Web Analytics – What you can learn about your customers

If even the term ‘web analytics’ befuddles you — you’re not alone. For most of us, we’ve been trained as clinicians: experts in pharmaceutical care.

So why would knowing who’s coming to your pharmacy website matter?

Well, it can actually help you be a better pharmacist by helping you know what content is attractive to your customers.

Simply put, web analytics tell us what our customers are doing on our websites and who they are.

I know you might be nodding off right about now, but this is cool. Really cool. And on a personal level, kind of scary too.

Did you know that when you go to a website, your behaviour is being measured — the time you spent there, what pages you navigated to, which website you came from, what buttons you clicked, where your cursor tracked, how much money you spent, and more? This is the world of web analytics.

For pharmacies, it can give you a great insight into what your customers are interested in and how you, as a business, can evolve and better serve the community’s needs.

Many pharmacies don’t have a modern, responsive website. Often this is because they’re part of a franchise brand that restricts individual pharmacy websites. For the other 2000+ independent pharmacies, it’s mainly because they just haven’t had the support to make it happen.

If you haven’t yet used Google Analytics — a free service from Google — take a look at Figures 1 and 2. You’ll see a sample of the metrics that are available. Used correctly, you can gain insights into the type of customers and the volume you’re attracting on a daily basis.

Figure 1 & 2 — Google Analytics.

This information can provide specific business outcomes. It can answer questions too: “Should we open a clinic room?”, “Do we need to increase our organic range?”, “Should we redevelop the website?”

Additionally, specific pages can be tracked. In the Guild Digital website platform, our pharmacy clients can also see the analytics of visits to each of their pages (Figure 3), including their self-managed blogs.

Figure 3 – Page-specific analytics from a Guild-Digital-developed website.

Knowing the popularity of each blog or health topic, gives this pharmacy an idea of the health topic areas that are interesting to their customers.

Note: We launched this website on our platform around 13 March. We saw a five-fold increase in our web traffic (Figure 4). This equates to 25 extra customers per day being driven into the store.

Figure 4 – Visitors to Guild-Digital-developed website five-folds after 13 March launch.

Another reason to understand web analytics is that Google (the overlords of the internet … no seriously … just like the Empire in Star Wars, but not as evil) will monitor the traffic to your site, the time customers spend on pages etc., and will either boost you or penalise you on Google Search.

Because a customer’s search terms will be matched by relevance and popularity with your business offerings as published and tagged on your website, you will be found or not found, based on these metrics.

Bottom line — you need a website that works with Google. You need to understand basic analytics for what’s working on your site and you need to know what is attracting customers to your site.

If you can’t manage all of that and get your daily stock out, plus pack all your DAAs and complete your Medschecks, you need a website partner who can help you, and who understands pharmacy.

One of the driving passions we at Guild Digital have is to make it easy for Guild Member Pharmacies to get online with a website that actually works.

There is no other pharmacy-specific website provider that can, hand on their heart, say ‘we specialise in pharmacy and have a data-driven layout that is specially designed for pharmacy consumers’.

In addition, we ensure that the site is plugged into a library of over 70 pharmacy-specific Health Topics. This means that your website will be found when a local customer searches for one of these topics.

Even your URL will reflect the pharmacy’s suburb. All of this leads to more customer interaction, more time on site and more Google pats on the back.

I’ve had many conversations with pharmacy owners who say, “Aaron, convince me that I need a website and I’ll sign up”. The truth is, if you need to be convinced that you need a professional website for your pharmacy, you’re already so far out of touch with your consumers that I can’t help you.

If your pharmacy doesn’t have a website, your potential customers will not find you on Google. They will not see you as being a legitimate business.

If your website is stale, they won’t find you credible. Without a proper site and a dashboard of your analytics, you won’t be getting a full view of your customers and what they want from you.

This is why it’s important to have a website and view your analytics — it’s a window into the needs of your community.

For more information, head to guilddigital.com.au.

Aaron D’Souza, General Manager, Guild Digital