It’s Time to Take a New Approach to Marketing Campaigns

Posted on May 14, 2013 by Casey Hansen

Marketing is a fast-paced discipline. Every day, new tactics and opportunities for getting your message out to your target audience are uncovered and vying for budget. Which tactics are best? How do you know if you should put your eggs in the billboard basket or the PPC basket? And how do you measure these tactics in a meaningful way, tying clicks and passerby’s back to actual procedures and service line volume?

No amount of gut instinct can tell you for sure.

A New Approach

That’s why we take a different approach at Geonetric. We launch Responsive Campaigns — campaigns that are flexible, nimble and easy to adjust.

With our Responsive Campaigns, we set a measurable goal, launch tactics in the market quickly, measure our efforts and adjust them immediately to maximize performance. We can measure the return-on-investment of any tactic at any moment – and we tell you which tactic is working best.

Most importantly, our team of experts invests itself in the success of a campaign. We measure our results against the goal daily, and we meet weekly with our clients to share our thoughts, results, and recommend a new series of tactics. This is not a “set it and forget it” approach!

A Shining Example – Colonoscopy Campaign

Want proof our Responsive Campaigns work? Last fall, we partnered with Crozer-Keystone Health System to develop a campaign focused on scheduling colonoscopy procedures.

We built the campaign using responsive marketing strategies and delivered results that matter – 73 new appointment requests in just three months!

See how we achieved this in our case study.

Data Puke vs. Actionable Data

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Matt Hacker

There is a misunderstanding with some online marketers that simply believe looking at your website’s visits and pageviews is indicative of the successes or failures of your site. Really? Come on, you can do better… a lot better.

I challenge everyone to dig deeper, but not so deep that you generate data puke. Data puke is the difference between ‘Web Reporting’ and ‘Web Analysis.’ It’s a term that Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist, uses heavily and it’s one that has stuck with me ever since first reading about it. In essence, most of the time Web reporting generates data puke, where Web analysis generates actionable data.

In Avinash’s blog post, The Difference Between Web Reporting And Web Analysis, he gives readers a list of 10 signs you’re doing Web analysis in hopes that you can identify data puke when you see it. While I agree with what Avinash has to say, I would like to put my own spin on this list and share with you 5 signs you are generating data puke and then give you 5 signs you are generating actionable data through performing Web analysis.

5 Signs You Are Generating Data Puke

The only numbers you are looking at are the high-level “dashboard” numbers (most of the time dashboards are data puke).
“What’s this?” or “What’s this showing?” is how someone else looking at the report you just created instantly responds.
It doesn’t pass the “so what?” test. Ask yourself “so what?” for every statistic you pull, and if you don’t have a measurable or economically identifiable reason to measure it, then don’t. You’re wasting your time.
If you are looking at a report and there is no mention of a ‘target’ or ‘goal’.
There is no context behind anything you are presented with or presenting to others.

Now, keeping in mind the 5 things listed above…

5 Signs You Are Generating Actionable Data through Web Analysis

The “thing” you are looking at isn’t just data, but data along with measurable action items that the business can take based off of that data. Or in the same vein, it is showing data that directly corresponds to the targets and goals the business has set in place.
If you are looking at something that has a clear and defined path of how the analyst got to the point of gathering that specific information, it probably took some analysis (a breakdown of big data into actionable datasets).
If, when looking at or generating a report, you see an explanation of the business implications, or economic value, that the data is showing outlined in the report itself.
Any glimpse that you can see where someone is comparing data to previous timeframes and giving someone a visual queue of whether things are improving or getting worse. The person is at least looking at the numbers now compared to where they used to be, which is showing some form of business analysis through the analytics (although it still needs to pass the “dashboard” and “so what?” scenarios listed in the previous section).
When viewing or creating a report that effectively has segmented data or user information, that is probably the product of someone performing Web analysis. After all, according to Avinash Kaushik, “All data in aggregate is crap.”

So, does any of this ring a bell? Are you performing Web analysis or creating Web reports filled with data puke? Challenge yourself. Challenge your peers. Stop generating Web reports that are filled with data puke and start performing Web analysis, which in turn generates actionable data.

