Today, I’m beginning what will be an occasional series of blog posts related to tracking your website traffic. The most popular, powerful, and free tracking tool available is called Google Analytics (GA). By using this tool to analyze the traffic that comes to your website, you can make improvements to your site and to all of your advertising and marketing campaigns. Here are some tips to help Medical Practices get going with GA.
- Set up your account and install the code on your site (the code will be provided to you as part of the setup process). If someone else designed your site, you will need to send them the code to add to the site.
- Set up access for key team members – practice owner and/or managers, webmaster, other marketing or IT personnel. Use the “User Manager” link at the center bottom of your Analytics Overview screen to add people.
- Set up goals to track the number of visitors who stay on the site for longer than 3 or 4 minutes and who view at least 3 or 4 pages. To manage your goals, click the Edit link in the Website Profiles section of your Analytics Overview page; from there, click “Add Goal” in the Goals section of the page, and set up goals for “Time on Site” and “Pages/Visit”. The exact time and number of pages will depend on the averages for your site. If you set these metrics at around the level of your site averages, then people who exceed these values may be considered highly targeted (and therefore valuable) visitors. In future posts, I’ll go into greater detail about how you can set and use these goals.
Once you have your account and basic goals set up, you’ll need to let the system begin to collect data. After you have a few weeks of data, you can begin to use this information to make improvements to your website and to your advertising campaigns. For now, check in every few days to see how the reports evolve as data is collected. In my next post on this topic, we’ll look at some of the most valuable reports and how to use them.
