The first place potential patients will learn about your medical practice is most likely from your website or social media accounts. What they see there will either make them want to know more about your medical practice or turn away from it. If your online presence is weak, you might have used the marketing budget ineffectively and marketing activities probably should be re-evaluated to ensure a positive return on investment (ROI). Here are a few statistics that show why it's vital to invest in your online presence:

• Currently, there are 4.66 billion active internet users (Statista)
• 77% of online health seekers start on search engines (Pew Study)
• 60% of social media users are more likely to trust social media posts and activities by doctors over any other group (Infographics Archive)

That said, measuring the success of your online presence entails factoring in endless digital marketing metrics. Ahead is an outline of some of the crucial ones you'll need to focus on:

Marketing Metrics

Here are the top social media metrics you can monitor to assess the effectiveness of your online presence and marketing efforts:

1. Patient Acquisition Cost

This is the most crucial benchmark to measure your return on investment. Patient acquisition cost applies to all marketing efforts. If it's a paid marketing effort, then your ad spend will be a good indicator to help calculate your patient acquisition cost. If your initiative is an organic blog, then your patient acquisition cost can be the cost of writing the blog article. Besides marketing costs, also know your patient's average lifetime value or spend to further decide if your investment is worth it.

Patient lifetime value = Patient Profit Margin x Patient Retention Time Period

2. Number of Social Media Followers

The number of social media followers is one of the metrics that many medical practices' marketing teams tend to dismiss as a vanity metric. While having engaged followers is more crucial than having many followers, many social media followers can help you grow your practice's reach.

If your social media followers are growing, then it means they find value in your social profiles. However, if you are losing followers, then it may mean that your social media profiles are not engaging enough.

3. Impressions and Reach

Impressions indicate the number of times a post shows up in a social media user's timeline. On the other hand, reach refers to the number of unique social media users who have viewed your content. This applies to both organic and paid social media efforts for your healthcare organization.

Also, while impressions give you an idea of how many people saw your post, even if they never commented, clicked, or engaged with that particular post in any other way, reach shows the number of people who saw your content.

4. Patient Retention Rate

Patient retention rate is an important metric in indicating if your patients are coming back for your service again, or if they're likely to choose another healthcare provider because of a bad patient experience. The quality of your service, the friendliness of your staff, and how easy your patient communication is all play a factor in the overall patient satisfaction. If your retention rate is high, chances are, you have more loyal patients that are more likely to bring you referrals. You should optimize your patient journey accordingly to these metrics.

5. Patient Engagement

How well you engage with your digital audience determines whether or not they will continue following you. Engagement enables you to determine how your practice's digital marketing efforts appeal to your audience. Here is an outline of some of the marketing engagement metrics that you need to keep your eye on:

• Likes, retweets, comments, shares: How many people comment on, like, retweet, or share your content? When you get more shares, comments, retweets, and likes, it means that your online presence is excellent.
• Post-engagement rate: When your post-engagement numbers rise, it means that your audience loves the content that you are presenting to them.
• The account mentions Monitor the number of times that your practice gets mentioned on social media platforms. Account mentions help you measure brand awareness.
  

6. Event Goals

Events and goals serve different purposes. They give you two sets of information and they are available in two different types of reports. To create an event goal, you'll need to create a goal for the event and track the event. Google Analytics can help you track the event in two ways:

• Using Google Tag manager
• Or adding an event code to the action you want to track

By measuring whether the goals of your medical practice's event were attained, you'll be better placed to make adjustments if need be.

Besides the key metrics outlined above, you can assess how effective your online presence is by looking at the number of online bookings for patients. If the numbers are high, then your strategy is working. If they are low, then you need to revamp your online presence strategy.

Website Performance Metrics

If you're like most medical practice owners, you've probably invested a lot of time and money developing your website, and for a good reason, because patients go online to choose providers. Your website is a valuable resource, given that it is the most important way to reach potential patients. As such, it is crucial to determine how well it is performing. Here are some metrics for doing that:

7. Overall Website Traffic

What do most medical practices measure to determine the success of their website? Traffic. Your practice's website serves not only as your home but also as your brand's face. As such, most of your online marketing strategies will probably focus on driving traffic to your website. Because of this, regularly measuring your website's traffic will provide you with valuable insights, such as which marketing campaigns are effective. Also, the better your SEO ranking, the more website traffic you generate. Maybe it's time you optimize your SEO strategies or add content marketing to your healthcare marketing strategy.

8. Number of New Patients vs. Returning Patients

The value of this dual metric is that it helps you determine the relevance of your website's content over time. Having multiple visits may indicate that you're providing useful information that potential new patients find so valuable that they keep returning to your website. As you publish new content regularly, you can review your new vs. returning visitors marketing metrics to see how any given content piece is performing.

9. Exit Rate

The exit rate metric is very specific and reveals quite a bit about the design of your website and user experience. Suppose your campaign is geared towards driving new patients to your website to learn more about your medical practice; the exit rate will show you the exact point when the patient lost interest after spending time exploring your content. Always strive to make your website's content as engaging as possible so that they don't lose interest in your brand.

10. Bounce Rate

The bounce rate metric is the percentage of people who abandon (bounce away) your website after viewing a single page. It can help you determine the reasons why visitors are leaving. These include:

• Error loading the page.
• The site takes too long to load.
• Visitors never found what they were looking for
• Wrong target audience
• They found relevant content but were not compelled to click further
  

11. Average Session Duration

The time on site metric usually varies in its relevance to your marketing campaigns. Average session duration indicates how long visitors spend on your website. It helps you determine how well your medical practice's website is performing from a user experience standpoint.

The average duration metric can help you find answers to the following questions:

• Do visitors find what they are searching for quickly?
• Is your content valuable and worth reviewing for long durations?
• Is your website easily navigable?

12. Conversion Rate

You can use Google Analytics to measure the number of conversions made on your website. Conversion can mean different things depending on your medical practices' marketing campaign. These include a lead entry, new patients, subscriptions to your health magazine, and more.

Bottom Line

When it comes to tracking your online presence, optimization, consistency, and ample preparation are essential for effective measurement. Given the busy nature of the healthcare industry, medical practices may have a difficult time measuring the effectiveness of their marketing KPIs. That's where we come in. Besides DearDoc being staffed with some of the best personnel, we also have excellent solutions such as marketing and media management that can help measure your online presence. Reach out to the DearDoc team to identify and maximize your metrics:

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