Awareness is a Crutch When Measuring Marketing Success

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Ben Dillon

Healthcare marketers track consumers, communicate with them, engage with them, build relationships with them, and then convert them. That’s the true goal of marketing success.

So how is it that so many of us have come to focus on awareness as our key success measurement? Look at our marketing today. Campaigns that say little more than “look at me, look at me!” Billboards and TV ads with no call to action. Web efforts measured by the number of visits.

Does any of that really matter? Does it move the needle of success for your organization? Does your CFO care?

The answer, of course, is “No.”

Awareness is a concept that was created to price mass market advertising tools. Two billboards aren’t created equal – one is better than the other because of the number of people who see it. That’s all awareness measures – how many people see your message.

But seeing isn’t believing. And seeing certainly isn’t becoming a patient.

Instead we should be measuring how many consumers walk through the door as a result of our engagement and relationship building efforts.

But most of us don’t. We focus instead on measuring awareness.

And we wonder why we have trouble getting more budget allocations. Think how much stronger our arguments at the budget table would be if we could demonstrate that our marketing delivered real value.

So instead of buying as many views as possible for the least amount of money, try creating marketing that truly engages and connects with consumers and converts them into patients. Start counting how many prospects your marketing turned into patients.

Easier said than done right? Well if you want to learn how to use digital marketing to generate real results – and we don’t mean awareness – join us for our upcoming webinar Reinventing Digital Marketing Campaigns on Thursday, May 23, 2013 at 3:00 p.m.

How Metrics and Transparency Will Make You a Better Digital Marketer

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Ben Dillon

“You can only manage what you can measure.”

– Peter Drucker

It’s easy to get obsessed with numbers and metrics when you’re working with the Web. There’s no shortage of information about what’s happening with your website, app or campaign. The cup of data overfloweth.

For a certain set of people, and I count myself in this category, data is just fascinating. I find myself getting lost in spreadsheets and databases while attempting to tease out just one more insight.

But the point of data isn’t in the data. It’s often not even in the insights that come from the data. The point is the act of measurement itself.

Measurement creates focus. This is really the reason why we do it. This is really why it matters.

If you’re doing your metrics properly the process starts with defining goals. Aiming only matters if you know what your target looks like. So you start with goals and the goals lead to metrics.

If you don’t approach the problem from this direction, it’s easy to get into trouble. I was recently reviewing the pay per click (PPC) campaign work that a client was having done with a third party. Initially they were thrilled with the numbers they were seeing – a large numbers of clicks, with a low cost per click. As we talked about why they were making the investment and what their goals were – questions that they were never asked and hadn’t considered before starting the PPC campaign – it became clear that there were many issues:

Traffic was going to the wrong pages – generic service line pages rather than campaign landing pages
They needed offers associated with the campaign that didn’t exist
The quality of the traffic (complete with near 100 percent bounce rates) was terrible
They were paying for many brand keywords that were not specific to the campaign and which they already owned from an organic search perspective
And, in some cases, they were promoting offerings for which patients rarely choose providers of have much input

Where was the problem in this? They never defined the ultimate goals of the effort! And they confused operational metrics with goal targets. Beginning with a goal of scheduled procedures rather than the general tactical charge of “promote this service line” would naturally have led to questions about converting browsers to patients, targeting audience segments, messaging needs, and a just a more holistic view of the process.

Instead, they’d been feeling good about money that they were throwing away.

Setting up a process for goal-driven marketing is not hard to do. To learn how to do this, and to learn more about how metrics and transparency will make you a better digital marketer, join us on April 18, 2013 at 3:00 p.m. CST for a complimentary webinar Translating Site Data Into Action.

Google Announces Enhanced AdWords Campaigns

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Casey Hansen

Pay-per-click advertising (and specifically, Google AdWords) is making it easier than ever to target users where and when it matters to them. Google Adwords is launching Enhanced Campaigns – a new way to manage ad campaigns in today’s multi-device world. This is making it even easier to drive targeted traffic to your site, no matter where visitors are or what device they’re using (desktop, mobile, tablet, etc.).

