Two ways Google Analytics is misleading you

It’s time to clean up your messy data

Used correctly, Google Analytics can be a powerful tool for hospital marketers. It can help you discover what’s working, what’s not working, and where your ROI is coming from. But if you haven’t taken a few steps to keep your data clean, it could point you in the wrong direction.

Here are two things you should be filtering out of your analytics data.

Traffic from outside your service area

The hospitals and health systems we deal with have fairly well-defined service areas. They know what counties and states they draw patients from. But if you look at their analytics, often they’re not filtering out visitors who come from halfway across the country. This data is muddying the waters. Visitors from far away aren’t very likely to become patients, and they probably have different engagement and acquisition patterns. The end result is skewed data.

Creating a filter that eliminates traffic from outside your area will paint a much clearer picture of how potential patients are behaving. If you’re new to creating filters, start here. It’s best practice to create new filter views instead of changing the main view. You don’t want to lose raw data.

Referral Spam

Referral spam (a shady advertising tactic geared towards webmasters and marketers) has been growing in popularity recently. You know you’ve got it if you see referrals to your website from sites like semalt.com or free-social-buttons.xyz.

You can eliminate it through a handful of methods. I like a combination of Google’s automatic bot filtering (a setting in your analytics admin) and some smart filtering. If you want a quick fix, use a regular expression to filter out the words “semalt”, “cheap”, “porn” and “button”. If you want to go a little bigger, try the regular expression found here.

The result

Eliminating this may reduce your data by hundreds or thousands of visitors. But what you lose in volume you gain in understanding of how real, potential patients are interacting with your website. And that’s a foundation for more effective marketing.