Google Analytics for Healthcare

by ROYAL DIGITECH

Google Analytics for Healthcare, We work with many healthcare clients who use different advanced tools to gather large amounts of data. Their main goal is often to get detailed insights into how their digital platforms and campaigns are performing. Tools like Hootsuite, Sprinkler, Google Campaign Manager, and especially Google Analytics, are commonly used.

Out of all these, Google Analytics stands out for its widespread use, powerful features, and complexity. However, many users find it challenging to unlock its full potential. In this article, we’ll provide some easy tips for healthcare organizations to quickly gain valuable insights using Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is tricky, especially for healthcare

Google Analytics is free and easy to set up using a Content Management System. It gathers a lot of useful data right away, so you’ll start seeing helpful information from the start.

Because it’s simple and low-risk, marketing teams often create a Google Analytics account. The person who sets it up usually ends up becoming the “Google Analytics expert,” even if that wasn’t their plan. While getting started with the tool is relatively easy, mastering it can be challenging.

The first dashboard you see is user-friendly and easy to navigate.

But doing anything deeper and clicking around, let’s say for a custom report is anything but clear. 

It can feel quite complicated. The data can be hard to understand. For example, look at this report in Google Analytics.

What do all these terms mean? How do I differentiate between a page and a landing page? What’s the difference between bounce rate and exit percentage? Are any of these metrics good or bad?

Google Analytics doesn’t provide context for these metrics, making them hard to interpret.

We often see healthcare teams start working on reports but then get lost or overwhelmed, leading them to give up.

While Google Analytics is powerful and easy to set up, using it effectively requires understanding its context. Many hospitals have Google Analytics but only access a small portion of the insights it offers.

So, here are some practical examples of how to gather and use this user experience information.

Helpful UX Google Analytics reports to pull for your healthcare organization

There are many ways to analyze this data. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, I have good news: there are simple methods to access and view this data without much effort. Achieving small wins can make using the tool feel less daunting!

Here are three common scenarios that will be relevant to your healthcare system. Along with some straightforward data, you can gather information to have meaningful, data-driven discussions.

Scenario 1: Our health system’s homepage is very important, and we need to add this feature to it!

There’s a common situation we encounter when designing a website: a key person (often a VP or similar) comes to a meeting with a new idea.

“Hey, we just received a big grant for our amazing cardiology research,” they say. “We should promote this and make cardiology more visible on our homepage!”

Your first thought might be, “How can we add this feature without disrupting the homepage?” Or maybe, “We can’t just redesign the homepage for this!”

But there’s a bigger issue we need to address first.

The homepage isn’t your patients’ front door.
The assumption that most people will see important information on the homepage isn’t accurate.

Here’s what I mean: Go to your Google Analytics account and check how many visitors enter your site through the homepage. In Universal Analytics, you can find this in a specific report.

The report will look something like this:

What do we see here? First, yes, the homepage gets a lot of visitors. However, if we check the percentage next to the homepage entrance, we can see it accounts for less than a quarter of all entries.

Keep this in mind: about 8 out of 10 people enter healthcare websites through pages other than the homepage.

This trend is common among all the healthcare clients we work with. Most users land on specific detail pages, like those for providers, locations, or services.

Why does this matter in your discussions with C-suite executives? How can we make better use of our data?

Many people think of homepages as the main entry points of websites, but that’s a misconception.

Google is actually the “front door” of your website, regularly directing users to the interior pages. These include detail pages like “www.hospital.com/doctors/your-doctor-name-md” or “www.hospital.com/service-line/cardiology.”

What report can I pull from Google Analytics?

Healthcare websites usually have straightforward URL structures, making it easy to filter content types like “/locations/” or “/providers/.” By applying filters for these strings, you can generate a detailed list of these specific content pages. This will help you see a clearer picture of where visitors are landing on your website.

Even with these simple queries, we’ve shifted the conversation to a more valuable insight: 12,000 visits started on provider detail pages! If we want to boost the visibility of our cardiology research, we should focus on enhancing these provider pages.

Additionally, how can we improve the connections between provider, location, and service-line pages to make navigation easier for users?

Analyzing entrances and specific URL groups can help identify the real “front doors” of your site. If the results aren’t what you expected, this can guide you in adjusting your strategy (how do we adapt to this new information?) or budget (should we invest more in improving SEO for these underperforming areas?).

*Our recommendation*
We suggest that instead of adding a feature to the homepage highlighting cardiology, we could instead add content that showcases the awesome research and improves the provider profiles or location pages, making them more appealing.

Scenario 2: Our online appointment tools aren’t working, and we should scrap them!

Southeastern Hospital invested a lot of time, money, and effort into building online scheduling tools for users to book appointments digitally. That’s great! But so far, it seems like only a small number of people are actually making appointments.

The first thing we should recognize is that the big call-to-action button on our website allowing users to “schedule an appointment online” is not the end of the user journey. It’s just one step in the process from “deciding I need care” to “physically being in a doctor’s office.”