How Do Enhanced Campaigns Work?

Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns allow you, the advertiser, to create ads that capitalize on the context of someone’s search… things like time of day, device they’re using, and location.

For example, to promote your emergency room, you may want visitors on a mobile device to see an ad with clickable phone number and driving directions, while visitors on a desktop computer view an ad that drives them to a landing page with an online form to reserve a spot. Your ad may even change depending on what time of day it is, or how far the visitor is from your hospital.

Rather than creating several ads for multiple different scenarios, Google will be able to detect the situations, and use your criteria to automatically tailor your one ad to fit the visitors’ specific needs.

The possibilities are endless.

Better Conversion Tracking

Since the new campaigns allow users to interact with your ads in a variety of new ways (e.g., click-to-call, visit a landing page, download an app, etc.), Google will also provide ways to measure and act on the data you can collect. Ultimately, this means better conversion rates and easier ROI information.

Next Steps

Google plans to convert all campaigns to Enhanced Campaigns by mid-2013. No worries, though. The AdWords gurus at Geonetric are on it.

If you’re not currently working with us for your pay-per-click campaigns, now may be the perfect time to contact us. We love making pay-per-click advertising work for our clients and can do the same for you.

2 Powerful Strategies for Using Promotion Codes to Drive Event Registrations

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Michael ONeill

VitalSite 6.4 introduced a powerful feature: promotional codes. It’s been exciting to see how our clients are using them to promote their calendar events and drive revenue for their organizations.

So you’re probably wondering, “What’s the best way to use promotional codes?” Well, reach into your marketer’s toolbox and pull out two proven tactics: Limited Time Offers and Exclusive Offers.

Limited Time Offers

In the psychology of selling, limited time offers provide the consumer a strong incentive to act immediately, as they promote a sense of urgency that counters natural inclinations to procrastinate or forget.

VitalSite has a built-in mechanism for publishing and archiving promotion codes automatically on specific dates. By using this feature, you can create your promotion codes and start your campaigns with the assurance that site visitors will only be able to use the promotion codes on the dates you specify.

My favorite limited time offer campaigns include early-bird discounts to registrants who sign up at least two weeks before the class, and special one-day promotions to motivate registrations with the offer of a steep discount for acting immediately. Of course you can (and should) experiment and find the types of limited time promotions that work best for your organization and events.

As with any promotion, you’ll want to target specific communities, use the codes appropriately, and pay attention to the results. Too many limited time offers and your audience will quickly grow fatigued. Too few and you may miss out on revenue due to fewer registrations.

Exclusive Offers

Next to limited time offers, exclusivity is also a strong motivator for action. Chances are you have a number of opportunities to use exclusive offers to drive event registrations:

Direct mail – Identify a target market and send them a promotion code for a discount that is not publicly advertised or announced outside the direct mail campaign. Make sure to tell your readers that not everyone has access to this promotion code. Otherwise, the strong motivational component of exclusivity doesn’t exist and won’t work in your favor.
Social networks – Offer incentives for people to follow your organization on your social media outlets by periodically offering promotions and discounts exclusively through those channels. Not only can this drive registrations, but it provides your audience with tangible value for following your social media stream.
Organization blogs – Have mommy bloggers or doctor bloggers? A great way to reward blog followers while driving registrations is to promote relevant calendar events through these channels. Provide your bloggers with unique promotion codes they can offer their readers. Used effectively, this approach can drive registrations and readership at the same time.

VitalSite’s Calendar & Event Directory is a powerful tool that can help you contribute to your organization’s bottom line while helping with patient education, public health and community awareness of your organization’s expertise. In addition to the approaches indicated above, there are a plethora of other ways to use promotion codes (such as running combination deals, core SEO principles, and other approaches to marketing and promoting your events).

Is Facebook the World’s Largest Billboard?

Posted on November 28, 2012 by Ben Dillon

Recent comments by Brad Smallwood, Facebook’s Head of Measurement and Insights, have really thrown marketers for a loop. At the recent Interactive Advertising Bureau MIXX Conference, Smallwood indicated, “It is the delivery of the marketing message to the right consumer, not the click, which creates real value for brand advertisers.”

