Who Is Really Visiting Your Hospital’s Website? (What If It’s Not Your Patients?!)
Written April 25th, 2007 by swanieOnce, I had assumed that patients were my primary target website audience. Why should I have ever thought otherwise? Well, you know what happens when you assume things…
Case in point: St. John Health in Detroit discovered that their site visitor composition was different than they expected.
According to a 2006 ForeSee Results case study titled “How St. John Health Grows Its Customer Base by Leveraging Its Website”, St. John Health discovered that 56% of the visitors to their website were not patients, but job-seekers. As a result, St. John modified their website to better suit the needs of job-seekers to their website. Is this true for all hospital websites? It probably varies drastically. But I think St. John did the right thing… they used an online survey to ask their web visitors to find out who they were.
What do you think? Do you know who’s visiting your website? How do you find out? Does it matter?
April 26th, 2007 at 9:26 am
That’s really interesting – who’d believe that over half their visitors are job seekers. What does that say about their demographics that they’re marketing too?
Makes you wonder if our audience is really who we think it is. Anyone else do any polls or surveys along these lines?
April 26th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
You don’t need a survey to figure this out. A simple Webtrends report breaks down which sections get the most visitors, and a review of search terms used to find your site will make their intentions clear.
April 30th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
We have a good deal of job seekers, as well.
Instead of tweaking our front page overly in their favor, we decided to work on the second-level career page, assuming that those looking for employment would find the links they were after.
May 9th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
We most definitely have different audiences for our web site, some coming in for jobs, some just to get directions or a phone number, others researching a health issue, and plenty of employees using the site as a doorway to the intranet. We know that both by tracking traffic patterns, and by asking users through our annual site visitor profile. If anybody would like to see the current profile study running right now, please let me know!
July 3rd, 2007 at 12:34 pm
Hi Ceil from MCG here. Neal, I’d like to see your current profile study. Do you have a link to a survey on your site? Do you send out an email to your registered users? We are interested in doing a survey but I am not a fan of popups and our registered users is not very large. Any idea on how we can survey the folks that are really using our site?