No campaign, No GFC gain

The CQC public engagement team launched the ‘Because we all care’ on the 8th July 2020 campaign in conjunction with Healthwatch England. The primary aims of the campaign are to increase awareness of the ‘Give feedback on care’ service (GFC) and encourage members of the public to provide their experience on health care providers. It aims to help services identify and address quality issues and support patients in response to COVID-19.

The campaign ran for a concentrated 4-week period and will reappear throughout the year in spikes of activity focusing on a specific user group.

Reviewing the first 4-weeks of GFC data, we wanted to understand the initial impact the campaign has had on user engagement, form completions and conversion rates.

Activity

Campaign activity saw the ‘Give feedback on care’ start page rapidly increase as one of the most popular pages on the CQC site. Typically in 15th position, GFC has been the 3rd most viewed page. The later weeks of the campaign saw a particular spike around the 29th July 2020.

Give feedback on care pageviews by week: 28th June — 8th August 2020

GFC sessions have increased 3-fold during the campaign.

The push has mainly been driven by social media, where GFC has typically had limited to no activity from this source. The main form of acquisition had been from Organic Search at 61% of all traffic channels i.e. users following the service through search engine results such as Google and Bing.

Acquisition by channel to GFC service comparing 9th June — 7th July 2020 (left) to 8th July — 5th August 2020 (right).

During the campaign, 55% of users came from social media. The level of Organic search and Referrals remained consistent, whilst direct has also increased. It’s interesting to note that volume of Social users which jumped from 217 to 14,057 users. Diving deeper into social, the largest volumes have come primarily from Facebook activity. All other social media compared to this has had relatively no impact.

More users, more submissions?

A steady rise, followed by a spike, in the number of users can be seen reflected in the number of users engaging with the form by clicking on ‘Start Now’. The first few weeks of the campaign showed a 22% increase in user engagement. The later weeks, particularly around the 29th July, showed a spike where an average of 1676 ‘Start Now’ clicks per week increased to an average of 2754 — a 64% increase.

Form completions have also increased but the numbers of users reaching the start page and then clicking on ‘Start Now’ has not translated to the overall number of form submissions.

During the campaign, submissions averaged at 700 per week, previously at 560 per week.

Form starts and completions on a week by week basis: 8th June — 8th August 2020

What does this mean? Overall, the campaign has increased submissions by 25% — good news! However, the gap between those that start the form and complete has widened considerably — look at Week 31 and Week 32.

Submissions by channel comparing channels before (left) and during (right) the campaign.

We can unpick this in the data, by looking at the breakdown of submissions by traffic channel. Despite Social now being the biggest traffic channel, it’s only 3rd in terms of submissions at 10%. Organic still remains the strongest (63%) providing over 6 times the number of submissions, followed by direct traffic (18.9%). Referral traffic has remained consistent in terms of levels of submissions. Whilst this isn’t necessarily bad, it’s important to note for reviewing the form completion rate.

Completion rate — in decline

Completion rate on a week by week basis: 8th June — 9th August 2020

On the flip side to the increase in submissions, the GFC completion rate has seen a sharp drop. Completion rate previously hovered around 40–42%. At the start of the campaign (week 28) we began to see a dip below 40% and in the last two weeks a further fall to 27%.

The concern here is that testing changes to improve completion rate for GFC will be negatively skewed by campaign activity. Fortunately, there are other ways that we can dissect the data.

The graphs below represent the completion by traffic channel highlighting Social previously on 33.33% declining to 15.69%, and due to the sheer numbers of users through the Facebook campaign this has contributed to lowering the completion rate.

Conversion rate by traffic channel comparing 9th June — 7th July 2020 to 8th July — 5th August 2020.

Nonetheless, Organic Search has proven to increase in completion rate from 42.27% to 43.75%. This is good to highlight as we should be able to observe Organic Search as a fair indicator for any changes the GFC team have made to the service in the last 2 months when comparing.

Expectation is that now that the campaign winds down the level of Organic Search as a percentage of all traffic channels should rise pulling up the completion rate with it.

To summarise:

• Campaign pluses — greater engagement, more submissions
• Campaign minuses —dramatically lowering the completion rate
• Note: Look at organic search to understand GFC impact changes in the meantime

What’s next?

• There is still some paid campaign related activity taking place over the next week
• Power BI dashboard has been created for ‘Give feedback on care’ summarising the KPIs based off of the performance framework
• GFC form continues to climb in terms of Digital Take-up and looks like it will finish 2020 Q3 as the most main source to provide feedback on care to CQC increasing from 35.75% to 38.39%

Digital Take-up for GFC on concerns raised by channels in date quarters

• A summary review on the impact of changes we’ve implemented in Public beta and their effect on GFC