Website engagement is crucial for medical practices, especially post-pandemic when more people are online than ever before. Measuring your website’s engagement may seem like a daunting task, however, with the use of widely available online tools, monitoring your website is easier than ever and can give you valuable insight into what changes you may need to make.
How to Measure Website Engagement
Measuring website engagement is important when it comes to setting and meeting goals. Sometimes looking at your website’s traffic can open your eyes to changes that you would like to make in order to attract more active visitors to your site. It can also give you a jumping-off point to set other website-related goals.
Because measuring your website engagement can provide ample insight to potential patients and help improve your medical practice’s online presence, it is important to know what can be measured and how to improve upon those factors. Some ways that you can monitor website engagement are by measuring:
- How far people scroll on web pages- When a person is lead to your site, it is useful to know how far they scroll down certain web pages and how much content they are actually actively looking at. If you use Google Analytics 4 you will be able to set alerts that measure how far people scroll. From there, you can monitor these percentages for a selected period of time and then do some math and find the average scroll depth for that period of time. This can show you how far someone reads before they either find the answer that they are looking for or they get bored and exit the site. It can provide information to you on which pages have low scroll depth so that you can enhance them in an attempt to increase the likelihood of people scrolling further.
- How people engage with forms- If your website utilizes forms as a way to gain patients, it is important to measure the extent to which people interact with them. The forms on your website will likely have some fields that are optional for patients to fill out. Those fields are what you want to pay attention to. If you use Google tools again you will be able to see how many people fill out the optional fields. Understanding what optional fields people fill out and what fields they tend to ignore can help you edit and condense your forms. Removing some optional fields may simplify the process for your patients and raise engagement rates. It may also inspire more people to interact with your forms.
- Seeing who uses accessibility tools- Adding accessibility tools to your website is always a great idea. It allows people the independence to use your site without the assistance of another person. A good accessibility toolbar option is this one from Monsido. After you install this onto your website, you can monitor how many people click on it and apply it while accessing your website. Not having a toolbar like this can exclude a range of potential users. After implementing it, monitor how many people actually use it, the number may surprise you.
- Monitoring who viewed a CTA- A CTA, or a call to action, is a tactic used to encourage people to reach out to your medical practice. It is likely that you have many of these on various web pages. Using Google Tag Manager you will be able to see which particular CTAs incited a reaction and were viewed the most. Some CTAs will yield more responses than others. You can use this information to improve upon other CTAs or to understand what caused a reaction from patients so that you can improve upon your other website content.
- Implementing Google translate- It may not be worth it for some medical practices to add translating services as an option. The need for this tool depends on the patients you serve. If you have, for example, a large number of patients who primarily speak a language that isn’t English, it may be beneficial to add translative services for that one language. More languages can be added in the future but if you are unsure, just begin with one. From there, you can measure how many people use this service and if it’s beneficial to keep it or to remove it altogether.
Measuring the above can give you insight on how to improve your website so that you reach a larger audience. Depending on your medical practice and your clientele, you may not need to use all of the above, however, adding them can only increase the likelihood of your website reaching more people.
How to Improve Website Engagement
After understanding how to measure key features of your website, it is important to know how to use that information to increase your website’s engagement. A few ways you can do this are:
- Add a parameter to your URLs- Your CTAs may be disruptive to someone who is already subscribed to your content or is a current customer of your medical practice. A great way to separate the way your customers interact with your website is to add parameters for certain groups of people. For example, if a client is subscribed to your newsletters, add a parameter that prevents them from seeing CTAs that relate to newsletter subscription. It may become bothersome for subscribers to constantly be bombarded with messages to subscribe. Adding a parameter that detects subscribers and allows them to view content that thanks them for subscribing will likely be less of a nuisance for them.
- Tie your metrics to goals- Simply understanding the metrics of your site doesn’t benefit you unless you actually apply it. Figure out what the impact of your measurements is and how it converts to your viewers. It is important to look at what does well so that you are able to take the information and metrics from that page and apply it to pages that you would like to improve. Maybe one of your pages is performing much better than other pages, in that case, you should monitor its performance and use it to set goals for the rest of your pages.
- Record your references- Using Google Analytics, you can track where your website users are coming from. This information can be extremely useful for medical practices, especially those who may not know who or what their most valuable referrers are. Understanding where your audience is coming from and how to maintain that audience will prove to be very profitable in the future.
Utilizing these tips will not only help you improve your website’s engagement but will also help you to better understand how to optimize your website for your patients.