With the growth of analytics, marketing departments have access to an ever-increasing number of report types. Focusing on the right healthcare website analytics to inform decisions is challenging.
By identifying the right key performance indicators (KPIs), you can determine your website’s effectiveness and make better decisions based on your patients’ needs.
Keep reading to discover what KPIs are most valuable to optimize your healthcare website and the user experience to best support marketing goals.
What are website analytics?
Website analytics are made up of all the data collected from a website. Collecting and analyzing data is a critical component of smart marketing. Their main purpose is to paint a comprehensive picture of how and why patients use a site and identify potential friction points.
The first step to getting better results from healthcare analytics is to tailor data collection to the field of healthcare and all its unique needs and challenges. Start by prioritizing the KPIs that reflect the patient experience and defining what a successful conversion looks like. Online sales are not a relevant indicator for healthcare website performance. Instead, look at conversions like appointment requests, donations, or number of contacts to your physician’s office.
Measuring healthcare website results
Build a successful website analytics process by incorporating these seven factors into your reports.
User flows
User flows map the steps patients take on your website. This report identifies the features that help users progress in their journey, the pivot points that help them make decisions, and the pages and paths that are more popular than others.
Generating user flows also shows common exit points at the end of user sessions, giving invaluable insights into which features and pages cause session abandonment.
Average page views and time spent on pages
You can study sessions in more details with these KPIs:
- Average page views tell you how many pages users typically visit during a session. Is there a process of content discovery? Or do users tend to visit a few pages to find quick answers?
- Time spent on pages reveals which pages have content users want to engage with, which ones act as stepping stones in their journey, and which ones don’t meet their expectations.
While these metrics can be enlightening, tread lightly since you can interpret these data points in multiple ways. If your website is difficult to navigate, users may have higher page views per session because they click several times to find information. The same could be true for time spent on-page if users are sifting and digging through dense pages.
Alternatively, with this information, you might identify what types and topics of content your patients find most valuable, such as spending more time on pillar pages, and shift your marketing tactics more toward those ideas.
Demographics
You can better understand your target audience needs by looking at demographics, such as age group, location, devices used, and first-time users vs. returning users. Profiles with different characteristics and goals may also emerge when you combine demographics with user flow.
Traffic sources and top landing pages
Healthcare website analytics reports about your top landing pages help you understand where the user journey typically begins.
Comparing traffic sources provides insight into how users find your website and which campaigns and outreach efforts yield the best results. You can also combine traffic sources with conversions to assess which channels result in the most appointment requests or other actions.
Bounce rate
Your bounce rate tells you the percentage of users who leave your site almost immediately. A high bounce rate could be tied to a poor user experience, slow loading speed, or a landing page that doesn’t correspond with what the user was looking for.
Conversions
Conversion reports show the percentage of users who turn into leads. You can track conversions for a specific page, campaign, or piece of content. This is a valuable KPI that reveals the kind of content that works best to get users to take action.
On-site search trends
Analytics reports from your search box lead to some enlightening insights about search trends and how they evolve. You can use these reports to identify topics gaining popularity, spot seasonal trends in searches, and pinpoint the most common action-oriented searches.
Search trends help you understand what people want to accomplish on your site, which features might be difficult to find, and identify new content topics that will add value to your users.
Get started tracking KPIs for your healthcare website
Want better results from your healthcare website analytics? TBH Creative offers data collection and reporting tools designed to make analytics accessible and actionable. Our data experts will identify the most relevant KPIs and reporting tools for your goals and do the heavy lifting to provide you with data-driven answers to your questions.
