SERMO, A Global Physician Network uses Woopra to Improve Patient Outcomes

SERMO is the leading social network for fully verified, licensed doctors in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland, South Africa, and New Zealand. With its global launches this year, SERMO’s goal is to help physicians connect with one another from all over the world. With over 382,000 physicians, SERMO’s global community shares medical advice, crowdsources treatments, and discovers new ways to treat patients.

As Lik Fun Chan, Product Manager at SERMO, explains, “The message we want to bring forth is improving patient outcomes by sharing information across borders.”

A Centralized Data Set

One of SERMO’s main challenges was a lack of a cohesive, centralized way to see and leverage user data across the company. At SERMO, data is utilized across each team for their own unique needs.

The product team at SERMO uses the data to understand if users are engaged with the product and how they are using different features. The commercial team, on the other hand, uses the data to monitor and optimize client campaigns.

The lack of central, consistent data for all teams to draw upon made collaboration extremely difficult. Team members would often end up with different metrics since it was impossible to share queries with one another. To solve this, SERMO felt it was necessary to bring the entire organization’s data needs under a single umbrella.

SERMO implemented Woopra and began transitioning all their tracking “so that we’re pulling from one central data source and not from multiple ones”, as Lik Fun explains. Now, SERMO’s teams can work off the same set of data and even automate report sharing for easy collaboration.

Increase User Engagement

SERMO wanted to understand how users were engaging with their products, content, and client campaigns. As a social network, user engagement is a key indicator of product success. Although SERMO had some high-level insight from their existing analytics tool, they knew they could be getting much more out of their data.

By implementing Woopra, SERMO is able to track product usage and very specific engagement behavior. They can now truly answer the question “What are doctors doing on site?”

In one scenario, SERMO had an important module placed towards the bottom of a page. After implementing Woopra, they were able to track whether or not users were actually scrolling down and seeing the module. They discovered that very few users were in fact seeing the module, and so they moved it up to the top of the page.

SERMO is also now able to better understand physician engagement with sponsored content and client campaigns. They can determine the level of engagement with campaigns and whether or not the content is sticky. SERMO’s main KPI is engagement. They can now measure users’ time on site as well as exactly how they engage with different content.

For example, there was a page that was believed to be underperforming, as it was not receiving enough impression counts. With Woopra, SERMO was able to track the average length of time users were actively engaging with the page. When they looked at the data, they had an “aha” moment where they realized the average length of time on that page was in fact exceptionally high. “For the longest time, we thought the page was underperforming, but … these were the eyeballs [clients cared] about and they were staying on for a long time,” explains Lik Fun. This revelatory data gave SERMO a new perspective on how to define success in a client campaign on site.

Being able to determine user engagement with campaigns is imperative to SERMO. As Lik Fun says, “The more information we have about engagement, the more we can communicate to clients about their target audience and advise them on how their campaign is performing.”

Advanced Segmentation

SERMO uses Woopra’s segmentation to understand how different groups of users behave, and then leverages that insight to determine how they can improve their product to help drive further engagement in each segment.

In addition, SERMO uses Woopra to analyze their conversion funnels and see how different physician segments move through the funnel. Each segment has unique needs and will interact with the product in a different way. By looking at how different segments move through their funnel, SERMO is able to understand what updates they can make in order to help move each segment towards conversion.

As Lik Fun says, “With Woopra, we can see our data at a more granular level, which ultimately helps us know if we are meeting our KPIs.”