Monitoring website traffic and evaluating its performance are the first steps in web analytics for your provider site. Analyzing web data to identify ways to better engage patients-consumers across the site is fundamental. Optimizing key visitor task conversion funnels and working towards improving the overall health of your site are just a few ideas to keep in mind.
Here are some questions you should be asking on a regular basis about analytics:
What does a spike in traffic truly mean? Is this qualified traffic?
When spikes in traffic are discovered, it’s important to understand where your site traffic is coming from and what this means for your site. Consider looking at a breakdown of website traffic by key metrics such as page views, session time, visitors, conversion events (schedule an appointment, find a doctor, find a location etc.) and conversion rates. When you understand where spikes are coming from and how qualified the traffic is, this will assist you in identifying whether the additional visits are likely to turn into new patients.
How are patients and potential consumers engaging with your site?
In addition to monitoring performance of key lead generation/conversion tasks, it’s worth taking a deeper look at engagement. These insights will help you identify how many pages are visited per session, time on site/time on page, repeat visitors, and exchanging of information to name a few. This will help paint a picture of what your website visitors are doing and support you in understanding your audience when making changes to the site and assisting with optimization efforts.
Do you evaluate performance by clinical area for the services provided?
Exploring traffic by different segments such as by clinical area (Heart, Cancer, Orthopedics etc.) across your provider site will provide a comprehensive view into specific patient-consumer digital interactions. Understanding conversion and direction such as drop off points within the funnel (for schedule an appointment, setting up a patient portal account, find a doctor, send a message to name a few), will support you in identifying areas for improvement for specific pages on the site.
Using web analytics data that also includes web session playbacks, online survey data, and heat maps helps to provide a comprehensive view of what is happening across your provider site. With deeper understanding of patient-consumer behavior, you’ll be able to drive recommendations, test hypothesis and optimize conversion funnels across your provider site to ensure you meet patient-consumer needs across your site. By no means is this an easy task.
I would love to hear how you are using web analytics to improve patient-consumer interactions. Please comment below.
