How Medtech Marketing Teams Can Improve Analytics Tracking

Often, medtech companies have a good idea of what success looks like, but measuring success and what contributes to it is often a different story.

Analytics tools can help you track key metrics, but it’s easy to get bogged down in all of the things that you can track, even when you don’t need all of that data.

This is where analytics planning can be really helpful in improving what and how you are tracking key metrics. A recent guest on The Health Connective Show, Kyle Akerman of Akerman Analytics, walks his clients through analytics planning and setup. He shared some of his process with us.

How to Start Planning for Better Analytics Tracking

Kyle starts the process of analytics planning by reviewing a couple of key things:

From there, you’ll want to look at your customer journey. What actions do you ultimately want them to take on your website, and what steps might they take to get there? It’s important to outline the customer journey, as it helps to identify the metrics that you will most want to track.

Common Metrics to Track

Now that you’ve gathered all of the baseline information, it’s time to figure out what metrics you need to track.

Still not sure where to start? These are some of the most common metrics that Kyle says a medtech company might want to track from their website:

The goal is to track enough data points that you can clearly understand whether or not you are hitting your goals, and if not, where breakdowns may be occurring. You don’t, however, want to be overwhelmed with a dashboard full of data points that may not all be relevant.

Avoiding Data Overload

It’s easy to become overwhelmed with all of the things you could track. After all, most analytics tools can do a lot! However, you’ll find it much more useful in the long term to narrow it down to just what you need.

Kyle recommends starting out by focusing on the top 3-5 metrics that drive the business. If you find you need to track more down the road, you can always go back and do more.

Remember that just because your analytics tool is tracking the data, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily useful for your business goals.

What About Product Analytics?

For the most part, we’ve been looking at analytics planning from the lens of a commercial website. However, if you have a login area or dashboard for current customers, you might want to track that too. That process—the product analytics side of your company—looks a bit different than commercial analytics.

For example, there are reasons that a potential customer might visit your commercial website more than once, but you generally aren’t looking at repeated use. In contrast, on the product analytics side, the goal is to have users regularly logging in and using the product.

Another potential difference is the analytics tools that you use. If your product dashboard is behind a login (as most are), the standard Google Analytics may not be the best tool. There are more product-focused analytics tools Matomo, Mixpanel, Heap, and Amplitude that may give you better insights.

One benefit of a product analytics tool is the ability to segment user groups in various ways. You might have different user types that use your product for different reasons. A product analytics tool would allow you to segment and filter to different user types so that you can analyze behaviors within that context, which may be more helpful than lumping all of the data together.

You can also use product analytics to help inform marketing strategies because it helps you to understand which product features to highlight. In turn, marketing analytics can help to inform which product features your audience is most excited about.

Plan to Evolve Your Analytics Strategy Over Time

Remember that the analytics tracking that you plan out now doesn’t have to be how you approach things forever. Your business, marketing, and products will evolve over time, and it’s important to update your analytics tracking along with that.

We recommend reevaluating your strategy as your company grows and adds on new things to make sure your data still meets your needs. Include analytics planning as part of that process so that you are always tracking the data that corresponds with current business goals.