eHealth Articles & White Papers

Stay Relevant: Tie Web Goals to Corporate Goals

Ben Dillon - Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

"One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. ‘Which road do I take?' she asked. ‘Where do you want to go?' was his response. ‘I don't know,' Alice answered. ‘Then,' said the cat, ‘it doesn't matter.'" - Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

The key to formulating an effective Web strategy is to begin by asking the right questions. What is it you want to accomplish with your site, and why? If you begin with the questions, you can then develop a successful strategy that contains the right goals, a plan for meeting those goals, and a process for communicating success.

Oftentimes, we become so involved in the actual development of our online programs, we forget to step back and ask "why?" Why are we doing this? How does it push our organization forward? How do we plan to measure success? Without a defined Web strategy, measuring the success of your efforts and then communicating that success effectively to your stakeholders can become a real challenge.

Not all goals are worthwhile

Let's say you've launched a new online initiative, such as a website or online campaign, and are regularly monitoring your site analytics. Over the next few months, you see a dramatic increase in traffic. Your site is a success, right?

We've all done it - when setting goals for our site and measuring the value of our online initiatives, we've focused on metrics like site traffic. Why? Because traffic is easy to measure and easy to explain to other people. Traffic is the metric of least resistance.

So what's wrong with using an increase in traffic as a goal? It's only a small piece of the puzzle. Increasing traffic leaves many important questions:

• What is the quality of the traffic?
• Who makes up the traffic?
• Why are they coming to the site?
• What do they do when they get there?
• Are they potential patients?
• Are they getting to what they need?
• Are they even getting to what they're expecting to find?

More importantly, your CEO and other key stakeholders don't care about traffic (on its own). When you set goals around metrics like traffic and when your stories of success end with them, you reinforce to your senior executives that what you're doing doesn't deserve space on their radar.

Setting effective goals

When developing goals for your website, look outside your Web team. Take time to understand what's important to your organization and senior management. What they care about most is likely:

• New revenues
• Reduced costs
• Care quality
• Improved outcomes
• Happy patients
• Happy doctors

Make sure to develop goals that align with your organization's plans. To do this, start with a review of your organization's strategic plan, department/division business plans, and marketing plans. These plans are there for a reason - they represent a consensus on direction and priorities. Such plans succeed when they matriculate throughout the organization, and contain projects and tactics that connect directly to the established corporate goals and initiatives.

Your Web goals need to flow from your corporate goals. Only then can you find the connection between your efforts and your organization's efforts and truly prove the success of your programs.

An example: growing service line volume

Your organization wants to grow its cardiology services as it prepares to open a new heart facility. The goals for this corporate strategy include growing cardiology service volumes and market share while improving quality and, over the long term, profitability of the service line.

What would your goals be for your online communications?

Your goal could be to increase online awareness of your cardiology services or the new facility. In this case you could use traffic to measure success. But keep in mind, this is less impactful than a goal that directly connects to the corporate goals.

Instead, try to establish goals that use the Web as the gateway to bring consumers into the facility. Remember: goals based on new patients, growth in market share and the number of patients influenced by your online channels will resonate better with your executives.

A focus on corporate goals when defining your Web goals will also change the priorities for what you do and how you structure your solutions. If you aim at increasing traffic, you might develop a microsite and invest resources in SEO and paid advertising to drive traffic. Those are all good elements of your online project. But what else would you include if your goal is to drive patient volume? Perhaps you would:

• Implement defined calls to action
• Drive visitors to transactions they can complete online such as signing up for a screening or making an appointment
• Set up distinct, traceable phone numbers for those who call for appointments, classes or screenings

These efforts would provide you with data that matters.

Does traffic ever come into play?

Increasing traffic does matter, and although it shouldn't be used as a goal, it's okay to use traffic numbers as a data point of success - especially when you use traffic to measure conversions for your transactions. For example:

• How many people come to the site? 
• How many of those visitors begin a transaction?
• How many visitors complete that interaction?

The best bang for the buck may come from increasing traffic. But more than likely, you'll have better success if you focus your goal on improving conversion rates rather than increasing traffic.

Traffic statistics are important, but they represent one data point and not the most important item you should be communicating as part of your story of success. Tying your goals and the measurements of those goals to what's important to the organization overall is far more important for a success story that will be relevant to senior leadership.