Conversion rates explained
Why you need to take notice of your dental marketing conversion rates
You may sometimes see “conversion rates” referred to in dental marketing reports but perhaps not really understood what these are? Or more likely, you may never have seen this type of reference before? The latter is common and results from the fact that marketers often don’t like to illustrate the real “nitty gritty” data which indicates if a marketing strategy is working or not – and conversion rate analysis is a key part of this.
“Conversion rate” generally refer to the number of enquiries you actually receive at the practice compared to other metrics, for example the number of website visitors you had within a given time period. It’s pretty easy to get lots of traffic to a website, for example using paid Facebook advertising, but without seeing the actually conversion rates, you won’t really know if that’s a viable strategy or not (hint – if you’re not targeting your ads properly and building appropriate conversion funnels, then it probably isn’t).
So it’s easy to think that because you’re getting lots of website traffic, then the enquiries will be buoyant too – but this often isn’t the case. So as a minimum you need to understand at what rate the traffic is actually converting to meaningful enquiries and indeed where that traffic is coming from. Was is via organic (free) search, paid Google ads, Facebook traffic or something else?
Types of conversion rate data
As you might expect, there is a lot of data available when it comes to measuring conversions, for example in Google Analytics, AdWords and also your telephone call tracking systems if you use one. As a minimum, your monthly reporting should show how much traffic you are getting from all of the various sources, and then how that actually converts to tangible enquiries, i.e. people filling in your website or landing page contact form or actually telephoning direct.
You should also expect to see other similar types of data too, for example, in AdWords, there are key metrics which show how many times your ad was displayed versus how many times it was actually clicked – this is referred to as click-through-rate (CTR). Thereafter you should also expect to see the conversion rate from that particular traffic source.
“In practice” conversions
The next and final part of the conversion “funnel” involves another step whereby the enquiry, whether a website contact form or telephone call, is actually converted to a treatment plan i.e. real revenue generating work. It’s not always simple to measure this, as the root source of the enquiry may not be 100% clear, but you should try to implement systems at the practice to give you as much transparency as possible.
Degradation within the conversion funnel
This means the “drop off” from the initial website visit to the actual treatment – and it’s often way more pronounced than you might expect. For example, in the case of Google paid advertising, you may get a click-through rate of 4 or 5% when compared to the number of times the ad is shown (impressions). Thereafter, there will be a conversion rate associated with the paid clicks which reached the website i.e. the number of visitors that actually made an enquiry. This would usually be in the 3% – 15% range depending on the type of service and targeting employed.
So in real terms 1000 ad impressions might lead to 50 website clicks and ultimately 3 or 4 enquiries. Of course, the range can vary quite significantly but these are useful rules-of-thumb. I often use this type of illustration to show why small AdWords budgets often don’t work very well at all, simply because they won’t generate enough clicks to lead to a meaningful number of enquiries. This is particularly the case for competitive terms e.g. implants and ortho.
Summary
Understanding “conversion rates” and similar data such as “click through rates”, is essential if you want to understand how your dental marketing campaigns are working and where attention is needed to adjust them for maximum effect. The “headline” data provided by many marketing agencies is often not sufficient to allow any real insights, so as a minimum you need to ensure that they are provided with reporting which shows where your website traffic is coming from and how effective it is in terms of tangible enquiries or conversions. Similarly, at the practice you need to implement systems to evaluate how many of those enquiries actually results in treatment so you can evaluate the full effectiveness of your marketing systems.
If you need some help to establish these mechanisms or just need some additional advice, please get in touch with the Dental Media team on 01332 672548.