In essence, Facebook is downplaying the role of the almighty click, falling back on long-term marketing truisms that recency and frequency are the keys to marketing effectiveness.

Most organizations waste a good portion of their marketing dollars, but lack of direct metrics leaves them at a loss as to what’s effective and what’s failing.

eMarketing is supposed to fix all of that, right? So Smallwood’s comments fly in the face of digital marketing dogma. We’re supposed to be able to see and track marketing effectiveness online.

Where’s All This Coming From?

The truth is that Facebook advertising has gotten some fairly negative press in the past year, which has done nothing to help the stock price of the newly public firm. Case in point being General Motor’s much publicized decision to pull all advertising from Facebook only days before its IPO.

The challenge for GM (who has since returned to Facebook) and other online marketers has been lackluster click-through rates for Facebook ads. Dollar for dollar, Facebook gives advertisers great reach relative to Google, but click-throughs are few and far between.

Facebook is therefore looking to recast the metrics of success that online marketers use. A good strategy given their predicament, but does it hold water?

A Defense of Recency and Frequency

Admittedly, Smallwood makes a good point. We know that brand impressions are important and the tremendous amount of time spent on Facebook each day gives ample opportunity for impressions. Further, how important are those clicks? GM sells very few of its cars online. Online advertising builds awareness and preference for a sale that happens at a local dealership.

This puts Facebook ads in the same category as TV, radio, billboards and other advertising vehicles (pun intended) on which many industries, including both automobiles and healthcare, invest the bulk of their advertising dollars. And, relative to those advertising channels, Facebook offers better targeting, control, and metrics.

The Flip Side

On the other hand, impressions aren’t always effective. As the classic saying from John Wanamaker goes, “half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Mass market advertising requires messaging that appeal to the largest possible audience. Highly targeted advertising can be far more impactful when the messaging is tailored to each customer segment. These segments can be fickle, however, and it can be tough to build traditional focus groups that allow you to hone those messages appropriately.

That’s rarely been an issue online as you simply refine your marketing message in real-time with real data that allows for quick tailoring and adaptation of messages.

That is, of course, if anyone chooses to interact with those ads.

Low click-through rates make it difficult to determine if an ad is working, eliminates your ability to adapt campaigns mid-stream, and undermines your tracking for ROI. Again, this is no different than most of your advertising spend today, but it places it at a disadvantage relative to other online marketing options.

What Do You Think?

So what’s your take on the question of Facebook’s advertising effectiveness? Are clicks the end-all be-all? Or is Smallwood pointing out an important piece of marketing effectiveness that we seem to have lost in this online world?

ROI and Social Media – The Awkward Date

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Casey Hansen

Here at Geonetric, we’re constantly cooking up new and exciting ways for our clients to engage with their patients. These days that engagement conversation often turns to tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many others.

You know – that social media stuff.

But along with generating creative ideas, we’re in love with measuring the tactics we use. Some might even call it an obsession.

Some Background

At the recent Social Brand 2012 Conference here in Iowa, presenter David B. Thomas took a stab at giving us some measurement tactics for social media.

Social media has always been the tough one to measure so I’m excited to share some of those tips. So, without further delay, here are six steps to measuring your social media efforts courtesy of David B. Thomas (but summarized by me):

Establish Your Goals – Simply posting wildly on social media won’t cut it. What would you like to see come out of your social media efforts? Certain Web traffic numbers? Event registrations?
Tie to Organization Goals – Your social media goals should tie directly back to organizational goals. How do your efforts feed the overall goals of your organization?
Establish Your Definition of ROI – ROI is difficult to define because everyone has a different explanation. How will your organization count your efforts on social media as a success? (Don’t copy your neighbor.)
Focus on Campaigns – Social media is often part of a larger marketing campaign, so meshing the metrics between the two can be powerful. Use metrics from social media (such as Facebook Insights and Google Analytics data) to assess the success of individual campaigns.
Track Through Web Analytics – Always use Google Analytics (or your tool of choice) to assess inbound traffic sources (social media specifically) and determine which platforms give you the best traffic numbers.
ROI = (Gain – Cost) / Cost – A simple formula that may work for some. Of course, you’ll have to define the “gain.”

