5 Ways to Measure the Performance of Your Dental Website

And how is your website doing?
Are you achieving your practice goals?

This resource will help you to understand what you can measure when it comes to your website and digital marketing. This will enable you to focus your marketing efforts on the areas that provide the best return for your practice.

Know What’s Working and What Isn’t

Websites and digital marketing requires today’s dentists to be savvy with their marketing budgets. What’s great about it, is that digital marketing offers detailed tracking and measurement about what’s working with your website and what isn’t

Do People Visit Your Website

The foundational key to success of a website is getting people to visit your website. There are many ways to get visitors to your website, including (but not limited to):

How Many People Are Visiting

Probably the first metric that’s essential is knowing how many people visit your website in a given period (for most folks this measure is monthly or sometimes quarterly, but any time frame can be used.)

The number of visitors to your site needs to be compared. You will want to know how many people visited your website this month, and compare it to:

  • Last month
  • The same month last year
  • And whatever other comparison helps you measure what’s happening with your website
How Have They Found You?

Knowing the number of visitors is good, but you want to know more. You want to know how visitors are coming to your website:

  • Organic: This is where people find your website from doing a search on a search engine. The better your website is ranked with Google and other search engines, the more
  • Advertisements: There are many different ways to advertise online, including search engine advertising (also known as pay per click and Google AdWords), and Display Advertising (where a visual ad for your practice is displayed somewhere)
  • Referral: Other websites can mention your practice. This can include blogs of websites and social media.
  • Email: When you have email campaigns going out to patients and prospective patients, you can see what people are reading. You want to know what interests them the most, so you can continue to provide information that engages them.
  • Direct/None: This measurement comes from visitors putting the URL straight into a browser. This also accounts for uncategorized or undetermined source of traffic.
Where Are They Coming From?

You want to know where, geographically speaking, they are coming from. Depending on your business, that’s essential to know what visitors are relevant and which visitors aren’t. As a dental practice, you normally are not concerned about any traffic that’s not coming from near your practice. Any information related to visitors from other countries is normally considered useless.

In measurement, we want to consider the traffic that is coming from close to your practice location(s).

What are They Doing On Your Website

You now know how many visitors are coming to your website. Now you want to understand their behavior on your website. When you understand the behavior of your website visitors, you can better understand what is working on your website and what isn’t. You can also get insight on what’s most valueable to people visiting your website.

New Sessions

This information tells you the number of new visitors and returning visitors. Both new visitors and returning visitors are good things. Returning visitors, mean that people are engaging regularly with you. However, if you are a dental practice that wants to grow, you want a continual flow of new visitors that comes to your website.

In order to be a successful, growing practice, you want lots of new visitors. That means you need to be using activities to attract new potential prospects. Some of those activities could include SEO, Advertisements (like PPC or display ads), and social media marketing.

Conversion

Are people taking actions that lead to new appointments? This can include things like going to the contact page, making a phone call, and filling out the schedule an appointment form.

If you are getting lots and lots of new visitors, but very few conversions, then your problem is either:

  • You aren’t getting the right people visiting your website
  • You aren’t getting people engaged and you need to look at how to better convince visitors that they should schedule an appointment with your practice

If you are getting a very few number of visitors and you are getting lots of new patients from it, then you are in a good position. With a bit of promotion of your website, you can get lots more new patients.

This gives you that actual number of first time visitors that come to your website.

Page Views

Page views measures the number of individual pages that site visitors go to during a specified period of time. Normally, you can tell if your website is engaging, because the page views is high. If your page views are low, that could indicate a poor performing website.

Pages Most Visited

Knowing what pages are most visited on your website gives an indication of what people are most interested in and perhaps what’s easiest to find or what’s most compelling to check out. Combining this metric with time spent on page helps to give you further insight.

Bounce Rate

What percentage of visitors come to your site and then immediate leave (bounce) before clicking on any other pages on your website. If your bounce rate is less than 40%, your website is performing well and has a low bounce rate. If you have a high bounce rate, then something is usually off.

  • They didn’t like what they saw
  • They couldn’t find what they wanted quickly
  • Your marketing efforts are getting people who aren’t interested in what you are offering

How do You Track Your Performance?

Google provides a measurement tool called Google Analytics. It’s the most common tool for doing website analytics. It doesn’t cost anything to signup. You can setup up a free account with Google Analytics. It will allow you to measure the performance of your website and provide you with a significant amount of information. Within a short period of time you will have collected enough data to enable you to analyze trends and find insights into the performance of your website and promotional activities.

If you want to start to find out what’s going on, you have a few options:

  • You can use Google Analytics and have custom dashboards setup for access to the information you want. You can set goals within Google Analytics and track and manage them.
  • You can have an analytics tool put in your WordPress website. Any time you login you can access the information on your websites performance
  • Or your web marketing agency can provide you with a monthly report that includes the information, insights, and recommendations of any changes to your marketing campaign. These reports often include other information, such as how you are ranking for keywords.

There’s lots of ways you can become an expert at analytics. You can learn what a renowned expert, Avinash Kaushik, has to say. Here’s one of his blog posts. You can take a course right from Google on analytics too.

Get Measuring

If you have a website for your dental practice and you aren’t sure if you have Google Analytics on your website, find out right away. Get Google Analytics put on your website and get someone who will provide you with a monthly report that has useful insights and recommendations that are provided to you.

Elevate99 can help. Please contact us for an initial consultation at 866-302-4399.