Here’s a simple question for everyone today. Do you know what people are doing on your brand website? You probably know how many visits you are getting and how many page views. You might even know the time people spent on the site and, if you’re really digging in, your bounce rate (including the specific pages people left from). Simple, right? If you’re not doing this, stop reading and go find this out. If you don’t know these basics or where to find them, then you’re not ready for the next suggestion I’ve got.

Great. I’m assuming you know the basic stats about your site, but I’ll go back to my original question: Do you know what people are doing on your brand website?

Here’s a simple test to see if you do. Review the list below. If you answer “no” to more than 3 of the questions, then you don’t really know what people are doing on your site. That’s okay. We’re going to fix that today. But first…the test.

Do you know…

1. the specific landing pages where people enter your site?
2. the keywords that are driving the most traffic to your site (organic and paid)?
3. which sites are referring the most traffic to your site?
4. which pages people exit your site from most often?
5. your site’s bounce rate (or even what bounce rate means)?
6. the path people follow once they enter your site?
7. where your site tends to direct people within your site?
8. if your site is achieving its goals?

So, how’d you do? Did you say “no” to more than three of these? If so, go find out the answers. Your site has some sort of analytics set up on it, so you might just need to find out who has the data. If you figure out that you don’t have any analytics from your site and you are a pharma or healthcare company, then you need a new website developer and/or new digital agency. There’s no excuse. I’m not saying that you need some very expensive analytics platform, but Google Analytics is really good…and free…and can be added to any site in about 10 seconds (okay, slightly longer, but not much).

If you answered “yes” to the majority of these, but answered “no” or “I don’t know” to number eight, then all bets are off. That’s the most important question of the eight, but I’ve found many healthcare and pharma marketers (and many others) don’t know the answer to this. The reason? Often there are no goals for the site. When there are goals, they usually are traffic-related, such as 100,000 visitors in 2009. That’s not a website goal. That’s just a number. What do you want your site to accomplish?

A few times in recent posts, I’ve suggested that you can simply get rid of your brand website. I always get some comments (usually offline) that this is a crazy idea. I always ask, “why?’ The simple answer I usually get back is something like, ” Well, well…well, just because. It’s crazy.” This comes back to the question: what do you want your site to accomplish? Think about it for a second and then read on.

Your answer to that question is the goal of your website. For a website that directly sells something, the goals are usually very simple: sell x number of widgets. For a site where you aren’t selling something directly, it’s more complicated. So, what did you come up with? Here are the goals that I often hear:

• Educate patients about my product
• Increase awareness of my product (or the condition it treats)
• Provide disease state information for patients

I almost never hear “To sell more product.” But, in the end, that’s the goal, right? It is for a branded site. It probably is for an unbranded site as well albeit indirectly.That’s okay. If you’re a healthcare or pharma marketer reading this post, that’s your job…sell more product. Yes, sell it to the appropriate patients only, but it’s still the goal. If not, why are there sales and marketing groups in your company? Of course, you can’t sell product directly on your site, so you need a surrogate endpoint. Something you feel comfortable saying, “I know that if people do this, they are very likely to use my product.” What’s your “this”? Hold that thought.

If you now know your goal, you need to figure out if your site is accomplishing this goal.  For the sake of the discussion, let’s assume this is a brand website, but an unbranded site would basically be the same.

Step one actually starts at the end. What activity on your site represents success? What do you want people to do that says you’ve reached your goal? This is the “this” that I asked you to consider a few sentences ago. Consider to yourself: ”I know that if people do this, they are very likely to use my product.”

Whatever you came up with is your site’s goal. You also need to consider if you’re satisfied with your “this.” That is, do you want your site to do more? If you weren’t able to come up with something, then you need to create something. Develop an activity that you know gets people closer to using your product. If the single most important activity wasn’t immediately clear to you, then your site probably isn’t doing much in terms of persuading people to try your product. Answers like “I want people to read this paragraph” or “I want them to download this PDF” aren’t good enough. Downloading and reading a PDF, no matter how great that PDF is, isn’t going to get someone to try a new prescription medication or have a procedure. Never. You need a stronger goal and you might find that you have to create something that represents this goal.

From my look through many healthcare and pharma sites, there isn’t a strong goal for the vast, vast majority. How about an example of a site where this a clear goal and path to that goal? Okay. I’ll give you one from a site my company did two years ago for Ethicon Endo-Surgery’s BariatricEdge. Without getting into a ton of background, this site is designed to help educate patients who might be candidates for bariatric (weight loss) surgery (either the gastric band or bypass).

You can see from the site that the path we want people to follow is built right into the site navigation. Down the left side is the progression we learned people follow when educating themselves about these procedures. It ends with “How to Choose a Surgeon,” which includes a tool (visible in red-bordered box in the image above) called the Surgeon Locator. When you’re ready to take the next big step, this tool finds a surgeon close to where you live. When you click on a surgeon in the results, you get something like this:

What you see is a bunch of ways to take the final step and make an appointment to talk with a surgeon. The site walks you all the way (almost literally) to the surgeon’s front door. I know from our research that people who get this far are many times (exact numbers confidential) more likely to actually have surgery than someone who didn’t go this far. That just makes sense. But people getting to this spot isn’t an accident. They are directed here over time. There’s a clear path for them to follow that ends with them finding a surgeon. Yes, there’s a lot of education before this point (just visit the site to see how much), but the education isn’t a goal in of itself. Using the Surgeon Locator tool is the goal. We know that if we don’t do the education part, people won’t ever get here, so we have to create a path.

What’s the final transaction you’d like people to do on your site? Can you imagine how different this site would be if the goal were simply to have people download a PDF? Do you think that would actually get people to have gastric bypass surgery? Of course not. It’s also not enough to get people to try your drug. Come up with a final transaction and then build a path to get people there. In an upcoming post, I’ll show you how you can track this and tweak your site to fix the places where people stray from the path.

For the record, usage of the Surgeon Locator tool exceeded the brand team’s expectations by 1o times. I credit this to the simple path we created for people, but I’d never have known that it worked if we didn’t create a meaningful, trackable goal right from the beginning.

I’ll ask once more: what’s the goal of your site?

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