The Economics of Travel Nurse Contact Information

Travel nurses maybe unaware that there is a burgeoning marketplace centered around collecting and exchanging their personal contact information. Even if you know about this marketplace, you may be shocked to find out just how valuable your personal contact information truly is. In this blog post, we’ll take an in depth look at the economics of “broadcast services” in the travel healthcare industry.

Lead generators vs. broadcast services

Travel nursing companies are always on the hunt for new potential candidates. In the recruitment world, as in the sales world, potential candidates/clients are commonly referred to as “leads.” Finding leads for your specific market can be very difficult. As such, there is a market for services, commonly referred to as lead generators, that can provide the specific type of leads that any given sales organization is searching for.

There are several types of lead generators in the travel healthcare industry. For example, third party job boards like Monster.com, Indeed.com and CareerBuilder.com are a form of lead generator. Agencies post their jobs and interested candidates apply or contact the agency directly. Or, the job board allows candidates to upload their resumes or complete an online resume and then sells agencies access to those resumes.

“Broadcast services” are another type of lead generator. They’re prominent in the travel healthcare industry. These services essentially offer to broadcast a candidate’s interest in travel nursing to multiple agencies. They often make claims like, “Connect immediately with the best travel nursing companies” or, “Let travel nursing companies compete for you” or, “Apply now to the top travel nursing companies in the USA.” Simply put, broadcast services convince travel nursing candidates to provide the service with personal contact information. The service then sells that contact information to healthcare staffing agencies and in some cases anyone willing to purchase it.

There are tons of these services in operation. The more prominent services include travelnursing.org, travelnursesource.com, and rnvip.com. The smaller services include rntravelweb.com, healthcaretraveler-lounge.com, and travelnursingusa.com.

It’s also important to note that some of the largest healthcare staffing companies have their own lead generators. For example, travelnursing.com is owned and operated by AMN Healthcare. The service advertises that, “The top travel nursing companies are waiting.” Of course, a service like this probably doesn’t sell contact information to it’s partners, but that’s only because they’d essentially be selling it to themselves.

The travel nurse broadcast service business model

Now that we have a basic understanding of what a broadcast service is, we can delve into their business models. In order to collect the contact information, broadcast services must first get people to visit their websites. When someone visits a website, it’s commonly referred to as a “page view.” Now, just because someone views a broadcast service doesn’t mean that they’re going to provide their contact information. And the percentage of visitors that perform the desired action on a website is commonly referred to as the “conversion rate.”

So broadcast services invest in websites and various methods to drive traffic to their websites. A certain percentage of visitors “convert” and essentially provide their contact information free of charge to the broadcast service. And the broadcast service then sells that information to third parties.

Cost of operating a broadcast service

Website costs

Now, to fully understand how these operations profit from selling contact information, we have to understand the basic costs they incur. First, remember that broadcast services operate websites. Obviously, there are costs involved with developing and operating these websites. However, these costs are minuscule for broadcast services.

These websites are very basic. They’re what would be considered “Web 1.0” websites. That is, they merely display pre-designed content, collect basic information and store it in a database. Such sites can be developed and maintained for very low cost. Moreover, these sites could easily be developed using content management systems like WordPress. In fact, someone working on their own could  have one of these sites up and running in less than 3 days.

So the cost of developing these websites is relatively low. And the cost of maintaining them is also very low.

Cost of being discovered

Of course, anyone can throw up a website these days; the difficult part is getting discovered. And for broadcast services, getting discovered is paramount. They must drive traffic to their websites in order to get what they need. Without website traffic, they don’t have a business.

While the advent of social media has increased the number of ways that internet users find things on the web, search is still the undisputed king of discovery. In fact, the digital marketer Conductor reports that 47% of all website traffic is driven by natural search while 6% is driven by paid search and only %2 is driven by social media sites.

Conductor also reports that 29% of traffic comes from direct visits. However, my guess is that broadcast services do not get a lot of traffic from direct visits. You see, “direct visits” come from people who already know about your website. For example, when you want to visit Facebook, you don’t search for Facebook, you just type in the URL or click on a bookmark.

