In order to achieve the best possible ROI on digital campaigns, medical marketers must establish key metrics and track them continuously.
If there’s one thing that marketers have learned since advertising went digital, it’s that collecting and understanding data is a cornerstone of success. In fact, a recent Black Book survey found that among health industry professionals, the ability to crunch numbers is the most desirable skill in the market. The reasoning for this is simple — by leveraging the right skillset and analytics strategy, medical marketers can maximize their digital marketing returns.
In any digital marketing campaign, it can be easy to become bogged down by the staggering amount of information available to you. For this reason, it’s crucial that you immediately distinguish the “vanity metrics” from the important ones — in other words, you must identify which metrics are actually linked to ROI, and which merely serve as distractions. For example, although a surge in site traffic might seem like a solid indicator that you’re on the road to success, this metric can actually be misleading. Your digital ads might be sending a huge volume of visitors to your campaign landing pages, but unless those visitors are converting, that budget is effectively going to waste.
You’ll need to identify actionable metrics based on your own needs, but there are several that will likely be useful for almost any type of campaign:
Moreover, be sure to select metrics which highlight all segments of the sales funnel, from the top (brand perception, reach, engagement) to the bottom (conversions and ROI). In addition to helping you justify your ad spend, these metrics will help you understand what’s working and what’s not so you can optimize your campaigns accordingly.
One effective method for gauging the effectiveness of a given campaign is prior period analysis, a feature of Google Analytics. By comparing metrics from customizable time periods against one another, marketers can view metrics in the context of change over time. For example, comparing site visit duration month-over-month can provide insights into blog content and/or landing page quality — say visitors spent an average of one minute on a particular landing page in June, then you updated the landing page copy and that duration increased to two minutes in July, it’s probably safe to assume those types of changes should be implemented across the entire site.
Ultimately, medical marketers can and should aim to translate analytical findings into actionable insights. By examining relationships between marketing initiatives and metrics which are directly tied to ROI, you’ll be able to transform an incomprehensible mountain of data into intuitive and impactful strategies for your medical practice.
However, tracking and interpreting these metrics can be a full-time job in its own right — a luxury many small or medium-sized practices may not be able to afford. MD Connect’s Performance Portal gathers key insights and intelligence and translates it into easy-to-digest terms via an intuitive interface. Moreover, the Portal allows practices to compare multiple marketing initiatives side-by-side to see which work and which don’t, transforming a previously arduous task into a highly intuitive and convenient process.
At the end of the day, the success of your practice’s digital marketing campaign depends on its ability to identify key performance metrics and interpret them, which admittedly can take a some time and effort. But with the proper tools and guidance, the return on that time and effort will be worth the investment.