Tools to Help

There are many great tools available to help you manage your social media measurement and see how your efforts are performing. They also help you manage your brand online and monitor the conversation going on about your brand

A couple candidates:

Radian6 (http://www.radian6.com/)
Sprout Social (http://sproutsocial.com/)

My Takeaway

In the end, ROI of social media continues to be a bit elusive. Since it does rely on your goals and your definition of success, I think there is room for you to develop your own definition of ROI for social media and then how you’ll measure it.

Know what you want to measure (followers? fans? social reach?) and set up the tools to measure your success against those metrics.

And measurement? Well, that just makes us Geonetric folks grin from ear-to-ear. And we’re here if you need a little help getting there.

Becoming the Amazon of Healthcare

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Ben Dillon

Healthcare marketers spend a lot of time thinking about how their website compares to other hospital websites. They even put a lot of energy into figuring out which sites to evaluate. Do you look at how you compare to peers around the country, or to that competitor up the street?

Although useful, this information doesn’t give a complete comparison. That’s because you don’t just compete with hospital sites – they don’t set consumer expectations. Consumers spend over 13 hours each week online, and most of that time isn’t spent on hospital websites.

When consumers come to your site, they don’t care how it stacks up with national healthcare leaders. They compare your site to the sites on which they spend serious time.

Look at popular sites across the Internet like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Expedia, Kayak, Mint and others. They all help consumers make decisions and complete transactions. And they create great experiences – consumers easily interact with the site and feel good about the purchases they make.

These sites do a particularly good job at helping consumers:

Find the products that interest them
Understand the products
Evaluate and compare options
Buy or sell
Share their experiences with their social networks

Take, for example, Apple’s website. The goal of the site is obviously to get you to buy an Apple device. Now consider Expedia. The goal of their site is also to facilitate a purchase, and they help you compare options to make it easier for you.

What is the top goal of your site? Is it to have the visitor make an appointment? Pay their bill? Sign up for a class? Do you help them make their decision or do you carry them part of the way and then leave them high and dry?

Let’s consider class registration. There are only certain points in a health consumer’s life when they can be influenced. Classes and screenings give you the opportunity to build relationships with prospective consumers.

What should an incredible class and event system look like? It should definitely cover all of the bases listed above – the visitors should be able to find the products, understand them, evaluate them, buy them and share their experience with their social network. Going a step deeper, the system should allow consumers to:

Search for classes in a way that makes sense to them
Read great information in the description so they can make a decision about what’s right for them
Compare dates in one place
Register and pay for the class online
Register and pay for several class registrations at one time
Use promotional codes and coupons
Create an account and save information to avoid re-entering it in the future
View recommendations for other classes that might interest them based on their original selection

To learn more about how to improve your site’s eCommerce capabilities, sign up for our next webinar Revenue Drivers: Improving Your Site’s eCommerce Capabilities on October 18 at 3:00 p.m. CT. Our next three webinars are dedicated to looking at how hospital websites measure up to the best of the best.

High Flying Websites

Posted on December 7, 2011 by Ben Dillon

In the cockpit of an airplane, there are a fantastic number of dials and warning lights that, together, give you a complete picture of the state of the aircraft. Each element provides important information, but they’re not all equally important nor are they used in the same ways. If you focus too much attention on the wrong indicators, you’ll land in the trees!

Running your website is similar in many aspects. Getting data is easy; there’s more information available than you can even process. Verifying that you’re going the right direction, however, can be a little trickier.

The metrics most of us monitor are operational metrics: site traffic, visitor interactions and server performance. Although interesting, these numbers alone don’t provide a lot of insight.

The key is to understand the story behind the numbers. When visits go up, was it the result of a campaign you were running? Did your bounce rate increase because of the new health library you just licensed?

Changes in the numbers are like warning lights in the cockpit yelling, “Look at me!” They don’t tell you what’s going on, only where to dig for the story. You need to dive deep into your analytics and research user behavior. So when the warning light tells you where to look, you can focus your efforts very precisely.

