Google Analytics is the most popular web traffic analysis tool. While it offers plenty of data, healthcare marketers need to know which metrics to focus on — and why, if their companies are to get the most value from the tool.
A quick refresher on the basics
Google Analytics (GA) is a free platform that helps businesses track and analyze users visiting their websites. This is important for organizations that have marketing campaigns running because it affords a 360-degree view of the buyer’s journey, as well as where, when and why users are clicking through to your digital hub.
GA also provides accurate performance metrics on your promotional campaigns, empowering you with the data you require to tweak and optimize collateral for better results. GA also uses tracking codes to document user activities and characteristics (age, gender, hobbies, etc.) and feed them to the GA server once users leave your site.
Which Google Analytics metrics are available?
A high-performing website is a happy marriage between relevant content and a keen understanding of your audience demographics. GA metrics help you hone in on your visitors’ likes, dislikes, and activities so that you can better create and deploy content that hooks them. Let’s get into the essential metrics:
- Acquisition: How efficient your website and marketing campaigns are at getting users to visit your online hub.
- Social relationship: Where your content is being shared, on-site engagement, and social media impressions on your website.
- Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who enter your site and then leave before viewing other pages.
- Traffic: An easy-to-use table that lists your traffic sources, including sessions, bounce rates, time spent, and goal conversions.
- Engagement and behavior: Metrics that track your website’s ability to engage and convert visitors into paying customers.
- Conversions: GA helps you keep tabs on a few conversion metrics:
- Conversions to contacts
- Conversions to customers
- Closed deals won by industry
- Blog performance
- Landing page performance
GA offers many more metrics to track, but in the end, it’s up to your healthcare organization to define which of them matter to your KPIs.
How do company goals affect Google Analytics use?
It’s crucial healthcare marketers define their goals before using Google Analytics. Here are the most common healthcare KPIs, and what metrics businesses should focus on to meet or exceed them:
Brand awareness:
- Analyze the subgroups of your website traffic, such as Organic Search, Direct, Social, and Referral.
- Pay close attention to search volume data by using Google Trends and Adwords.
- Track the volume of brand mentions on social channels.
- Establish baseline brand awareness metrics and then measure them against your benchmark to identify any peaks, troughs, or inconsistencies.
Word of mouth (WOM):
- Tracking keyword usage gives you valuable information on who’s searching for your brand, and from where.
- Source tells you the number of users that typed in your brand’s domain name or bookmarked your website.
Leads:
- Landing page traffic and conversion metrics are your best friends here.
- The Acquisition metric splits into Direct, Organic Search, Referral, and many more, offering insight into what’s bringing in the most leads and converting them.
- The Source medium gets granular, highlighting exactly where conversion traffic is coming from.
Sales and revenue:
- The Sales Performance Report assesses total sales and revenue over a specific time period. This new tool comes with GA’s new suite of Enhanced eCommerce solutions.
These metrics are just the tip of the Google Analytics iceberg and only a small example of what lies in store for healthcare marketers who delve deep into its treasure trove of tracking solutions.
Google Analytics — an essential tool for healthcare marketers
Marketing and wider business success depends on how well professionals are able to use the tools at their disposal. As digital continues to become more prolific in the healthcare industry, Google Analytics — or a tool like it — has become indispensable. With decades of combined experience in both healthcare and digital marketing, KBK Communications is uniquely positioned to help healthcare marketers get the most from digital tools.
While Google Analytics helps to provide insight into your marketing efforts, this can be aligned with other tools such as HubSpot, Databox, Google Search Console and many others to give help you visualize critical business insights of what is working and what needs to be tweaked.
In early 2020, our marketing technologists will present the first seminar in an 8-week program to help healthcare organizations shape the customer experience through targeted inbound marketing. Learn how to navigate the world of digital marketing for short-term gain and long-term growth by reserving your spot here.
