What Is Your Hospital Website Worth?

// By Jane Weber Brubaker //

In a recent eHST “Ask the Expert” column with Avinash Kaushik, Digital Evangelist at Google and Co-Founder of Market Motive Inc., we briefly touched on the concept of economic value in the context of web analytics and website goals. “Without goals and goal values, you are not doing web analytics,” says Kaushik.

Goals are conversions, and Kaushik divides them into micro conversions that don’t directly drive revenue, and macro conversions that do. Unless a health system sells products on its website, or charges for events when people register online, revenue is generated offline, when someone visits a physician, or has a procedure. Therefore, all conversions on a health system website are micro conversions.

But what is each one worth? Which ones are doing the best job of getting a consumer to choose a physician and become a patient, or decide to have a procedure? How do you put a value on those micro conversions so you can measure the effectiveness of the website? How can you see which marketing channels contribute the most, or the least? Are advertising dollars allocated correctly?

Healthcare is similar to other industries with products and services that have a long sales cycle. Someone experiencing hip pain may be months away from actually visiting a physician to explore treatment options. But in the interim, the person may seek information online, take a health risk assessment, sign up for a newsletter, attend seminars, read online content, or search for a physician. Each one of these micro conversions is a goal, and in Google Analytics (or other digital analytics tools) can be assigned a goal value. But how?

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