More exciting is the prospect of using the numbers to direct your strategy. If you have a low conversion rate or high bounce rate for a particular landing page, investigate further. Plan and implement changes, and then measure the impact.

In order for the numbers to tell you a story, put them into a context. Monitor trends. Find relationships. Figure out how the numbers compare to those from similar organizations. This can be difficult; that’s why it’s often helpful to have the guidance of a strategic partner!

Communicating Up
Your CEO doesn’t care that traffic to the site is up five percent. She just doesn’t; nor should she. Operational metrics are great to monitor, but don’t use them to communicate results. Operational details don’t give executives the insight that they need.

Executives focus on items such as:

Organization/department strategy
Allocating resources
Evaluating the capabilities of the leadership team
Financial stewardship

The metrics you communicate should align with these items. Think of these as your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Monitor the operational metrics that contribute to these indicators to make certain you’re going to get there. For example:

To learn more about what metrics are most important, how to establish a metrics program, how to utilize metrics to make your site more effective and how to attain that elusive ROI for online initiatives, join us for our webinar on December 13, 2011.

Close the Gap

Posted on November 29, 2011 by GeoVoices

There’s a terrific perk attached to my strategic services team membership – and that’s the strategic thinking part. I get to spend time mulling over all the pieces of the interactive marketing puzzle; pieces that if placed correctly, coalesce to create a message that supports measurable goals for clients and engaging experiences for users.

Strategic thinking has been top of mind this month because we are inching toward the end of the year. Clients are starting to look ahead to marketing plans and strategies for 2012 and we’re thankful to be part of those conversations.

Looking back on 2011, we can share in a lot of marketing victories: increased social media utilization, QR code campaigns, branded social media channels, mobile websites, integrated campaigns… the list goes on. And as those strategic marketing plans for 2012 unfold, I have no doubt innovation will continue to dominate tactics and approaches.

But for all that forward thinking, there’s something missing.

Something so critical that if the red flag isn’t raised, I’m afraid the strategic marketing plan you’re working on right now won’t give you the best outcomes.

In an effort to get 2012 off on the right foot I’d like to suggest a quick exercise. It won’t take long. It’s just an inventory. You can make it a mental exercise or a more actionable one. Either way, it’s focused on one simple question:

“Is there an online component to all of your upcoming marketing campaigns?”

Unfortunately, the answer to that question is often “no.”

I’ve listened to marketers outline goals, strategies, campaigns and tactics with no mention as to how it connects to their website, social media channels or even those microsites specifically created for the campaigns. There’s no talk about calls-to-action, conversion points or engagement. But there should be.

Integrating online and offline marketing is the key to making all of your efforts work. And it’s also one of the greatest challenges.

As traditional marketers, we have a tendency to create our campaigns in an offline vacuum. There’s an obvious lack of communication between marketers and those executing the various components. But bridging that gap can be as simple as taking an inventory and asking everyone involved, “What is the online component to this campaign?”

Be the one to raise that question. Start the conversation. Chances are pretty good there’s a terrific opportunity to tie that offline promotion to your website, a services landing page or one of your social media channels.

If cohesion isn’t enough of a reason to start the conversation, then ROI certainly should be.

The recent 2011 IBM Global CMO survey found that 63 percent of CMOs said that by 2015, marketing spend will be the most important measure of their success and yet only 44 percent felt fully prepared to be held accountable for marketing ROI. Creating synergy between online and offline strategies and using the measurable opportunities that the Web offers is a great proving ground.

Old habits die hard and in this case, create gaps. Bridging these gaps should be your most important marketing objective for 2012. Put it on your list. Be aware of it. Close the gap.

The Numbers Don’t Lie…

Posted on November 8, 2011 by Ben Dillon

But they can be really deceptive.

The 2011 Healthcare Internet Conference is in full swing in Orlando and there’s more push than ever to demonstrate success with real numbers. The trick to working with analytics is this: the tools report the numbers but they don’t know what they mean. Before you present your numbers, and I’m more concerned about presenting them to your leadership than to a conference, you need to understand them.

