Digital marketing can be a complicated animal.
With so many moving parts to an effective digital marketing strategy, it’s important to make sure the effort you put into developing a strategy is effective. The only way to truly gauge this is through measurement.
Metrics are one of the most important parts of any digital marketing strategy — they tell you what’s working or underperforming. They provide you with an opportunity to evaluate your marketing efforts’s success in real time and make important adjustments on the fly.
We’ve compiled 10 metrics that healthcare tech marketers should keep an eye on during a digital marketing campaign.
Digital Marketing Metrics Healthcare Tech Marketers Should Pay Attention to
1. Overall Website Traffic
What it is: The total number of visits a website gets during a set period of time.
What it means to you: Tracking how frequently your website is visited gives you a view from 10,000 feet up. It helps you evaluate the impact of your marketing campaigns and if they’re actually driving traffic and track trends over time.
Pro Tip: Visits vs Sessions – In reading up on website metrics, you may come across the terms “visits” and “sessions.” Though related, these are different things:
Visits represent anytime someone comes to your website from somewhere outside your website domain, e.g. clicked a link on another website or entered your website address in their browser’s URL bar.
Sessions are all the activities a website visitor has while on your website within a 30-minute timespan.
2. New Visitor/Returning Visitor Rate
What it is: The ratio of someone who has never visited a website before vs. the number of visitors who have come back. It’s calculated by dividing the number of return visitors by the total number of unique visits to a website.
What it means to you: Paying attention to this metric can be a good indicator of what your content is doing to attract prospects. By evaluating the content returning visitors are consuming and their source, we can begin to understand the pathways that lead them along their buyer’s journey.
3. Traffic Source
What it is: Where website visitors are coming from. There are 4 main visitor categories:
What it means to you: Keeping an eye on where your visitors come from gives you valuable information about how you can align resources to attract prospects from the right source. If you are getting most of your traffic from one of these sources, be sure to use that source more.
Additionally, tracking an existing customer’s digital journey to your website can help you duplicate that success to attract similar prospects.
4. Time Spent on Website
What it is: This metric is as it sounds — the amount of time a visitor spends on a website.
What it means to you: Taking a deeper dive into website traffic, this metric can help you gauge the quality of your website and its content. If visitors are spending a good amount of time on your site, this is a sign of useful and engaging content. If time spent on a page containing a great deal of content is low (see bounce rate below), this indicates the content wasn’t what visitors were looking for.
5. Click-through Rates
What it is: The number of clicks a link receives. It’s calculated by dividing the total number of clicks on a link by the total number of impressions (instances when someone saw the link).
What it means to you: This one is particularly important in email marketing campaigns, as it shows you how many recipients took the next step after opening your email and viewed the content you promoted to them. The same can be said for links posted on social media platforms. It’s also important to watch this rate with the CTA’s on your website as it helps you determine if their message and visual elements are drawing visitors to take the desired action(s).
6. Exit Rate
What it is: The percentage of visitors who leave a website altogether from a specific webpage. The exit rate does account for a visitor spending time on multiple pages of a website. It’s calculated by dividing the total number of exits from a webpage by the total number of visits to the page.
What it means to you: Paying attention to where visitors leave your website provides you with an opportunity to evaluate what interactions are happening with specific pages or pieces of content. This information can help you make decisions about which elements of your site to optimize or leave alone.
7. Bounce Rate
What it is: This is somewhat of an extension of the previous metric. Bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors who navigate away from a website after only viewing 1 webpage for a very short amount of time. Think of a bounce as when you Google something and click on a result, but quickly hit your back button because the site wasn’t what you wanted. It’s calculated by dividing the total number of visitors viewing only 1 page by the total number of visits to a specific page.
What it means to you: The bounce rate can tell you if there’s a malfunction on your website or that its content is just not engaging to prospects.
8. Social Media Audience
What it is: The number of followers a company or brand has across social media platforms.
What it means to you: Tracking how many followers you have can show how your marketing efforts are gaining ground to attract more prospects to your content. Conversely, it also can show you if your social media posts and their content are causing you to lose followers.
9. Social Media Engagement
What it is: Users and followers interacting with social media posts, e.g. likes, shares, or comments.
What it means to you: This metric shows you what posts are actually resonating with your follower base. The more positive interactions, the better!
10. Conversion Rates
What it is: The number of website visitors who completed a desired action (sign up for a demo, download an ebook, etc.) and became leads.
What it means to you: This harkens to the quality vs. quantity debate. Having thousands of website visitors each month is great, but if they aren’t taking steps toward becoming your next customers, is your site traffic really that great?
Looking at your conversion rate can let you know if your digital marketing effort is actually reaching its goals in getting you new customers. Low conversion rates provide an opportunity to re-evaluate a strategy.
Bonus Metric to Watch
11. Mobile Rates
What it is: The percentage of website visitors interacting with a website on mobile devices.
What it means to you: With mobile tech being the preferred platform for many, paying attention to how many mobile visitors your website gets may require you to put additional focus on designing with a mobile-first mentality. Google will also deduct SEO points if your site isn’t responsive for mobile.
When Healthcare Tech Marketers Should Check Metrics
Because digital marketing strategies often have many components, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. The frequency with which you monitor metrics depends on the element of your strategy.
Social media can be monitored in real-time, and because of the level of interaction it invites you should check your posts often. On the other hand, overall website metrics are something that’s best tracked on a month-by-month basis. Daily website traffic will, at best, give you a snapshot of a digital marketing campaign’s impact.
The time to check the various metrics of your digital marketing campaign is not at its conclusion. By then, it’s too late to take any proactive steps to improving the campaign’s performance.
Regularly checking the performance of each part of your campaign ensures that you can make adjustments in a timely manner.
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