Why does this matter? Because broadcast services don’t really give users much of a reason to return to their websites. They provide very little value to the user beyond collecting and distributing their contact information to agencies. Moreover, once a broadcast service has your contact information, they have everything they need and they don’t care if you ever return to their site.

This means that broadcast services rely almost exclusively on natural search and paid search to generate traffic to their sites. The costs of these traffic generation methods make up a significant percentage of a broadcast service’s costs. We’ve included an illustration below in case you’re not familiar with the difference between natural and paid search. Everything inside the red line is a paid advertisement and everything else is the result of Google’s natural search algorithms.

 

It’s important to note that there is a HUGE difference in results between paid and natural search links. Search Engine Journal reports that 70% of the links that search users click on are natural. 70%-80% of users completely ignore the paid advertisements. And a whopping 75% of search users never scroll past the first page of search results.

Moreover, there’s a HUGE difference depending where a site is ranked on the first page. Search Engine Watch reports that the top ranked result gets 33% of the search traffic while the second ranked result gets 18%. The numbers get progressively worse with the 10th spot getting only 2.4% of the traffic.

Travel nursing discovery with natural search

Given the information above, it’s clear that natural search is the best driver of traffic to any website. Moreover, benefiting from natural search requires that your website ranks high in the search results. Discussing how to rank high in search results is outside the scope of this blog post and would probably bore most of you to death. Instead, we’re going to offer a cost estimate for driving natural search traffic based on our own experience with BluePipes.

It took 1 person working full time for approximately 1 year to achieve search rankings similar to those of the major broadcast services. And these results are not extraordinary. The future maintenance of this traffic level will require less than one fifth the time it took to get here. And any additional time spent on the blog will only serve to grow these numbers.

Getting to this point required someone with knowledge of the industry, a fairly high level of technical expertise and knowledge of “search engine optimization” techniques. This isn’t an easy person to come by in the employment market so their salary would be relatively higher than average. Let’s say this person cost a total of $130,000 per year to employ, all benefits and taxes included.

Based on the total number of page views that BluePipes receives versus the number of views that our conversion pages receive, we estimate that our cost per page view will be between $0.50 and $3 over a 5 year period.

It’s also important to note that some broadcast services, like TravelNursing.org and RNvip.com are very small websites with 56 and 21 total pages respectively. In other words, a far greater percentage of their site traffic is landing on their conversion pages because close to every page is a conversion page for them. Moreover, they’re spending far less time developing content in order to drive traffic to their sites.

So what does all this mean? Given the relatively small number of pages that broadcast services have, it’s fair to say that their cost of acquisition for page views derived from natural search is relatively low. We’d be surprised if it were any higher than $3 per page view.

It’s also important to note that only travelnursing.com and travelnursing.org rank on the first page for the most popular search term in the industry “travel nursing.” And remember, travelnursing.com is owned by AMN so we’re not really considering them here. In fact, travelnursing.org is the only broadcast service that ranks on the first page for any of the most popular search terms we checked. By ranking so high in natural search, travelnursing.org is in a much better position than its competitors.

Paid search for travel nursing

That’s because paid advertisements are not cheap. For example, Google recommends bidding between $6 and $8 per click for travel nursing related searches. For example, if you want to place an advertisement on the first page of search results for the search term “best travel nursing agencies”, then Google recommends bidding $6.56 for each click your ad receives.

Of course, there are other ways to advertise. For example, you could place advertisements on travel nursing related blogs.  However, there are very few independently operated websites pertaining to travel healthcare and only a handful get more than 10,000 visitors per month. Moreover, such advertisements get 1 click for every 1,000 views on average.

This is why you will routinely see the broadcast services, with the exception of TravelNursing.org advertising on Google. TravelNurseSource.com and RNvip.com come up almost every time we conduct a search for the top travel nursing search terms.

Bottom line cost per conversion

With all of this wonky mumbo-jumbo in mind, we can make a calculated guess as to how much these broadcast services spend on driving traffic to their websites. When they rely on advertising, it’s fair to say that they spend between $6 and $8 per click. Again, it’s almost impossible to guess how much is being spent on driving natural search traffic. However, we are certain from our own experience that it is much cheaper over time than advertising.

