Marketing Channel Analysis
What is it and why should dentists prioritise it?
Regular readers of this blog will know that we are extremely keen that dentists understand exactly how their marketing campaigns are working so that their return on investment is clear and that any maintenance can be done quickly to maximise effectiveness.
A key part of this is an understanding of where new patient enquiries came from, i.e. which channels actually delivered them. By ‘channels’ I mean the routes or paths the patient travelled along before they actually made contact with you. For example did they find you via a Google search, a paid advert on Facebook, an ad in the local paper or perhaps word-of-mouth?
Drilling down further (no pun intended!) we can also measure what we call ‘channel attribution’ which is where we work out just how much credit can be assigned to each touch-point within the conversion path. In basic terms, this means working out which bits of your marketing efforts worked best!
There are lots of studies on this type of work, some quite detailed and mathematical; however that is beyond the scope of this article. Today I’m simply trying to illustrate how important this type of channel analysis is and how you can get the basics in place without breaking the bank or studying for a degree.
Let’s take a look at the basic monitoring which allows this and which should be in place for any dentist using the web to promote dental services.
Google Analytics
This is a free tool which allows the comprehensive monitoring of website performance. It is hugely detailed if you want it to be, but on a more basic level it will allow you to easily see where your website traffic came from, when it came and how much there was. If you set up goals (conversions) it will also tell you how much of this traffic resulted in tangible enquiries.
Installing a small piece of tracking code on your website will allow the collection of huge amounts of valuable data which can be analysed and used to inform your marketing campaigns. You can also integrate your analytics with paid ad platforms so you can see how much traffic those campaigns are generating, and indeed if they are resulting in enquiries.
Oh, and very importantly, Google Analytics is free to use, so there really is no excuse for not using it.