I attended a session yesterday about a physician directory overhaul and how they used metrics to demonstrate success. The numbers that they shared were the following:

Page views: before: 320,000, after: 300,000
Page views per visit: before: 3.76 , after: 8.83
Bounce rate: before: 48.12, after: 7.78

Understand that these were numbers that they shared with their executives. I’ll admit that, looking at these numbers, I’m really confused. Doing a little division, we find that they had around 85,000 visits per week before the redesign and only 34,000 after. Sure, those new visitors are more engaged (lower bounce rate, higher pv/visit), but that’s a big shift!
After much discussion, the disconnects were teased out:

They didn’t measure the same thing – both sets of numbers were for an overall URL, but the old site included a health library that was dropped in the overhaul without recasting the old numbers to remove the irrelevant page activity.
They changed tools – the old site used WebTrends while the new site uses Google Analytics. Past experience tells me that you really can’t compare numbers between these platforms.
They really didn’t dig into the numbers to understand what was going on. Why did the bounce rate go down? It could be that large numbers of people were coming to the health library and then leaving, but it could also be that physician profiles aren’t indexed well in the search engines. You just can’t know without further exploration.

The presenters did do one thing very well from a metrics perspective – they looked at conversions ! It’s possible that the activity metrics could lead them to diagnose real, serious issues with their tools or it could be that the numbers are simply meaningless. But the true story lies in the fact the presenters noted that the number of appointment requests being made from the directory increased. This is a meaningful goal that they can promote, especially if the numbers continue to grow. In the end, that’s what really matters!

Who Says You Can’t Measure Social Media ROI?

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Ben Dillon

In the lineup at this year’s SHSMD annual conference was a presentation by Dean Browell, Ph.D. I’ve had the great pleasure of working with Dean this year on SHSMD’s Emerging Media Task Force, which he chairs, on the development of the SHSMD Emerging Media Handbook, and in the companion SHSMD U course this summer.

He’s a thought leader on social media use and I’d been looking forward to hearing him speak on measuring social media.

While the measurement of subscribers (friends, followers, likes, etc.) in social media has become commonplace, more meaningful measurement is a necessary component for building impactful social media engagement programs.

To begin, you should have a target to shoot for. Goals should be built based on audiences and what you hope to accomplish with those audiences. Social media outreach efforts should then be organized around those goals (service line growth or donor engagement) rather than the tactical efforts employed (Facebook, Twitter or blogging).

For example, more subscribers are rarely a bad thing, but the benefit of those subscribers can vary greatly. A pile of multi-level marketers following you on Twitter are unlikely to help you with your goals. Real insights come from digging more deeply into the data.

Dr. Browell recommends four keys to success in social media efforts:

Silo at your own risk – Social media is far less impactful when executed in a vacuum.
Listen and choose smart – Spend time understanding the audiences that you’re looking to reach, where and how they spend their social media time, and what they say about your organization.
Track, tweak, track, repeat – Social media moves and changes incredibly fast. A continuous cycle of monitoring and adjusting strategy and messaging is a great way to make the most of your campaigns.
You won’t get “R” without “I” – Social media is not free. Some of the tools and platforms may be free, but the strategy and implementation of social media programs take resources.

While the tactics for social media may be different than for traditional media, the planning and thought that go into them are, in many ways, not so different. The simplicity of diving into the tools doesn’t mean that the core research, planning and message development process that you would undertake with other marketing efforts shouldn’t also be applied in the realm of new media.

Counting Quality?

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Ben Dillon

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

–Albert Einstein

There’s been much talk about hospital quality in recent years. We measure and report more and more metrics, as each new piece of healthcare legislation comes with new reporting requirements. We’re constantly measuring care data, but in many ways, we’re still far from where we need to be.

It seems we have a tough time determining what we should be measuring. What numbers really matter? Hospitals report metrics – but often disagree with the metrics or how they’re calculated. Patients judge healthcare organizations through a totally different lens.

