This past September marked the five year anniversary of receiving my MBA. At a recent informal get-together to celebrate the occasion, it was a pleasure renewing acquaintances with former classmates and discussing the various paths we have taken. What a wild ride it has been! Career changes, relocations, layoffs, promotions – you name it. When we graduated, the Goizueta Business School Class of 2006 could not have possibly imagined the changes our country and our economy would go through over the next five years. Our trials and tribulations would make for a fascinating documentary.
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Ask any market researcher if they have some examples of funny things people have said on surveys, and then stand back and watch what happens. I am willing to bet that you will have to stop him or her after a few minutes. Do not be surprised at any excessive exuberance, as we research geeks are generally not called upon for humorous insight and tend to cherish these rare opportunities.
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The results of our recent research on internal reporting of external Web analytics data are in, and have been sent to all who participated in the study. According to the 40 organizations who participated in the research, it is clear that this is an area where many continue to struggle. Here are some of the major findings: Read more…
This week we went live with two new areas in our Greystone.Net Benchmarking database: traffic from referring sites, and mobile traffic. Both areas were added based on feedback from participants. After I had a chance to review the preliminary data, two interesting findings jumped out:
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The results of Greystone.Net’s recent research on intranets in hospitals and health systems are in. Thanks to all who participated! We received responses from nearly half (46%) of our 125-member panel of healthcare marketers. All respondents who completed the survey have received a complete copy of the results.
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Good internal reporting of Web data should document successes, illuminate failures, and serve as a key component in evaluating overall strategy. Yet for many healthcare Web marketers, the challenge of producing quality reports has proven to be extremely elusive and frustrating. In my experience, most organizations do not go much further than tracking basic Web analytics metrics like page views and visitors. It is not uncommon for me to come across a mishmash of numbers pasted onto an Excel spreadsheet, with a webmaster telling me, “I am embarrassed to be showing you this report.”
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“I don’t really pay attention to our top search terms,” says one of my customers, a marketing analyst at a prestigious academic medical center. “They are mostly just a variation of our hospital’s name.” For a lot of analysts at hospitals and health systems, especially those cursed with having an easily misspelled name, I can understand why they feel this way. Top keywords are frequently filled with various versions (both correct and misspelled) of the organization’s names and hometowns. Our research shows that across all hospitals, the average is about one in four visitors who arrive at a hospital or health system’s Web site from a search engine use some version of the organization’s name as a keyword.
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Greystone is pleased to announce the results of our recent survey on hospital/ health system Web budgets. We sent the survey invitation to more than 100 healthcare marketers, and received responses from 65. (please note: Greystone’s research panel is made up of hospitals or health care systems with at least one FTE dedicated to the Web, and members tend to be more “Web 2.0 savvy” than other hospitals and health systems)
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We have recently received inquiries from several hospital or health systems Webmasters who want to know our opinion about Web sites like Alexa, Compete.com, and Quantcast.com. These “third party web data providers” use proprietary algorithms to estimate the number of visitors on any Web site, and have become a major resource for many Web marketers.
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Over the last week and a half during the Vancouver Olympics, several of my colleagues here at Greystone and I have been held hostage during our lunch hour watching the unique and exciting sport of curling. If you’ve never watched curling, the sport is very similar to shuffleboard on ice, but with a few interesting wrinkles. A thrower from each team alternates sliding cement “rocks” down the ice, as two people with brooms follow along and try to steer it to the correct place by vigorously sweeping. Teams battle back and forth trying to be the closest to the center, knocking each others’ rocks out of the way in the process. With sliding, screaming, sweeping, and smashing, curling simply makes for great theater.
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