Measuring website performance

Key measurements for dental business owners.

Many of us will have heard the phrase “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” and perhaps unsurprisingly, this also holds true for website performance. You might think that dentists would be right on the ball when it comes to this, particularly considering how important a website is for gaining new patient business. However, it still surprises me to find that the majority aren’t and that lots of improvement opportunities are going to waste.

Where dentists are trying to assess the performance of their websites, we also see a huge variance in quality, ranging from those who have Google Analytics installed but don’t really use it or know how to use it, through to auto-generated reports delivered by marketing companies which fail to measure the factors which really make the difference. Of course, periodically we do see website reporting and management done correctly, but unfortunately this is a small minority of cases.

Website performance – what should you measure?

My advice here is that you only really need to see a report which shows the headline data – sufficient for you to know that the website is performing well and that your digital marketing spend is returning appropriately on the investment. For sure you can drill right down to the “nitty-gritty” data if you wish, but typically dentists are too busy with their business to find time for that. So like any business performance metrics, a concise “headline” report should be sufficient. However, you do need to be sure that your marketing company is presenting the right data and that you can trust them. Unfortunately I’ve seen way too many examples where this wasn’t the case.

As a minimum you need to know the following:

• traffic differentiated by channel – what I mean by this is an illustration of where your website visitors are coming from, whether organic (free) search, paid (pay-per-click), referral, social media etc. This is essential to see which of the channels is working best for you and which ones may need extra work – or indeed stopping work.
• conversion (goals) – this is the real measurement of success i.e. a recording of the number of people who actually contact you as a result of visiting your website. This could be via your contact forms or, if you have call analytics installed, via the ‘phone. Again this must be broken down by channel. For example, it’s easy to get lots of traffic quite cost-effectively via social media, but the quality of this traffic can be poor and lead to very few conversions. You need to know this. “Conversions” can be configured for all sorts of things, for example measuring how many people downloaded your e-newsletter, how many people subscribed to your email list etc. This will vary depending on the types of marketing campaigns you are running.
• bounce rate – this is an important measurement of the effectiveness of your web pages, i.e. do they hold a user’s attention. A “bounce” is recorded when a user visits a page but then moves directly away from your website without visiting any other pages. High bounce rates can be indicative of stale content, poorly configured content or indeed visits from users who aren’t really that interested in your services – quite often the case for social media traffic.
• most popular landing pages – this will tell you which of your website pages (and hence services) are attracting the most attention.
• reverse goal path – this is getting a bit more technical but this type of report shows where the patient landed on your website and how they progressed before they contacted you. It’s very useful for understanding the on-site behaviour of the user and also serves to show how easy (or otherwise) a website is to navigate. There are a number of other reports in this vein too, but likely of more use to your website marketing team.
• keyword positions – lots of dentists would still put this top of their list but to be frank, they’d be wrong. It is always useful to keep an eye on keyword positions as this can be indicative of how well an SEO campaign is working, but ultimately, increases in high-quality traffic and conversions are the key measurements.

There are many other factors which can be measured and your marketing team should include these selectively depending on the types of campaigns you are running. However, if you have a concise report detailing the above, this will be sufficient to allow an overview of how your website and marketing team are performing.

Summary

Your dental practice website is a key tool for new patient enquiries and you need to know how it’s performing. Any digital marketing campaign should be accompanied by appropriate reporting and the metrics above are a great starting point to give you the confidence you need. If your current marketing company isn’t providing this sort of data, you need to insist that they do and don’t be afraid to question them on it too.

If you’re interested in fully transparent, effective digital marketing for your own practice website, complete with clear reporting, then please call the Dental Media SEO team on 01332 672548 for no-obligation advice.