The problem with traditional forms of marketing (like mailers and Yellow Pages ads) is the difficulty in tracking the return on investment. Websites are great because free tools like Google Analytics show you how web visitors find your site, how much time they spend on your site and which sites they go to after leaving yours. The marketing potential of this information is huge! Google Analytics gives you visibility to the data on your website. Again, WordPress and other platforms have built-in tools that make it easy to use Google Analytics. We suggest that dentists focus on these key areas:
Website Traffic. On Google Analytics’ main page, it shows a line graph of site visitors (users) for each day. When you hover over the dot for each visit, you can see how long the visit lasted. It shows visits per day and, more importantly, the trend. If you hired someone to do SEO for your practice, you should see this number increasing—if not, consider it a warning.
Site Usage. Another area on the main page shows statistics of site usage: total number of visitors (users), the average number of pages per visit (session), the total number of page views, the average time spent on the site, and the percentage of new visitors each month. These numbers will let you know how relevant patients find your site. If you have a lot of page views but the average time spent on your site is very short, this tells you that people are finding your site but not finding anything that they find helpful. This would be a great indicator that you need to focus your message or look at developing content that resonates with potential patients.
Acquisition Page. Another page in Google Analytics is the acquisition page, which displays a pie chart of traffic sources to your site. This chart shows how visitors landed on your site (referring sites, search engines, direct, or other). This is great because it shows you if people are typing in your website address directly or if they are being referred by search engines or other social medial platforms. Again if you hired a company for SEO and do not see a lot of traffic to your site from search engines, you should ask your SEO provider about it and consider making a change.
This information is valuable when it comes to knowing how successful your website is at customer engagement. Another area of interest is the specific pages that the people visit the most often and spend the most time on. This suggests what is most important to your patients (and future patients) and where you might want to spend additional time in refining your marketing strategy. For example, if a lot of people spend time on your dental implants page, then maybe add more content about implants and possibly feature education or specials on implants on your home page. A call to action about that topic would also be helpful!
CLICK HERE to read “Out of Site, Out of Mind” and learn the dangers of neglecting your website.
All graphs courtesy of SEO.com
