Big news at Demi & Cooper! We recently launched a mobile website for Sherman Health that was built for the burgeoning smartphone community. The new mobile site allows on-the-go visitors to find a Sherman location, physician or patient room. On top of that, visitors can view floorplans, send an eCard or find things to do in the area. Visit shermanhealth.com on your phone to access it. Or, click on this link to see Sherman Hospital’s mobile website in the DC Interactive Group portfolio.
So what sparked the creation of the mobile site?
This idea began when we examined how visitors accessed shermanhealth.com. Analytics showed that when we compare the last six months (October through March) to the same months the year prior, iPhone browser visits (the most popular smartphone browser to access our site) jumped over 700% from one year to the next.
Starting in November, Google created a separate segment that shows mobile devices that visit a site (which gives you an idea of how important mobile devices are becoming). And even when we compare November, the first available month of data for all smartphone devices, to last month, mobile device users jumped 116%.
Tied into the mobile website launch are new billboard ads that simply state “Smartphone. Meet smart healthcare.” It’s a whole new way to view Sherman Health, providing a wealth of information in the palm of the hand.
I have a question about the new google segment for tracking smartphone visits. Was this created in November of 2009? And does it calculate or show visit information from before nov. 2009? And for the 700% figure, was this figured by comparing the Oct-March (08-09) visitors and the Oct-March (09-10)visitors? I’m a little confused.
Thanks for the nice example! We’re working on a mobile site for our hospital and are excited to see what other organizations have done.
Good question, Holly. Google began a separate segment in analytics in November 2009 that specifically tracks mobile visits to a website so that you can drill down information about only those visits. This is where the “Mobile Devices” graph shown above pulls information from. This only has information from when the segment was created on, so it only shows November 2009 on.
However, even prior to “Mobile Device” being an analytics segment, Google Analytics tracked which browsers any visitor used to access a site. So the 700% number is comparing Oct-March (08-09) visitors and the Oct-March (09-10)visitors that used the iPhone Safari browser to visit ShermanHealth.
Thanks for the comment, Becky. It’s good to see healthcare moving forward online.