Digital Metrics All Hospitals Should Measure In 2020

Key digital metrics help shape every decision made about your hospital, or soon will.

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(SALEM, Ore.) - The public’s demand for easy-access, low-cost, on-demand healthcare has transformed them from patients to consumers of healthcare.

In order to best serve them, and to attract more business to your hospital, you have to start seeing them as marketable consumers in 2020 and beyond.

You can use your website, apps and other digital medical devices to help create a positive user experience that attracts healthcare consumers and creates loyal customers out of them.

To do this, you’ll want to track some key digital metrics that will help shape every decision you make about your hospital from now on. Here are the key digital metrics all hospitals should be measuring as we enter the new millennia, organized by three key categories.

Before you can build engaging websites and apps, you have to have a reliable framework that is fast and functional. Spend time laying the right foundation, or else all the bells and whistles will ultimately fail.

If you want to see if your foundation is solid, track the following metrics:

• Track Load Time

  In the digital age, nothing annoys users more than slow-loading apps and websites. The ideal load time is less than 2 seconds. According to Mix Panel, every additional second of load time will cost you 7% of your conversion rate. Take note of clutter, such as images and icons that take too long to load.

• Measure Uptime

  In addition to load time, users hate downtime and crashes. Uptime monitoring tools will measure the percentage of time your site or app is usable and your uptime needs to be at least 99%. Crashes are bound to happen from time to time but they will deter users.

• Desktop vs. Phone vs. Tablet Use

  This falls under the “nice to know” category. Knowing what percentage of your users access their digital sites and apps via desktop versus a smart device like their phone or tablet can help you determine what content and features you need to be focused on.

Once you have your foundation set up, it’s time to add relevant content and features to your website and apps that make customers want to use them.

Your sites and apps will give you a treasure trove of information, you just have to know what you’re looking for. Here are the metrics that will help determine engagement:

1. Bounce Rate

A huge sign of low engagement is when people exit your site or app after only viewing one page. On healthcare sites, the average bounce rates are between 45% and 66% because they have been slow to jump on the digital metrics.

Their sites are older, run slower and have outdated or overly technical information on them. A lower than average bounce rate should be the goal.

2. Conversion Rate

In the healthcare arena, conversions don’t necessarily mean sales. Every time someone signs up for your email list, creates a profile on your app, downloads your whitepapers, they are doing a conversion activity.

Digital Authority points out in a recent article, numerous ways to increase your conversion rate, including strong calls to action and utilizing better headlines.

3. Time In Use

According to the Brafton Content Marketing Benchmark Report, the average time spent on a healthcare site is around 3 minutes. You can influence this rate by adding more useful content and incorporating infographics and videos which users find more appealing.

4. Engagement

People used to spend a lot of time on websites because there were no other options, now apps are the way to go for interacting with consumers. Apps you can download on your phone, tablet, watch or other devices keep people connected to the things they care about most.

This is why apps and wearable medical devices are becoming more and more popular for hospitals and other healthcare companies to get involved with. Gamified medical apps can boost engagement and encourage good health habits at the same time.

Finally, you want to build consumer loyalty to your products and services. You can use your website and apps to help determine how strong your customer loyalty is by tracking the following metrics:

A. Frequency of Use

How often do users come back to use your platform again? Knowing this can help you measure customer loyalty. Once you attract someone to your app or site, you want to make sure they keep coming back.

These are the people that are most likely to engage in conversion behaviors and also the most likely to champion your healthcare services to others.

You can offer incentives for coming back, one of the most compelling reasons to come back is gamification or the act of earning small rewards for doing repeat activities on your site or within your app.

B. Direct Feedback

The best way to find out if people love your digital apps and content is to ask them directly. Use chatbots, feedback forms, app reviews and even live Q&As on social media to help gather feedback from users. Social listening, monitoring chatter about your brand across social media, is a great way to get candid feedback.

C. App Referrals or Sharing Content

When people see relevant or entertaining content online, they share it with their family and friends on social media. The more your content is shared and the more your app is referred, the more traffic and conversions you will see.

Hootsuite, the master of social media traffic, claims the way to increase shares to create engaging viral content that is easy to share.

This means creating visually appealing images, infographics, and videos that people can easily click on to share. You can also make viral blog content, use catchy headlines, good graphics and implement tools like “click to tweet” to make sharing a snap.

Your digital metrics should give you endless data to help shape your 2020 marketing plan. It’s time to start looking past vanity metrics like your number of followers on social media and start digging in to reveal more meaningful data that can help you get in front of trends.

Source: Salem-News.com Special Features Dept.