Analytics: Leading indicators provide early warning

Actionable metrics can improve healthcare marketing results

One of the really cool things about healthcare marketing campaigns in the 21st century is the capabilities of modern analytics technology. The boom in online advertising has opened up new opportunities to track ad responses and consumer behavior in ways that were never possible with traditional mass media channels. Now marketers can gauge the effectiveness of our campaigns from day one with metrics we call “leading indicators.”

Measurement approaches used to focus on outcomes. How many appointments? How many procedures? How many dollars generated? We call these lagging indicators: the metrics that report on the final outcomes of your marketing efforts. All valuable data points, all relevant to the final impact of your campaign, but lagging indicators come at the end of a campaign, when it’s too late to do anything to change the results.

However, there’s another set of metrics that can report results in real-time, while the campaign is still underway. Measurement of landing page visits, click-through rates, page views and phone inquiries track consumer actions and behaviors that lead up to the desired outcome of your marketing efforts. We call these leading indicators because they anticipate the consumer’s likelihood for conversion, or to choose your hospital or practice.

Here’s an example; Let’s say a hospital runs an advertising campaign to increase patient visits at a new facility. The campaign’s call-to-action drives patients to a landing page on the website. There, they are prompted to call a phone number to make an appointment at the new office. So what do we measure?

In this example, the leading indicators are the amount of traffic to the webpage and the volume of phone calls. A high number of people arriving on the landing page and spending time there is a leading indicator that people are engaged and suggests the campaign will be a success. The lagging indicator (in this case the number of people who actually make an appointment) however, is the final determination of the success of the campaign.

Leading indicators offer healthcare marketers an early warning system to anticipate results and adjust tactics as needed to improve the trend. While they are not guarantees, basic assumptions can be made based on the numbers. In the example above, a lack of web traffic early on would indicate a poor response, and may indicate the need for a few adjustments to achieve the campaign’s goals. That may mean a change to the creative, a different call to action, or some incentive to motivate people to make appointments and put the campaign back on track to achieve the stated goal.

Leveraging leading indicator metrics allows marketers to anticipate trends and make adjustments during a campaign, when there’s still time to impact the final results.

Learn more about analytics in Protocol: Measuring Outbound Marketing.