Marketing without measuring the results is a recipe for disaster. Too many healthcare practices invest in marketing but don’t track the results. Google Analytics is by and large the most common and easy-to-use program available. It takes copious amounts of data and distills it down into easy-to-understand reports. But what are the most important marketing statistics to measure?
Website traffic overview
The website traffic overview focuses on the basics of the audiences that are interacting with your website. How many potential patients are visiting your webpage, how many pages did they view, what was the average duration of time spent on your website, which page was the last one that was visited, and the percentage of new sessions.
Website traffic by source
Once you know that people are visiting your webpage, one of the most important elements is to find out exactly how they got there. Website traffic originates from three primary sources: search traffic, direct traffic, and referral traffic. The search traffic is derived from the search results provided by a search engine (Google, Bing, and Yahoo). Direct traffic comes from typing the exact address into the browser abstaining from the use of a search engine. Referral traffic is prospects that came to your website from a 3rd party link that is not a search engine.
Referral traffic
This report is very valuable when you are analyzing the performance of the 3rd party sites with which you are working, whether they are free (Facebook) or paid sites (WebMD). It breakdowns the traffic that 3rd party websites are redirecting to your website and gives you very clear results to weigh the cost vs. benefits when hiring a paid site.
Page popularity
The page popularity report ranks all the pages that exist in your medical practice website and it ranks them in order of popularity. Popularity meaning the number of page views during a certain amount of time. With this statistic, you are able to see which of your pages has the most and least traffic. With this information you are able to create strategies to persuade users to interact with your preferred pages. The “Contact Us” page is an example of a page that you would want viewers to prefer.
SEO keyword positions
This aspect analyzes the quality of the keywords that you are employing to generate traffic. As mentioned previously, a way of getting into your medical practice’s website is through Google (or any other search engine), and some of your potential patients do it not by writing your URL, but by typing certain keywords. Knowing which words to emphasize gives you a significant advantage, allowing you to build content around these words to generate more exposure.
