Most business leaders are familiar with web analytics, and many have taken steps to acquire or monitor them on a consistent basis. Recent estimates for the number of companies using Google Analytics range from 30 to 50 million. But how many of us are regularly taking the time to truly decipher and utilize the most valuable analytics available to us?
If you’re not investing time and energy in this process, you’re missing out on opportunities to improve your sales numbers and customer experiences. In this article, I’ll walk through the five most useful figures from Google Analytics that your company should be gathering, watching and putting to good use.
1. Where did your visitors come from? Do they already know who you are? Tracking the origin source of your page visitors will tell you whether they came upon your business or site intentionally or coincidentally. Origin analytics will point out the visitors who used search engines -- and whether they typed in keywords related to your service (which can be noted and added into your SEO process) or whether they typed in the name of your company (which denotes a visitor who was already acquainted with your business). These analytics can also tell you whether your visitor arrived via another website or referral link. Understanding the points of origin for your web traffic is critical to identifying new ways to increase your visitor rate.
2. What do visitors do when they arrive at your website? Once you understand where your visitors are originating, begin watching their movements while on your site. Look at your time logs for each page to see how long visitors are staying with each bit of content. Analyze the typical pathway that visitors use to navigate your site. When you identify patterns of behavior among visitors, you can streamline those preferred pathways for easier and more engaging interaction.
3. Where do your visitors drop off? The last page your visitors land on before exiting your site is called the “exit page.” We recommend taking a close look at the page or pages that most commonly result in visitor exits from your site because these are your prime opportunities for content improvement. Exit pages are the points on your site that most readily lose your visitors’ interest, and there could be myriad reasons why. Examine these pages for long-winded, redundant or boring copy, poor or missing visuals.
4. How engaged are your visitors? What actions are they taking? Analyze your visitors’ actions while on your site. What are they clicking on? Are they taking the actions prompted for them? We recommend leveraging heat maps as part of your analytics monitoring, to see where your visitors are lingering and taking action and where they’re not. Then, consider placing call-to-action opportunities at high-interest points. This can help generate positive results. For example, in a digital campaign with one of the nation’s leading multi-state healthcare providers, MyHealthDirect observed that having a “schedule now” button increased patient bookings by five times. Similarly, Mozilla drove a large increase of downloads for their Firebox browser with the specific call to action, “Download Now – Free.”
5. Finally – what’s your conversion rate? The single most important analytics metric to watch is your conversion rate. This figure represents the number of visitors who turn into customers – perhaps by adding a product to their carts (which by the way is on average 8.7% for Monetate customers) or actually completing a sale (1-2% on average). You’ll find that as you make improvements to the other analytics mentioned here, your conversion rate will improve tremendously. We recommend making a habit of tracking your conversion rate over time to gauge big-picture progress.
Unlike the industries that are routinely using web analytics to improve ROI (such as retail, banking and hospitality sectors), healthcare is an industry that often struggles to make full use of available digital technology.
At MyHealthDirect, we’ve seen that phenomenon firsthand with the rate of adoption of self-scheduling and digital care coordination tools. While some healthcare frontrunners are making the investment in such technology, others are lagging. This reluctant attitude towards technology also plays out when it comes to utilization of web analytics. We find that many healthcare organizations and systems aren’t monitoring their users, patients and providers’ site activity. To help remedy this, MyHealthDirect has incorporated detailed but easy-to-use web analytics monitoring into the digital care coordination solution we provide to our clients in the healthcare industry. Clients who take the time to act on their analytics see positive results (our clients report an excellent conversation rate of 30% while using our solution) -- while identifying opportunities for continuous improvement.
Take a lesson from our experiences working with both early adopters and slow adopters. Seek out a system for monitoring and tracking the most useful web analytics for your business and put a process in place to systematically improve your web presence. Your bottom line will thank you.
