Your website is one of the most important assets your business has. As a healthcare business, new patients are most often finding you through the internet. Ensuring you have an easy-to-read and fast-loading website that offers valuable content to the readers is an important factor in creating your online presence.
Now that you have this website, how do you get potential patients to your site? You can start by understanding the metrics behind your site and how they can help increase your website traffic.
In this article, we will discuss the importance of website metrics and which ones are important for you to measure. From page visits to bounce rate, you’ll be able to view your metrics and understand exactly where your website visitors are coming from and how to get more.
Why Website Metrics Matter
Website metrics are how you measure your site’s performance. Metrics tell you what’s working, what’s not, and where you can improve.
Without paying attention to your metrics, you’re working off assumptions, and you really have no idea how much your website helps your business grow or the opportunities you’re missing.
Luckily, there are tools out there to make the understanding of metrics more manageable. You may not have thought you were signing up to be an analyst when you first joined the healthcare industry. But being fluent in Google Analytics is a helpful way to gain insight into your website visitors and your overall marketing efforts.
Behind every hospital or urgent care facility, every private practice healthcare business, there’s a marketing function hard at work. And while the types of medical practices vary, there is one undercurrent running throughout them all: data.
Understanding what information to pull out of that data and use it towards your marketing efforts will help you increase your website traffic. Below we will discuss what metrics to focus on and how they can help you better understand your website visitors.
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Website Metrics You Should Measure
While it may seem like there are numerous metrics to measure, understanding which ones are best for a healthcare business is crucial. Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean you should. Here are 5 essential marketing metrics every medical practice should be tracking and holding their marketing teams accountable for.
Website Traffic
Traffic is essential for any website; this metric tells you how many visits your site receives. It tells you how many people visit your website over a given time and can even compare time periods like week over week or month over month. Using this metric is a great way to tell if your website is growing, standing still, or even in decline.
How To Measure Website Traffic
If you are using the Google Analytics platform, here are easy-to-follow steps to measure traffic to your website.
- Login to your Google Analytics platform
- Click Audience in the left navigation
- Select Overview
- Check the Sessions metric. Google describes this number as: “The period of time a user is active on your site or app.”
Traffic Sources
Once you’ve learned how many visits your website receives, it’s important to know where that traffic is coming from. Did that click on a link from your social media post? Were you mentioned on another website with a link to your site? This metric will help answer those questions and more. Once you know what’s working, you can decide which efforts to focus on and which ones to ditch.
When using Google Analytics, this is how the information is broken down.
- Direct: Traffic from entering your URL directly into the browser address bar
- Social: Visit from social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
- Email: Clicks from email campaigns or links within any email message sent
- Organic Search: Traffic from search engines like Google
- Referral: A visit to your site from a link on another page
- (Other): Even Google gets stumped. When Google Analytics isn’t quite sure how to categorize visits, it’ll add them under Other.
How To Measure Traffic Sources
- Open Google Analytics
- Click Acquisition
- Select Overview to view your traffic source breakdown
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Search Engine Impressions and Clicks
Search engines are one of the best ways to increase traffic to your website. As a healthcare provider, people are often searching for answers to their medical problems. If your website has valuable content that can answer their questions, Google will find it.
Google defines impressions as ‘How often someone saw a link to your site on Google.’ Clicks are defined as ‘How often someone clicked a link from Google to your site.’ Impressions and clicks go hand in hand; often, as impressions increase, so will clicks. But if you see impressions increase and clicks staying stagnant, this gives you some opportunities to improve.
How To Measure Search Engine Impressions and Clicks
Google Search Console is a great way to measure impressions and clicks. Once you’re set up, here’s how to measure impressions and clicks.
- Open Search Console
- Select your website property
- Click Search Results in the navigation
- Make sure Total Clicks and Total Impressions are selected
How To Improve Your Impressions and Clicks
To boost your impressions, you need to produce high-quality content that offers value to the readers. Google recognizes you as a trustworthy site and moves you up the rankings.
You need more people to click on your link in the Google search results to boost your clicks. Be sure to use a strong headline for your blogs and a descriptive excerpt. This way, readers will know exactly what to expect from what they are about to click on. Guide them to click with intriguing language, giving hints as to what they will learn from your post without giving them all the information in that first sentence. The more valuable your content comes across to readers, the more your clicks will increase.
Conversions
What’s the number one action you want someone to take when they visit your website? Is it to book an appointment on your site? Call the office to schedule an appointment? Whatever it may be, you can often measure your goal with Google Analytics.
How To Measure Conversions
In Google Analytics, you can measure goals in four ways.
- Destination: Visiting a specific URL on your site.
- Duration: Sessions that last a specific amount of time or longer, like 1 minute or more spent on your site.
- Pages/visit: The number of pages you’d like people to visit per session.
- Events: An action you desire people to take on your website, such as played a video or clicked a CTA.
By measuring your goal conversion, you get a look into your site’s performance and the progress you’re making toward your goals. Use a specific link for appointment booking. Create an informative video about your practice on the homepage. Give readers a reason to visit and stay on your website. Then give them clear actions to take to move further down the line to becoming a patient. By incorporating these into your website, you can measure the success of your efforts.
Here’s how to view your conversions in Google Analytics.
- Open Google Analytics
- Click Conversions
- Select Goals
- Choose Overview. From here, you’ll get a snapshot of your site’s performance.
RELATED: 6 Tips to Master Social Media Marketing for Doctors
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is an important metric that puts a number on your website’s appeal toward incoming traffic. Bounce rate measures the number of visitors who leave the site after viewing only one page without interacting with its content. Google calls these ‘single-page sessions.’
A high bounce rate sends bad signals to search engines and could lower your ranking on search results. If visitors keep leaving your site like this, it means they haven’t found anything relevant or valuable to them. An average bounce rate is between 40 to 60%. If your bounce rate far exceeds that, it’s time to change things up.
How To Measure Bounce Rate
In Google Analytics, you can see the bounce rate metric in reports that include a data table. These reports can be found in the Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion tabs on the left menu bar.
Final Thoughts
The trick to using these metrics properly is to identify which metrics can help you assess whether your website meets the needs of your business. If you try to measure all metrics at once without any purpose, you’ll quickly become overwhelmed and obsessed with improving the numbers in your Google Analytics dashboard.
Instead, focus on generating insights from the metrics you’re measuring’insights that you can convert into actionable knowledge for improving the user experience on your site.
Finding the time and bandwidth to focus on these metrics may pose a challenge to your business. Market Hardware can be your marketing partner to help manage those metrics for you. Reach out to us today to learn more about how we can help increase your website traffic.
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