Web analytics are crucial to ensuring that your site is maximizing the return on your investment. Who is visiting your site? How are they finding it? Which pages are most effective? Which pages are driving customers away?
Google Analytics is a powerful, cost-free tool that provides comprehensive data about your site’s visitors. It works by adding a small tidbit of code to the backend of your site that is invisible to your customers and offers a rather helpful across-the-board analysis of your traffic, making it a highly effective way for medical practice owners to track results of online and even offline marketing efforts.
The service allows the user to generate reports about a specific timeframe in the site’s traffic history. The most recent 30-day period is the default setting, but you can change the setting (found on the upper right of the site) to any interval, from one single day up to every day since you first added the Google Analytics code. A flexible graphing tool allows you to view the results at different intervals, in order to better track trends: on a daily basis, if you are analyzing a 30-day interval, or by day, week or month for longer periods.
The Dashboard report, a useful high-level overview of all traffic, is the default report when you log in. The Dashboard report should be viewed on a regular (usually monthly) basis, and Google Analytics will allow you to set up a schedule for generating PDFs that are automatically sent to your email. But this initial report only scratches the surface of the possibilities, as the system includes dozens of reports, most of which can be examined in multiple dimensions. In future blog posts, we will examine specific reports that are valuable for medical practice marketing.
