The Power of Google Analytics

Having a website to represent your practice is a great first step in establishing your online presence.  But let’s face it, even if you have the most beautiful website on the planet, that doesn’t mean that new business is going to suddenly come gushing through your door…or that your shiny new website is going to deliver the results that you’d expected.  We hear the story again and again from physicians: they drop thousands of dollars for a customized website chock-full of nifty graphics and design, and yeah, it LOOKS pretty but it’s not DOING anything for their business.  At Medical Site Solutions, we use the following analogy: having a gorgeous website without SEO (or an understanding of SEO) is like having a pretty new sail boat with no wind to propel it forward (we’ll talk a lot more about SEO in the coming months).
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Unfortunately appearance isn’t the only factor in having an EFFECTIVE website.  There could be many reasons why your current website isn’t delivering.  At the very minimum, every physician needs to know about Google Analytics and why it’s an absolutely invaluable tool for your practice.  Google Analytics is absolutely AWESOME.  Yes, that’s AWESOME in all caps.  In a nutshell, Google Analytics is a website tracking service that can be embedded into your website.  It is working 24/7 and silently watches all the visitors that come on to your website.  You can see how patients come to your site, where they click on the site, how long they stay on each page, the length of their session, where they are geographically, and much more.  This service offers a boatload of invaluable marketing data and statistics.  The bottom line is this: having knowledge and insight as to where your traffic is coming from and the activity taking place can greatly enhance the performance of your website. 

Here’s how:
Because Google Analytics tells you about visitor behavior and HOW patients get to your website, you’ll be able to tell which links or social media avenues are most effective for your practice, specifically focusing your marketing efforts in those places.
♦  You’ll be able to see, in hard numbers, which pages are the most popular on your website (and how long each visitor stays on that page). Knowing which pages are the most important and the most viewed is power.  Why?  Because you can now make adjustments and improvements to your website that yield the results you want.  These are the pages where important messaging can be refined (or where you may want to add call-to-action buttons).
♦  Again, we will talk more about SEO in the future, but for now, just know that there is a correlative relationship between Search Engine Optimization and Google Analytics. Understanding and reviewing this relationship regularly is intrinsic to the overall success of your website.
♦  Google Analytics is also essential to SEO because the analytics pinpoint which keywords are effective. This is critical in creating effective advertising campaigns or improving your PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns.  And this is where is becomes REALLY important: for advertising campaigns, tracking reveals performance in leads captured and converted.
Google Analytics is an incredible tool and can be set up to generate reports that are user-friendly and ridiculously informative.  Installing Google Analytics involves a little programming which includes embedding code on each page of your website (or embedding it to the root of your site).  The great news is, at Medical Site Solutions we offer a package (our Premier Plus package) where this is automatically done as part of your monthly services.  This means that your site is launched right from the start with Google Analytics embedded and ready to go!  We set up your Google Analytics account and send you a customized monthly report that breaks down all the data discussed in this blog.  Every physician and healthcare provider needs to be looking at Google Analytics reports on a regular basis if they want to engage their audience or enhance results and online reputation.

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