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.”
Fortunately, more and more organizations are going a step further and tracking key activities on the Web, such as newsletter subscriptions or video downloads. (More on this here). A few sophisticated outfits are actually able to link their patient data with their Web data and compute ROI. The bad news is that those who are doing the most advanced reporting are generally reticent to share. This year we had to eliminate the “Best Use of Web Analytics” from our Best-In-Class Awards because of a lack of entries.
Given the importance of internal reporting as a key input to strategic decision-making, why are so many organizations stuck at the most basic level? And for those who are doing a good job, are there any insights they can share with the rest of us?
I hope to get answers to these questions and more in our next special survey, which will focus on internal reporting of Web data. I am particularly excited about covering this topic, as there is a dearth of quality research on this topic (as it related to healthcare Web marketers). If you would like to participate and are not currently a member of the Greystone.Net research panel, join today. I look forward to receiving everyone’s input, even those who are too embarrassed to show me their reports.
“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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At the height of last year’s financial struggles, Greystone.Net sent out a survey to its current and former customers about their budget outlook for the coming year. We certainly struck a chord with our hospital and health system audience, who at the time were wondering if the sky truly was falling. We received a tremendous response, with more than 170 hospitals or health systems submitting a survey. The study yielded some interesting findings. The biggest revelation was that despite 40 percent of hospitals/health systems experiencing some sort of budget cut, 68 percent said funding is stable or increasing for the Web. Based on the findings, Greystone.Net cut back on some of its events that require travel. We also added a new category to our annual Best in Class awards for successful Web initiatives amidst severe budget constraints.
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Our recent study on social media has generated a lot of buzz from healthcare bloggers. The high level of response is really encouraging, and Greystone.Net will continue to do this type of research in the future. There seems to be a tremendous demand from healthcare marketers for information on current industry topics.
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According to our just released research, 9 in 10 hospitals or health systems are currently involved to some degree with Social Media. Other key results from the study:
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Recently, Greystone.Net was helping a client hospital with a business plan for its Web site. As part of the arrangement, we designed, launched and managed a web satisfaction study for them. This is something that we are doing more and more these days, as organizations seek to add customer input into their redesign efforts. My background is in research, so I am usually heavily involved with these engagements.
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This was an extremely common refrain at the 13th Annual Healthcare Internet Conference. I can’t tell you how many times I heard some version of this expression during conversations in the hallways or during concurrent sessions. With so many first-time Conference attendees this year (in fact, this was our best-attended conference ever!), I am not sure how many were prepared for three days full of case studies by peers, speeches by industry visionaries, and networking with some of the most successful hospital Web site managers in the country.
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