What to measure: inbound marketing
Website and SEO metrics
Website marketing creates a deep pool of metrics for analysis and reporting. Today’s sophisticated analytics tools not only measure site traffic; they can recognize unique and repeat visitors, provide audience demographics, and report on how SEO is performing. Advanced tools track the visitor’s behaviors, too, including page views, unique page views, actions on page, average time spent on the page, bounce rate, video views and completions and conversions.
It’s also possible to evaluate how most people are getting to the site (traffic sources), the number of indexed pages on the site (pages that show up in organic search), and keyword performance and ranking (which search keywords are bringing up the site in organic searches).
Inbound links are a big indicator of SEO and the website’s ability to be found. Inbound links can be found in online news releases, related sites, directories, external blogs, local media, social media activity, and emails. The more inbound links that point to the hospital’s website, the better.
The most important metric for lagging indicators is the conversion rate. To gain more perspective on how and why people convert, some tools provide insight on how the majority of conversions are arriving on the site, what page they convert on, the average number of actions taken on the site, the average time spent, and visitor demographics. If a pattern develops, it’s possible to adjust the marketing to create a more favorable environment for conversions.
Measure the impact of blogging
Blogging may seem like an impossible effort to measure, but engagement can be used to gauge its effectiveness. With the right software, it’s possible to track leading indicators such as the amount of traffic to a hospital’s blog and where it’s coming from, the amount of individual post views to see which are the most popular, the number of followers and subscribers to the blog and RSS feed, and the number of comments and shares on each blog post.
However, it’s possible to take it a step further by providing a call to action in certain blog posts, such as a form or a video. The determining measurement would then be how many readers performed the call to action or completed the goal.