The Value of Benchmarking As it Relates to Your Site
Written April 30th, 2008 by Katrina GriffinAs many of you forum-regulars may already know, I’m in the process of obtaining my MBA. The countless hours I’ve now been spending at the Bradley Library, have been met with this blinking light bulb effect and no it’s not from the fluorescent lights. In my next few blog posts, I’m going to share a few of those light bulb moments with you.
Have you ever done any benchmarking for your web site? You may have and just don’t realize it. Google just came out a few months ago with this cool new feature where you can benchmark particular stats against other hospitals. I’ll leave that topic to Bart to expand on for you in a future post or perhaps it could be a topic of discussion in the forums. You should check it out if you haven’t already.
In comparing your site to others within healthcare and outside of healthcare, you discover a lot about your site, its functionality, content, strengths, weaknesses, and much more. But more than just comparing, learning how they do it helps you to be efficient with your work. And we all know that we could use some more efficiency around here (especially when we have so many one-man web teams). This is another thing that is so great about WebiScope. I have found the forums to be a great place for this type of benchmarking. We’re always sharing our ideas and experiences with each other, which in-turn helps us to deliver a stronger product. In doing so, we’ve raised the bar for healthcare web sites and continue to do so as our sites advance further.
Currently, I can’t really benchmark against other hospitals in my area because our Web site and eBusiness is so much more developed than theirs. (I do still keep my eye on their site though, just in case anything should change.) While I can’t benchmark against them, I can benchmark against what hospitals and hospital systems are doing around the country and that has proved very valuable for me. It is also important for us to go beyond hospitals and health systems for benchmarking, step outside of the box and look at other kinds of health care sites as well as sites in other industries. How are they using functionality in their site that can translate over to mine? How are they using their content to be the most effective? What can I learn from their navigational structure? Up to this point, no formal benchmarking has been done on my site, but now that I have learned about this theory and the concepts surrounding it, I see the real value of it. I am planning to complete formal benchmarking for my site before the end of the year (as I pray for that summer/fall intern). I think the information gained will be very valuable to my hospital as a whole, not just the web/eBusiness area. I’m sure this type of benchmarking will bring in a lot of new and interesting ideas that we have never thought of before.
May 2nd, 2008 at 7:07 am
Great post. Benchmarking is so valuable. We find it useful to triangulate the data, by pulling infomration from Quantcast and Compete as well. Depending on the level of traffic to your site will help determine the usefulness of this data, but it still provides a great overview of what is going on with other organization;s web sites.
May 2nd, 2008 at 11:48 am
Greystone offers a service that compares your site with others in health care. We’ve used it for years and like the comparisons. You don’t know who the other participants are, though.
May 6th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Benchmarking especially has value when you’re understaffed and need to justify additional resources. A particular challenge when benchmarking site stats for us has been finding other sites that share the same audience, size of institution, etc.
I like to contrast our site with sites in other industries, too. There are many ideas and techniques that have value no matter the subject matter.
An interesting problem I’ve seen – what about when your competitors have a feature that you don’t, but the feature is silly or useless? It can be difficult to explain to stakeholders that it’s not needed, and why. Anyone else feel this pain?
May 13th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Bart, that happens all the time. Somebody sees a neat “bell or whistle” and they want to jump in. Sometimes it makes sense. Other times, when you can’t get any usage data from the people who launched the tool, it’s just a “me too” with little or no business sense behind it.
Meanwhile, I took a look at the Google Benchmarking feature, and it’s nice that it allows me to compare performance in certain metrics with web sites of similar size, or with different industries. However, I think the application (currently a beta version is available to Google Analytics users) has several drawbacks:
– It only includes data from sites that have opted into the program, and Google does not tell you how many sites you are comparing against.
– It relies on participants to categorize their own industry. That can be tricky, as the system does not allow for multiple selections.
– All hospitals are grouped together in a single category, and there is no way to remove extremely large or extremely small sites. Google promises to add additional categories as more sites join benchmarking, but until they add more classifications within the hospital category, the value of the comparative data is limited.
– The scope of the data available for benchmarking is limited only to the “visitors” section of Google Analytics. I couldn’t find a way to compare benchmarks for other important items like search terms, top content or traffic sources.
– It isn’t integrated integrated with Google Analytics reporting functionality. You can look at the graphs but cannot export, email or add them to the Google Analytics dashboard.
It is still a beta, and I’m sure Google will improve some of these things in the future. In the interim it is still a useful comparative tool, but with limitations.
Neal
May 20th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
Katrina,
It’s great that you’re taking the itiative to compare your sites with others across the country. Like Neal, I think the Google Benchmarking leaves something to be desired.
Earlier this month we began a benchmarking project of our own using some of the data from our clients. Although it’s still not “apples to apples” when it comes to service area and depth of the site, it will provide some great info on areas of strength and weakness.
I’d love to know what type of data would be helpful to hospital web managers.