digital interactions and driving an ever-growing demand for electricity. In a recent study focusing on the 500+ biggest global websites, we examined their carbon emissions per user. We collected data on the websites’ yearly views and ran these through a carbon calculator to provide us the exact carbon emissions these websites emit. Our analysis reveals the significant impact that our online activities have on the environment and highlights areas for improvement among leading companies. Understanding Emissions Per User Emissions per user refer to the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) generated by a website each time a user visits. This metric considers the energy consumed by data centres, networks, and end-user devices. It doesn’t include embodied emissions, such as the production of computer chips. A high emissions per user rate indicates a significant environmental impact, while a low rate suggests a more sustainable operation. Top 3 Websites with Highest Emissions Per User We have uncovered that certain websites are major contributors to carbon emissions. Based on the data, the top three websites (based on their actual page views) which emit the amount of emissions that trees do are: Pinterest (pinterest.com) - equivalent to the amount of energy 2,589,406 trees absorb… Docomo (docomo.ne.jp) - equivalent to 2,861,352 trees Office.com (office.com) - equivalent to 2,4249,11 trees Companies Not Using Sustainable Energy The transition to sustainable energy is crucial for reducing carbon emissions. Our analysis showed that several websites from the top 50 list do not use sustainable energy sources. These include: Yahoo (yahoo.com) Bing (bing.com) Reddit (reddit.com) Twitter/X (Twitter.com) This means the energy these companies use to power their servers and data centres is still coming from sources that produce a lot of pollution. As a result, their operations contribute significantly to carbon emissions, which harmfully impact the environment. Transitioning to sustainable energy sources would greatly reduce their carbon footprints and help combat climate change. But how are well-known worldwide websites doing? As a leading video streaming platform, YouTube’s high emissions per user are concerning. The energy-intensive nature of streaming services highlights the need for significant improvements in energy efficiency and a shift towards renewable energy sources. Based on yearly pageviews alone, you’d need to boil 413 billion cups of tea to equal the amount of emissions YouTube emits. Netflix has a significant carbon footprint due to streaming high-definition content, requiring further efforts to reduce emissions despite renewable energy investments. 174,976 trees absorb the same amount of energy as Netflix users Facebook has achieved commendable progress in renewable energy adoption, but there is still room for improvement, primarily due to the high popularity and number of visitors to their website. 1,942,696,201 is the cup of tea equivalent here, so considerably less than Youtube.