A clear example of this appeared in Friday’s USA Today. USA Today compared top-rated hospitals, according to the new HCAHPS survey of patient experience, with Medicare mortality data from www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov. Top ranks from the patient experience survey were often at odds with top ranks from the mortality data survey. Patients often liked hospitals that had mediocre or even poor outcomes and vice versa.

So this leads to a single fundamental question: what is quality?

I’ve made the case in the past that, for patients, quality is about what they experience. If patients could assess the clinical competency of their doctors, then they wouldn’t need doctors…they would be doctors.

Providing excellent care is very, very important. It just doesn’t mean the same thing to every organization or every audience.

To patients, quality is about the attention they receive from the receptionist, the bedside manner of the physician, and how long they’re forced to wait. They have no personal reference point with the statistical probabilities that represent our official view of quality. A one percent shift in mortality rates may be statistically significant, but it isn’t meaningful to most health consumers.

So, what does this mean for how we communicate quality?

Your organization needs to determine how it defines quality. This is not the same as rationalizing your current quality situation. Is quality strictly a set of metrics, or is it the institutional knowledge that results from performing volumes of particular procedures? Is your mortality rate most important or do you handle the most complex procedures on the sickest patients?

Patients, the media and job-seeking physicians look at your numbers when evaluating your organization. So when you present your quality metrics, be sure to give them context. What does five percent actually mean? It is good or bad? Increasing or decreasing? If you’re not happy with the number, how are you addressing the issue? All of this helps your audience judge the care system you have in place.

Your website provides the opportunity to tell your quality story. But keep in mind – the numbers aren’t the story. They are the facts that support the narrative. You still need the narrative.

Most of all, present the information where it matters – connected with the appropriate services. If you have a compelling quality story, be sure consumers find it when they’re evaluating you as a care option. In the end, that’s what counts.

Putting Success in a Successful Site Launch

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Linda Barnes

In March, we launched four successful new client sites. And although four launches in one month is impressive, we’re much more focused on the successful part of that sentence. Why? Because we believe a website, intranet or patient portal is only as good as the results it delivers.

We help our clients see the results of their efforts immediately. Not only do they hear the rave reviews and compliments from their own site visitors, we also provide them with a post-launch report detailing statistics on their key success measurements.

Here’s a look at our recent launches and some of the stats we’ve seen:

MidMichigan Health started the month with the launch of its new website and “MyMidMichigan” patient portal. Within two weeks of launching, MidMichigan noticed an improvement in key site traffic measurements: visitors are spending more time on the site and the pages are relevant to visitors measured by a low bounce rate.
Mid-month, Overlake Hospital Medical Center unveiled its new website and “My Overlake” portal, and also became the first hospital to launch a mobile site in the greater Seattle area! The new site generated 478 total portal users in a month and the first portal users signed up within an hour of launch. And after just four weeks, Overlake’s visits were up by 28%, a total of $93,201.41 was collected in online bill payments (a new feature for Overlake), and again, pages are relevant to visitors measured by a low bounce rate of 27%.
In the last week of March, Pella Regional Health Center launched its new website to strengthen its regional brand. The site offers many enhanced features, including new online bill payment functionality. According to the first month stats, visitors are spending 72% more time on the site and bounce rate decreased to 25%.
And finally, Lubbock Heart Hospital debuted its website the day after Pella, following an impressively fast three-month implementation. After site launch, Lubbock’s site visits increased 67%, visitors are spending 67% more time on the site and search traffic from Google improved by 181%.

Of course, numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. We dig into the numbers to help interpret the data, benchmark the results against industry norms, and make suggestions for next steps. So our clients understand when an increase in time spent on the site or pageviews is good, what an acceptable bounce rate is given the goal of the page, and when it’s time to build a mobile site or launch a search engine marketing campaign.

And the reporting doesn’t stop after the first month. We continue to track key success measurements and deliver quarterly reports to our clients’ stakeholders – so everyone on the team can see how the Web is impacting organizational goals.

When you’re selecting an online solutions provider, it’s important to consider both the sophistication of the product as well as the level of service provided. At Geonetric, we focus on building the most powerful software solution on the market and backing that up with a support team dedicated to ensuring you launch a site that meets your goals not just on the day you launch, but every day after.