How to Record and Manage All Enquiries From Your Dental Website
Using Google Analytics for comprehensive conversion capture and analysis.
Are you in the dark when it comes to fully understanding how your dental practice website is performing? Perhaps you’ve installed Google Analytics to get an idea of how much traffic the website receives but other than that, you’re unsure how many enquiries were generated and from what source?
This is a picture we see all too often when dentists approach us for advice about making best use of their website. Many of them have had a website built but then been left in the dark about how it performs. In an effort to get some insights they often have a member of the reception team trying to record enquiries on a spreadsheet, checking to see where an email came from or asking patients on the ‘phone how they found the practice. As you probably realise, this is very inaccurate and simply not good enough to get a clear understanding of how your website is performing.
How then, do we help dentists track website users? Even more importantly, did they make an enquiry and what mechanism did they use – ‘phone call, contact form, chatbot or WhatsApp?
Without this knowledge, you can’t measure your website’s performance and consequently you can’t manage it.
First let’s take a look at Google Analytics and how it can be used to provide a holistic performance assessment of your dental website.
Google Analytics
Before we step in to the detail, let’s take a look at how this free and fully-featured tool is essential for capturing raw data from your website. Also how it can be extended to capture all the enquiries that originate from there, irrespective of the source.
Google Analytics is comprehensive and easy to implement, simply by adding a few lines of code to all of your web pages. If you are familiar with your website CMS, e.g. WordPress, this is easy enough to do yourself but failing that, it’s a 15 minute job for your preferred dental website designer or developer.
A very basic install of Analytics will allow you to monitor lots of different aspects of your website traffic and see how it develops over time, but there’s far more to it than that. You can also see all types of user information to help you understand your website performance including how many new visitors you received, where they came from and how long they stayed on the various pages of your website. You can track all sorts of user activity, albeit anonymised, from start to finish.
This is all very useful but you can also add bespoke configuration to Analytics to allow you to record how website users contacted you, whether that was via your contact form(s), chatbot, WhatsApp or ‘phone. Let’s take a look at each of those elements now – in our discussion we’ll use the term “conversion” which basically mean when a website user gets in touch.
Website contact form
This is the most common conversion which you will find recorded in Analytics and you may have conversions recorded for one or more contact forms on your dental website. Usual implementations include for general enquiries, new patient registrations, registering interest in open days, referrals and so on. Typically the user completes the form, submits it and an email is pinged to the address of your choosing.
When the form submission completes, you can configure a specific “event” to be recorded in Analytics. This event can further be designated as a “key event” if you want to prioritise it above other slightly less important events such as page views. By marking each of your website form submissions in this way, you can use Google Analytics to record from which source a user found you e.g. a Google search or maybe from a paid ad, and if they subsequently went on to contact you.
Recording contact form conversions as key events in this way, allows you to see which traffic sources are yielding the most enquiries.
Chatbot
The chatbot is becoming commonplace on dental websites and is an increasingly popular way for web users to make an enquiry. But did you know that you can use Analytics to record the performance of your chatbot over time and the types of enquiry that was made using it? For example, you can record when a chat was started, completed, whether a ‘phone number or email address was submitted and more.
In a similar way to contact forms, the events generated by a chatbot can be designated as key events and then included in your reporting. This way you’ll know if your chatbot is performing as expected and justifying the fee you pay for it.
Similar to Chatbots, dentists are now consistently including WhatsApp call buttons on their website and it’s important to record the enquiries (conversions) which go via this route. In the same way as contact forms and chatbots, specific events can be attributed to WhatsApp enquiries for later analysis and attribution i.e. which traffic source led to the enquiry.
Telephone call tracking
This is an often neglected aspect but a very important one, particularly when you consider that more dental enquiries from websites happen when the user picks up the ‘phone or uses “click to call” on their mobile ‘phone. As a marketer, it’s really important to know where those calls originated – if they came from someone using your website, it’s essential to know whether they found you via a standard Google search, a paid ad or some other channel e.g. an advert in a local magazine.
This is where call tracking comes into its own. Alongside the other sources discussed above, call tracking completes the goal conversion picture for all the enquiries coming from your website.
Using CRM – the customer relationship management system
Many of our clients also use a CRM system to help them collate their website conversions and then manage them through to treatment. This is not essential and they do tend to come with a monthly fee, however they are an increasingly popular tool, particularly with medium to large practices where the volume of enquiries can be significant.
Summary
Traffic to your dental practice website and the enquiries that result from it can originate from various sources. Where you are investing in services such as paid ads and/or SEO, it’s essential to know whether the investment you are making is yielding the results you expect. By measuring all of the conversion sources discussed above, this differentiation and attribution is possible and you will have a clear picture of which initiative are working well and those which aren’t!
If you’d like more information about tracking activity on your website and/or how to use SEO and paid ads to help bring new patient enquiries, please get in touch with the team at Dental Media on 01332 672548 for a no-obligation discussion.