Healthcare Marketing: Five Google Analytics Features You Should Use

If you are marketing a medical or a healthcare website, the web analytics should be an essential component of your online strategy. And Google Analytics is known to be the most effective tool helping to understand your online audience and to find out what content they enjoy and which platforms they use. It’s also quite handy when it comes to determining their conversion rate. Regardless of the size of your medical practice, introducing Google Analytics to your digital marketing can help you to utilize the use of your budget.

 

More than a half of medical marketing professionals are already using Google Analytics. However, most of them are missing out on the features which may help to transform the online presence, as well as bring even more consumers and profit.

 

Here are five ‘hidden’ features of Google Analytics that only a few people actively use:

1. Website Search

These days almost every website has a search bar for visitors to find the information they are looking for. The availability of this feature is not only crucial for your website usability but also can help you to understand what information you need to include on your website. And the Site Search feature of Google analytics can help you to retrieve this data. By using this tool, you will be able to find out which products and services are valuable to your visitors, as well as measure your website’s usability.

 

You can enable the Site Search feature in the Admin section of your Google Analytics account. Just follow these steps:

 

• Go to Admin section
• Click on “View Settings” under the website you would like to track
• Scroll down to the bottom of the page
• Turn the switch on and fill in two fields with the website’s search parameters. Search parameters are the words and phrases that precede a query in your URL.
• Enter search parameters into the Query Parameter section and everything except specific search terms will be filtered out from your report.

 

If you did this correctly, you would be able to view the search data under the Site Search segment of the Behavior section under your Google Analytics’ account reports.

2. Weighted Sort

When examining the performance of your website pages, you can quickly sort the Google Analytics table by the number of ‘page views’ and ‘bounce rate.’ You can do it by clicking on the particular heading. Yet, just sorting the table by one attribute of your choice may not give you the full view, since arranging by bounce rate won’t put your pages in order by traffic volume and vice versa.

 

The Weighted Sort feature may help you with that. It allows Google Analytics users to see which pages have both high traffic volume and bounce rate. This information is useful to spot the conversion opportunities you missed. Moreover, it is easy to activate and use Weighted Sort feature. Just click the “Bounce Rate” column header to sort all your rows, and then click on the drop-down menu next to “Sort Type” and select “Weighted” from the list. The first page in the list will have the highest bounce rate as well as page views.

3. Trackbacks

It is easy to get lost in Google Analytics with its numerous valuable features. Yet, there is a section which is dedicated to social media and can help you to measure its impact on your healthcare website SEO. This function is called ‘Trackbacks’. It helps you to see who engaged with your website content, including blog articles, downloadable content or even with any product page. You can check how many times the same URL linked to your site, as well as separate passive visitors from active (engaged) ones.

 

It is essential to note that whenever you have an opportunity to share your content or to co-sponsor an event, you should also approach it as an excellent opportunity for the link building. Link building is a crucial part of successful healthcare SEO strategy.

4. Funnel Visualization

The Funnel Visualization feature under Google Analytics helps to analyze the journey of your website visitors. It shows the path of your visitor through the site until they abandoned their original way, visited pages and left the website.

 

The principal focus of the Funnel Visualization feature is measuring the website’s conversion rate. And if you have ‘Goals’ set up, you can monitor what prevents users from reaching your goals, i.e., making a decision, booking an appointment, contacting you or purchasing something. The Funnel Visualization is the way to track which marketing campaigns perform well and which are not. At the same time, it provides a deep understanding of visitors’ drop-offs from the web pages and ways to optimize them for more conversions.

5. Remarketing Lists

Remarketing is known to be one of the most powerful tactics healthcare marketers should use. And Google Analytics’ Remarketing feature can help you to capture the potential clients who didn’t convert the first time they visited your website. It is used to optimize the message which didn’t work the first time around. Thus, it gives you a second chance to convert website visitors into customers. Moreover, it allows you to spend less on your advertisement.

 

It is essential to note that the Remarketing feature works with Google AdWords accounts. It helps you to create lists of potential customers and target them during your future marketing campaigns. Unfortunately, it is not possible to use this feature without an active Google AdWords account.

 

To turn on this feature, please follow these simple steps:

• Under Admin section of your Google Analytics find Property column and click on “Remarketing” under it
• Click on “Audiences” drop down to create custom audiences
• Let Google create it with the help of a Smart list or create your list based on new and returning visitors of the website. You can also create such a list using the particular website page visitors who reached a predefined milestone or purchased something.

Once the audience created, you can add it to your future advertising campaigns at Google Adwords.  Google Analytics limits you to 2000 remarketing audience lists per account.

Keep abreast of Google Analytics improvements and updates

Google Analytics often updates its interface and adds new features, so even the most frequent users can miss out something. So it is very crucial to repeatedly look through your analytics account to find out which new features are added.

 

For your comfort, Google has released numerous training sessions and study materials to watch and read to get acquired with this powerful tool. Moreover, it is possible to get certificates by passing free exams available online.

 

Google Analytics is highly critical for search engine optimization (SEO); it allows measuring the return of your link building, content marketing, and social media efforts. And the mindful use of Google Analytics, which is easy to install and setup, may do wonders. It can help you not only to measure your rankings, but also to check whether your website provides your visitor with the information they had been looking for.

 

Spend some time on the research of features, and no doubts you will understand how your website is converting (or not converting) your visitors.