Traffic quality – why it’s important for dental websites
Lots of web traffic, but the wrong quality? Don’t expect good conversion rates.
Perhaps the most important factors determining the success of dentist’s websites are the volume and quality of traffic received by it. Other factors are also very important such as the quality of the website and its ability to convert the visits to tangible enquiries, but without the visits in the first place, the rest is incidental.
Website traffic can originate from multiple different sources; from search engines, clicks on your link on other websites, direct visits where the user enters your www address in their browser, social media channels and more. However, whilst getting traffic to a site is a primary objective, the type and quality is extremely important – some traffic is good, other types of traffic are less good and can actually be detrimental. So it’s important to understand the various types and sources of website traffic and whether they are likely to result in useful new patient enquiries.
For the purposes of this discussion I will keep to fairly generic categorisation and try not to go into too much technical detail. However, it will serve to give the dental business owner and manager sufficient appreciation of the topic so that they can have an informed discussion with their chosen marketing partner during performance reviews.
Organic (free) search traffic
This is the traffic which comes to your website from users who search for businesses and services in Google and other search engines. These users usually have a firm idea of what they want and consequently this type of traffic tends to convert the best of all; assuming of course that your website is in good order and sufficiently engaging when they arrive. This is why we always recommend that a good organic SEO campaign should be your mid to long-term strategy for your practice website.
We also see the lowest “bounce” statistics for this type of traffic. As a quick recap, a “bounce” is registered when a user hits your page, doesn’t find anything of interest and then goes elsewhere i.e. the journey is not continued on your site and the chance of an enquiry is lost.
So traditional organic search traffic is still providing the best chance of new enquiries and increasing it steadily over time should be a key priority for any dental practice.
AdWords pay-per-click traffic
This is the traffic which originates from the ads you pay for on the Google search and display networks. The quality of this traffic is variable (search is typically better than display) but overall is generally lower than the quality of clicks which originate from the traditional free search results. There is some evidence to suggest that searchers are wary of paid ads and actively avoid them. There is also the small risk of clicks from competitors who are really only interested in depleting your advertising budget – this is not rife but it definitely happens and when it does, you still pay out.
So even where your ad campaigns have been set up by an experienced practitioner and are correctly targeted, you can still receive some spurious, low-quality traffic which typically does not convert as well as traffic from organic results. That said, pay-per-click is still a viable way to acquire new patients and can be successful if done well – just not as successful as prominent free ranking results.
Social media traffic
This is a relatively new area resulting from social platforms like Facebook and Twitter needing to monetise their platforms. You can acquire traffic from social channels in a number of different ways; for example boosting posts and placing adverts on Facebook, promoting tweets on Twitter and more. Each channel has tools to assist you and you can run all types of different campaigns depending on what you are targeting. There is of course the traffic which comes naturally from Facebook etc, however with the demise of organic (free) reach, this type of traffic to dentist’s websites is relatively minor these days.
In terms of traffic, the lowest quality originates from social media – actually by a long way. Whilst it is relatively easy to acquire, it is typical to see bounces for traffic from Facebook exceeding 90%. So for every 10 visits you acquired, 9 went elsewhere immediately. This is not good, as high bounce rate on a website can give the wrong ranking signals back to Google. However, commentary suggests that Google is able to differentiate bounce by channel and hence we have to hope that they don’t penalise high social bounce too heavily.
We also have increasing data from dentists who have active Facebook campaigns underway which suggests that whilst you can use it to gain new enquiries, the quality of the enquiries is often poor and they don’t result in actual “in chair” treatment. The jury is still out, but results so far are “mixed”.
The lower performance of social media traffic can perhaps be explained by considering where a user is in their decision making process. People searching on Google are usually doing so with specific intent whereas those on social media have ads appear whilst they are undertaking primarily “social” activity – so any interest at that stage is likely to be less intent-full than users on Google who are some way further into their buying process.
Summary
Website traffic is critical for performance but the quality of the traffic can vary markedly depending on the source. Traditional search engine traffic tends to yield the best results by some margin, followed by pay-per-click advertising and then social traffic some way behind that.
So if your marketing guy announces that they secured hundreds of new visits to your website from Facebook, you also need to understand just how many of them resulted in tangible enquiries versus those from the tyre kickers. I’m not suggesting that social traffic does not have a place – it can still bring enquiries; but it’s useful to understand how the quality of such traffic matches up to that from the traditional search channel.
At Dental Media, we differentiate the traffic and enquiries by channel in your monthly marketing report – so it’s easy to see what performs best and where to allocate your budget. For more advice, please call us on 01332 672548.