Therefore, we estimate that a website like TravelNursing.org is spending less than $2 per page view because they’re probably getting the majority of their traffic from natural search. Websites like RNvip.com and TravelNurseSource.com are getting their traffic from a combination of natural and paid search. We estimate that they’re spending less than $5 per page view.

Remember though, not every visitor to a broadcast service provides their contact information. Typically speaking, conversion rates run between 10% and 20% for successful web based services. We’ve spoken to many of the broadcast services in the past as potential customers so we now how many leads per month they’re able to provide. Considering those figures along side each website’s Alexa page rank, which is an indicator of how many page views they’re getting per month, demonstrates that broadcast services most likely operate with conversion rates between 10% and 20%.

To put this into context, let’s look at a couple of examples. Let’s say a broadcast service relies heavily on paid search for its traffic and therefore spends an average of $6 per page view. In this case, they’d pay $600 to get 100 page views and get 10 leads if their conversion rate was 10% and 20 leads if their conversion rate was 20%. So it’s costing them $60 per lead or $30 per lead. Remember, this would be a really high cost per page view. So it’s not a very realistic example.

It’s more likely that they’re spending an average of $4 or less per page view. At this rate, they’d pay $400 for 100 page views. So their cost would be $40 per lead if their conversion rate was 10% and $20 per lead if their conversion rate was 20%.

The price of travel nurse contact information

With that in mind, we can look at how much they sell these leads for to estimate how much they profit. Prices for travel nurse contact information vary. Moreover, there are several different pricing plans out there. And many of the more popular broadcast services don’t advertise their pricing and it’s quite difficult to attain. However, we have spoken to all the broadcast services and can attest to the fact that prices tend to coalesce. With that in mind, we’re going to provide 2 sample pricing plans that are indicative of the norm.

First, some services sell their leads as monthly subscriptions. For example, for a monthly fee of $1,200 an agency can receive all the leads that the broadcast service generates in the month. At this price point, they’ll typically generate anywhere from 150 to 300 leads per month. So that comes out to a cost of $4 to $8 per lead.

Under these plans, the broadcast service typically caps the number of agencies they sell the contact information to in the first month. The typical cap is between 15 and 20 agencies. After the month is up, the broadcast service is free to sell the contact information to other parties per their privacy policies.

Why do they have this 30 day cap for 15-20 agencies? The cap ensures that the leads are more valuable to each agency. In other words, if you’re one of 20 agencies contacting the candidate, then you stand a better chance of actually landing the candidate than if you’re one of 100 agencies.

Broadcast services also shy away from selling their leads to the largest healthcare staffing agencies. This is because the smaller and mid-sized agencies would be less apt to purchase the leads as they do not want to compete with larger agencies who have many more job opportunities. Working with smaller and mid-sized agencies gives the broadcast services more potential customers.

Given the numbers above, if each lead is sold to 20 agencies for $4 per lead, then the broadcast service receives $80 for a lead that realistically cost them somewhere between $20 and $40 to generate. Another way to look at this is that the broadcast service sells 20 subscriptions for $1,200 per month, or $24,000, with a profit margin of 50% to 75%. If you consider that these services have very little overhead, this is a very lucrative business.

A broadcast service operating with this model stands to make over $288,000 per year just on their subscription service. And remember, they will turn around and sell the leads to even more interested parties once the 30 day period is up which results in even more revenue. And the more they sell, the more their profit margins increase because the relative cost percentage decreases.

Other services sell their leads on a per lead basis. In other words, agencies pay for each lead individually. Currently, healthcaretraveler-lounge.com sells RN contact information for $5 per lead. RNTravelWeb.com sells their leads for $12 per lead. So the numbers are very similar to the monthly subscriptions described above.

Now, not every broadcast service is this successful. However, the top broadcast services routinely have waiting lists to get into their top tier subscription services. The bottom line is that selling traveler contact information is a very lucrative business. Not everyone is successful at it, but there is a big market nonetheless.

For the record, BluePipes is not a lead generator or broadcast service. We will never sell your personally identifiable or personal contact information to third parties. We provide a robust set of tools for travel healthcare professionals and our business model depends on us keeping your contact information private.