Healthcare marketing analytics: How to set great goals
Realistic analytics goals are the key to success you can measure.
More engagement. Increased traffic. Longer site visits. These are common goals for healthcare website redesigns and digital campaigns.
But if you set these kinds of goals, you might be setting yourself up for confusion when it's time to report on the results.
It's not that any of these goals are bad in and of themselves. It's just that they're based solely on achieving the "ultimate outcome" rather than on specific pieces of the overall puzzle.
There's a better way.
The following tips can help you set analytics goals that are realistic and that move you through achievable milestones.
Start with a solid baseline
Don't be too quick to dismiss this as something you've already done. There's a big difference between having Google Analytics plugged in on your site and collecting data—and truly being set up to pull the data that you need.
It's imperative that your baseline is pulling data that will give you a solid foundation to compare your new metrics against. You need to make sure that:
- The traffic you are measuring is accurate. Are you filtering out internal traffic? Do you have a large number of redirects coming in that are immediately bouncing? (See our article about guest Wi-Fi settings.) If you aren't measuring traffic that accurately represents your user base, then your campaigns won't demonstrate their full impact in your reporting.
- You've collected enough data. Ideally, you want between 3 to 6 months of data so that you can start to understand the site's natural ebb and flow of traffic trends.
Break down your website traffic
Increasing traffic to your website is a common and easy to measure goal. However, you'll have more success if you take the time to look beyond overall traffic and focus on the main channels your site traffic is coming from. Not all traffic is created equal, and users from each channel will be visiting your site for different reasons. The most common channels hospitals get traffic through are:
- Direct. People who typed in your URL into the search bar or used a bookmark.
- Organic. People who found your site via an online search (e.g., Google).
- Referral. People who clicked on a link to your site or were automatically routed to your site.
- Social. People who arrived from a social media post or page.
- Paid or display. People who clicked on a paid ad campaign.
By analyzing this information, you can begin to understand which users are most engaged with your site and where you may want to focus future campaign efforts.
Define what engagement means for you
Engagement is one of those key areas everyone wants to increase, but engagement can differ from site to site (and even page to page) so it can be tricky to determine what it really means.
Start by defining what your end goal is and then figure out how you'll measure success for that specific goal. For example:
- Do you want people to download a brochure? You may want to set up event tracking.
- Do you want people to fill out a form? Consider creating a funnel tracking how users moved through each page of your form (for longer forms). Or track total users who reach a submission "thank you" page.
The key is to define specifically what engagement looks like and to make sure you have the tools in place to start collecting that data immediately.
Analytics are us
The world of healthcare marketing analytics can be confusing. If you need help defining and measuring goals for your website, reach out to Coffey. Our digital team will work with you to establish goals that are meaningful and measureable. Schedule a meeting with one of our team members.
