Web analytics data allows you to make decisions about marketing for your practice or your health and wellness company on the basis of data, rather than having to rely on gut feelings. But Google Analytics contains such a wealth of data, you may find yourself feeling overwhelmed. What are the top 5 Google Analytics reports for healthcare marketers? Which are the reports you should look at as part of your weekly routine? Which ones will give you the best ROI?
Here are our recommendations for the can’t-miss reports every healthcare marketer should be checking. The screenshots come from our lab site, FreshPlans.
Reports snapshot
The Reports Snapshot tells you how many visits your website has received, and how your visitors have engaged with your website. By default, it shows you the past seven days, but you can change that. We recommend clicking on the comparison button and checking the previous time period.
The screenshot above shows that our lab site had a 30.4% decrease in traffic. Our audience is K-12 teachers, so we are not alarmed that they weren’t visiting during the Christmas holidays. We can see that they came back with a spike the day after New Year’s Day. If we missed it, Google will point it out to us, as you can see in the screenshot below. Hover on any surprising points to get these insights.
This basic report is like taking your website’s temperature. You can see how your overall traffic is shaping up.
Location
If you’re marketing for a doctor’s office or a healthcare facility, gym or a hospital, you probably want to appeal most to people in your physical area. New patients, clients, or students will probably come from your local area. That means that the Location report is an important report for you. It tells you where your visitors came from.
Find this report at User attributes> Demographic details> Cities.
Our lab site has an international audience, so we’re seeing different countries in the screenshot above. You might want to cast a larger net if you want to find new team members or if you know that you serve college students whose parents might look for a doctor for them from their home town. If medical tourism is part of your marketing mix, you may want to target different places from your neighborhood. And of course e-commerce sales can come from anywhere.
In most cases, however, healthcare wants to focus on local search. If that’s the case for you, the cities report will show you the towns that bring you traffic. If local traffic doesn’t make up the bulk of your audience, you’re not communicating well with the search engines.
Channels report
The Channels report tells you how your web visitors find you. It is Acquisition> Traffic acquisition> Channels. You should generally see Organic Search first for a well-optimized website. Next in the screenshot above comes Direct, mostly made up of people who have typed in your URL or used a bookmark. If you don’t much direct traffic, train your team to ask patients, “Have you visited our website? There’s lots of good information there and you can visit the patient portal, too.” Your website might allow people to pay their bills and see upcoming events, book appointments online, or send secure messages; let your patients know the value and they’ll be more likely to visit.
Referrals traffic is next for our example, followed by Social media. You might receive referrals from local directories, sites like Healthgrades, or even area blogs. You may also have paid search, email, or other channels. This report lets you see what’s working and what needs work. For us, we knew we had a holiday dip in our traffic, but we see that referrals were up quite a bit. That’s worth looking into further.
By using the search function to isolate referral traffic and then adding the secondary dimension of traffic source/medium, as shown in the screenshot below, we see that we had a bunch of bot visits while our teacher audience was on vacation. The #2 referral traffic source was Pinterest, which is typically #1 for us. Once again, the surprises are worth looking at. In this case, it was fake traffic from a bot.
Pages and screens
What content brings people to your website, and what kind of information do they use once they arrive? Visits to your insurance page or your About Us page tell you that your web visitors are at least thinking about signing up with you. Visits to your blog posts or articles show the issues that are of concern to your visitors.
Pages that get less traffic could be more specialized, but they might also be due for a revamp. In our example above, we see that the homepage had a rise even though the website overall was having a holiday rest. We can guess that this was probably the aforementioned bot traffic. But we also see that the Wizard of Oz lesson plans are having a moment, probably on the heels of the release of Wicked. That means it’s a good time to polish up that post, or even to add plans for the movie.
Events
If you have conversions set up in Google Analytics, you should check the Events report.
You can set up custom goals, or use common events like downloading files or making Ecommerce purchases. This report lets you know whether the number of visitors doing what you want them to do is increasing or decreasing.
These are the key Google Analytics reports for healthcare marketers. Add these pages to your Monday morning or your Friday wrap-up and you’ll have a good idea of how well your website is performing. If you need help with analytics, contact us.
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