10 website statistics all medical practice managers should know

“How could they improve your practice’s income and service levels?”

Updated May 2019

ARTICLE FAST FACTS

Details the 10 website statistics that should be monitored to help build a successful medical website and practice
Outlines the statistics you should monitor and what you should do with the data
Article contains 1777 words – Reading time 3-5 minutes.

David Douglas

Director – Medical Website Solutions | Head of Health Marketing.
Over 15 years of website and online marketing experience.

Here are the 10 website statistics you should analyse:

You should benchmark and measure all of the following statistics and review them on a monthly basis with your team. The goal is to monitor the trends and see where you can improve your website to:

Drive more patients
Increase income and;
Improve patient care.

1. Being found on the number 1 organic position on Google:

Look at the amount of potential patients being in the No.1 position of Google could drive into your practice:
(80% to 90% of Australians use Google as their primary search engine)

Google search results	Average traffic share
Number 1 position	32.5%
Number 2 position	17.6%
Number 3 position	11.4%
Number 4 position	8.1%
Number 5 position	6.1%
Number 6 position	4.4%

Statistics from Search Engine Watch

What should you do with this information?

Firstly see what position your practice comes up in common keyword searches. For example if you are a physiotherapist in Brighton type into Google “Physiotherapist Brighton”.

Take a look where your practice comes up in Google search results and consider if some Search Engine Optimisation work may benefit your practice in the long term. Do this for all of your practice’s services. It may also show you more opportunities to improve your website’s content.

Even improving by 1 position higher in a Google search can drive a lot more traffic to your website and more patients into your practice.

Also see – Search Engine Optimisation for Doctors

2. Website page loading time

40% of people will abandon a web page if it takes more that 5 seconds to load.
Source – Econsultancy

What should you do with this information?

There are a lot of free tools you can use to measure your website loading speed. I recommend:

Pingdom– Simply type the url address of your website into the test box.
Website Speed Test – Type the url address of your website into the test box. It will show you haw fast it loads in different countries around the world (Please only take notice of Brisbane time zone)
Google Developers -Type the url address of your website into the test box. This one will even show you what items are taking a long time to load.

(Note – Over 5 seconds is considered a long website load time).

Most commonly images slow down your website’s loading time. As a rule of thumb, keep your images as small as possible without compromising image quality. For small images a good rule of thumb is to keep them around 10kb to 60kb in size. For large images keep them around 100kb.

3. Bounce rate

Definition – Your website’s Bounce Rate is the percentage of people who visit your website and only see a single page. They leave your website without interacting with the page or any other information on your website.

So what is considered a high bounce rate?

This depends on the history of your website statistics (that is why you need to constantly measure your website statistics every month) and how your website is set up. Other factors could include:

Poor website design
Poor website information
Usability issues
Not having a mobile friendly website
You may even have a single page website
Users may have found the information they are looking for
User behaviour – A user may bookmark a page, go to it and leave (that’s considered a bounce)

What should you do with this information

Try to keep your bounce rate as small as possible in an historical sense. Most practices I see have bounce rate between 70-80%, which is too high.

Ensure the information on your website pages are:

Relevant to your target audience
Contains keywords patients commonly search
Easy to read – Your website should have a reading age of a 13 year old
Well spaced copy using images, tables and bullet points to break up information and make it easy to digest.

4. Know your competition

Take a look at some of your competitions websites.

What should you do with this information?

Make a list of what you think they do well. Prioritise a list and look to improve some of the copy, features and functionality on your website.

View white paper now!

10 FEATURES YOUR WEBSITE MUST HAVE

“20 page white paper – How to improve income and patient care.”

View white paper now!

5. Time spent on website

How long a person spends on your website is a fair indication of how interesting they find your information.

After the key information of:

About your services
Experience
Why should they use your practice
Facilities and;
Location

What should you do with this information?

Think about what else you could add to help a potential patient to build trust in your services. You could have:

Helpful “How to” or “Tips” section
Photo gallery – Before and after shots
Videos
Frequently ask questions
Health notices
Useful statistics – Latest research on…

6. The number of website visitors

Measure how many visitors are accessing your website.

Any analytics package pinned to your website can tell you these statistics. Pay attention to the “unique visitors”. Unique visitors refers to the number of individuals visiting your website during a given period, no matter of how often they visit.

What should you do with this information?

This enables you to keep an eye on how many people are visiting your website per month. This is a good reference point to set a benchmark and helps you monitor spikes or a decline in traffic. It is one of the first indicators to show you if there is a problem.

It is also an important statistic to help you measure conversion….more on this later.

7. Mobile insights

This is important especially if you do not have a mobile friendly website.

62% of Australians access the internet via a tablet or phone.

What should you do with this information?

Bottom line – If you don’t have a mobile friendly website, you are offering your patients a poor customer experience. They will potentially bounce off your website and go and find a competitor (someone who does have a mobile friendly website)
.

8. Popular pages visited on your website

It’s always useful to know what the popular pages are on your website. Most of the time these are the ones that can be tweaked to help drive more patients into your practice.

What should you do with this information?

There should be a high correlation between your practice’s strategy, your main income streams (or your most popular services) and what and how this information is displayed on your website.

Most practices I see initially have very little copy or useful content on their websites. The copy that is there has not been written by a professional website copywriter and is not optimised for search engines.

The patient journey is also forgotten….

9. Traffic sources and referring sites

Where is your website traffic coming from? How do you attract patients to your website? Does your practice:

Feature highly on Google searches
Advertising via Google Ads
Active on social media
Advertising via social media
Advertising via online directories either free or paid (yellow pages)

What should you do with this information?

Monitor where your website traffic is coming from so you can see where your successful efforts are coming from. The beauty of a website is you can test and measure your efforts so you can optimise them. This can also be a great indicator of any problems or positive efforts that are helping you drive patients to your practice.

10. Measure your websites conversion

Definition of website conversion – Measuring the conversion of website visitors into patients.

Number of goal achievements = Leads from your website
Visitors = Your websites unique visitors

Number of goal achievements – You can measure this in a number of ways:

Have dedicated telephone number that is only on your website (record the number of calls per day)
Have a special offer only available on your website
Measure the email responses coming from your website (set up a dedicated email address)
Measure the number of new online bookings
Simple ask new patients where they found out about your services

What should you do with this information?

If you have 20 new patients from your website in a week and it was visited uniquely by 150 people that week your conversion rate would be 13%. This approach gives you an indication of how hard your website is working for your practice.

Keep in mind these figures are an indication only as gaining 100% accuracy in any format is almost impossible. Use it as a good rule of thumb indicator.

Conclusion

Monitoring these 10 website statistics should only take 10 minutes a month. Put them in a spread sheet and discuss them with your team in your monthly meeting. You will see the trends quickly appear.

This will enable you to strategically pick the pages and efforts you need to focus on in line with your practice’s income streams. You can then put a plan in place to test, measure and improve your website to drive more patients, improve income and patient care.