In rural areas, people rely on mobile networks to access the web. This is something Pella Regional has witnessed firsthand. Headquartered in Pella, IA, this growing health system has seen a 36% increase in mobile traffic since 2017, correlating with their growing footprint and medical clinic expansion into more rural communities.

That’s why when the organization set out to redesign their web presence in 2019 with their long-time agency Geonetric, they wanted to create an exceptional user experience for both desktop and mobile users. The organization had already gone responsive, but with this new site, they wanted to put mobile user experience front and center. The new site, which launched in June of 2019, does just that, boasting a new design, new functionality, and results that demonstrate how much mobile users appreciate the approach.

Uncovering insights

As part of the redesign, Geonetric worked with Pella Regional to administer a mobile user experience assessment, digging deep into their site’s mobile performance. The team evaluated traffic trends across organic, direct, display, social, paid search, and referral sources. They also reviewed content for the top mobile landing pages and analyzed exit pages for mobile users.

The team also looked at section-specific performance, including page load speeds for each section, as well as user heat mapping and scroll mapping to study how users’ mobile interacted with the site. Finally, the team reviewed mobile conversion opportunities across the site, evaluating clickable phone numbers, online forms, and above-the-fold calls-to-action.

From this analysis, the team was able to create a set of priorities and tactics focused on improving the mobile user experience.

Redesigning the site

To support their mission and focus on the organization’s caring and compassionate values, the new site showcases photography with real staff and patients. The large homepage hero image featuring a family visiting a new baby sets the stage for the type of patient-focused care you receive at Pella Regional.

The longer homepage matches content to the way mobile users scroll and doesn’t limit content — just presents it differently on desktop and mobile. It provides visual cues, such as arrows, to keep users on the right path. It also uses large icons to call out their highest priority calls-to-action and displays eye-catching wait times, a top mobile task. Pella Regional also added more videos throughout the site, as mobile users tend to interact with video content.

Unique mobile-focused elements included rethinking mobile navigation. When accessed from mobile devices, the menu is partially hidden until the user taps on it, reducing the amount of screen space it takes up. The menu is streamlined to two horizontal bars that creates an X to close. When opened, the user is offered the same primary and secondary navigation as a desktop user, as data suggested mobile users still were accessing the same content, including locations, services, and providers. On a desktop, the user gets larger mega-menus that show multiple locations and offers module search right from the dropdown.

The redesigned site also boasts new features and functionality that delivers an improved experience to all users, including custom location profiles and custom provider profiles that include ratings and reviews. The site also has geographic targeting personalization, providing customized user experiences for site visitors who share their ZIP code.

Mobile-focused results

Mobile users are engaging with the new site. Since launch, the bounce rate for mobile has decreased by 23%, pages per session from mobile users has increased by 17%, and average session duration on mobile has increased by 21%.

Locations had 1,000 more sessions from mobile than desktop, with large increases in users landing on their walk-in clinic location profiles and the walk-in service line pages, which are services people are looking for on mobile. In general, users on mobile devices click provider ratings and reviews slightly more often than users on a desktop.

In addition, 71% of the activity on wait times came from users on mobile devices, and 80% of interactions with the task navigation were from mobile devices.

Pella Regional Health Center launched a lung cancer screening, and the marketing team needed to generate appointments. They partnered with our digital marketing team for a five-month PPC campaign.

Conceive

We started with a kickoff call to discuss their goals and set the campaign strategy. The lung screening is a differentiator for Pella Regional because it’s offered by only a few other hospitals in the area. The target audience for the screening is people between age 55 and 80 who lived within driving distance. To reach their audience online, we chose to use display ads on Google and text ads on Google and Bing.

Develop

For the text ads, we developed user-focused copy that highlighted the benefits of the screening. We wrote some ads as a statement and others as a question to test which would perform better. We also added Google Ad extensions, including a call extension, location extension, and a few callout extensions.

For the display ads, we created two concepts. The first was a real-life picture targeted to current or former smokers. The other ad was an animated GIF, showing a pair of lungs expanding and contracting.

Implement

We implemented text ads on Google and Bing. We also launched display ads through Google AdWords.

Analyze

Our team used heat mapping to track the success of the landing page. Throughout the campaign, we saw they were getting more mobile visitors, but the CTA was appearing at the bottom of the page in mobile phones. We recommended moving the CTA to the top to capture more conversions.

Test

For the display ads, we tested the picture of a man breaking a cigarette against the GIF of lungs expanding and contracting. The picture was more successful, bringing in more clicks.

For text ads, we found that questions were most successful in both Google and Bing. Over the course of the campaign, we transitioned to using more questions in the ad copy.

Conclusion

Within the first couple of months, Pella Regional got more appointment requests than appointment openings. To accommodate the requests, they performed screenings an additional day each week. And we achieved these results while keeping the ad spend below the monthly campaign budget.

In addition to exceeding the main goal, the campaign helped increase the brand awareness by creating over one million ad impressions in the last month alone. The medical imaging team was pleased with the results, which led to more follow-up appointments with Pella Regional’s pulmonologist for abnormal screenings.