Here’s how we often think about our digital tools:

User visits site → user clicks on CTA = Conversion!

Unfortunately, that’s an oversimplification.

An actual user flow
An actual user flow looks something more like this:

1. User Googles “Doctor near me.”
2. Visits the site on a doctor profile page.
3. Browses 1-5 other pages.
4. Returns to the doctor profile page.
5. Clicks on a CTA.
6. Gets redirected to an internal form on a separate site.
7. Fills out the form.
8. Submits the appointment request form.
9. Reaches the thank-you page.

It’s a much more complicated, multi-step process. At every step, a user can abandon the process. Often, a surface-level look will only show us the final result of the user journey. Instead, we need to focus on understanding what happens throughout the process.

For example:

• 1,000 users Google “doctor near me.”
• 400 visit the site on the doctor profile page.
• 320 click on the CTA.
• 315 start filling out the form.
• 50 submit the appointment request form.
• 45 actually show up for an appointment.

In this scenario, where is the drop-off? Where is the pain point? Is it the design and placement of the button? Or is it in the online form that users need to complete?

This is an important UX feature.

What report can I pull from Google Analytics?
A simple way to find this in Google Analytics is by creatively using custom segments. When logged into Google Analytics, open the segment builder to create a new segment:

If you hit the ‘preview’ button, you can see exactly what percentage of users completed this task. When you update that segment with the next step, you can see how the preview changes.

That’s a quick and straightforward way to identify where there’s a larger-than-expected drop-off in sessions or users, helping you direct your efforts. You still need to accurately identify the steps, and for this, you’ll want to use either events and pageviews if you have them, or URL string fragments if you don’t.

*Our recommendation*
Think through what we can do better about that particular stage in the journey? Can…

• A form be shortened or simplified?
• Load time be increased?
• Move elements to more visual prominence to facilitate the user’s journey?

And, if this step is difficult, is it even necessary?

Scenario 3: Our internal search tools aren’t working at all

This is another common issue we encounter with our hospital clients: someone comes in and says…

“Our internal site search stinks! I’ve been searching for my name, specialty, and location, but no relevant results show up! We need to reassess how our search results are ranked; it’s all wrong.”

Before we completely overhaul our search weighting, let’s find a quick way to use Google Analytics to answer that question.

What to do in Google Analytics?
The first thing you should ask in this situation is not “is our internal search successful?” but rather, “what do we mean by “successful?’’

Maybe this is “select a relevant search result from the list displayed.” Maybe you want this to be “clicks on a specific CTA” after that search result. Maybe you want them to end up in a specific location or URL on the website. 

Most of the time, the simplest way to ascertain “success” for an internal search tool is “did the user find a relevant search result?” The good news is that there is a straightforward way of getting that information.

Almost all the time, your search information will be pushed into the URL in the form of parameters. They’ll look something like this, and populate when a user executes a search:

This process makes it easy to trace a user through the search journey. It also is why we like using URL parameters rather than or in addition to Google Analytics’s native site search features: this allows us to get information on the filters used as well as the queries used, and most healthcare providers have internal find-a-doc or find-a-location tools that feature filters very heavily.

What report can I pull Google Analytics?
So what do we do here? We look for the search pages with a query parameter attached. The easiest way to do this is by content categorization. We’re looking for two specific steps here: 

• A user who entered a query into our search tool
• A user who subsequently clicked on a relevant result

In order to do this, we need to run a very simple report: We need to go to the all pages report, located here in the GA interface: 

Once there, we are going to add a secondary dimension called “Previous Page Path” to the report.

The last piece of this puzzle is to add a custom filter to this report, where we filter the previous page path to include only URLs that contain an entered query (that’s the “?” part of this puzzle). And yes, I’ve chosen a straightforward example; if you prefer a more complex one, you should use that in the blog you write. We also filter the page paths to include only those pages that have a provider profile page as the next page.

*Our recommendation*

What we have here is a useful dataset: we know what queries were entered and which pages users ended up on.

You can adjust the filter to be more or less specific or inclusive, allowing you to see which queries led to specific results being clicked on. You could even use the Google Sheets integration via API or an API call from R or Python to get even more details. But even without that, these steps will provide a solid first look at the data and help you feel more confident and familiar as you move forward!

An Ending Note

I hope this has provided you with some helpful first steps toward getting MORE out of your Google Analytics implementation in a real, practical, and tactical way. These are common, straightforward analyses and data dives that we regularly perform for our clients.

However, I also want to emphasize that each of these scenarios involves some strategic thinking before execution.

Example #1:

We need to shift from a poorly formed directive to a better research direction and question.

Example #2:

First, we must better identify and outline our user funnel and the steps involved.

Example #3:

We need to identify and agree on how we define “success.” This part of the puzzle is just as important as the analysis itself (I’d argue it’s even more important, but this is a blog post aimed at providing you with tactical actions to get great use out of a tool you probably already have!).

We hope these tactics help you make the most of your free tools! Good luck, and don’t hesitate to experiment!

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