Sutter Health: Understanding User Behavior and Activity Across Many Sites

Overview

With a network of websites that serves system-wide, regional, and community-specific information, understanding how people are interacting with the websites and getting actionable information was a necessity, but daunting.

Challenge

For business and performance reasons, Sutter Health was switching from a paid analytics package to Google Analytics, and turned to Blast Analytics & Marketing to help them implement and configure Google Analytics to suit their unique needs.

Within the Sutter network, some sites are meant to provide general information to all of Sutter’s doctors, patients, and potential patients (like the Cancer awareness site). However, some are meant to provide specific information to small regions or to a specific set of patients. Therefore, a single type of Google Analytics setup used across all sites would not fit their needs. Sutter Health needed an Advanced Google Analytics configuration in order to properly understand and analyze user behavior on these different types of sites.

Solution

Blast Analytics & Marketing worked closely with Sutter Health through a process of discovery, audits, recommendations, execution, and follow up. Blast’s goal was to give their online marketing team a clear picture of what users are doing on the site, and what areas of the site could be improved upon to help users more efficiently find and utilize their websites.

Through an in-depth discovery process with the Sutter Health online marketing team, Blast helped Sutter identify the key differentiators between the types of sites, how the goals of users change within each site, and how the actionable data will differ. This discovery helped us define goals, needs, and allowed Blast to configure Google Analytics in a way that would provide real value to the Sutter Health team.

After configuring Google Analytics, we were engaged to perform high-level strategic SEO Audits for 10 system-level sites, and presented our findings in a series of consolidated reports and presentations which were easily shared with key stakeholders. These presentations provided a summary of findings including important areas of note, next steps, and a prioritized list of issues to address in the form of an SEO Action Plan. This strategic guidance helped Sutter Health improve SEO, and understand their challenges and successes in a way they weren’t able to see before.

Results

Sutter Health now has easy access (and regularly scheduled reports) to actionable data that is driving continuous improvement and providing better information to their community of patients and doctors.

Continued Support

Through an ongoing partnership agreement, Blast continues to provide support in the implementation process and perform SEO audits on Sutter Health sites to give the Sutter team more insight into how each site is performing. This partnership agreement allows us to continually improve the Sutter Health websites and help them meet the needs of patients across northern California.

Blast continues to work with Sutter Health to help them gain a full picture of the performance of their websites as well as identifying key opportunities for improvement.