Dental Practice Telephone Call Analytics
Call tracking as part of your marketing ROI calculation.
Measuring the return-on-investment for your dental marketing campaigns is essential and yet many dentists often neglect it completely, or at best, do it half-heartedly.
This may be down to a lack of understanding of how to do it, reluctance by your marketing partner to provide full visibility, or failure to have a full set of tracking tools in place.
It’s the latter aspect we will cover in this blog, in particular the data “black-hole” associated with telephone calls to the practice and how those potential new patients were stimulated to call you. Understanding how many calls you received and where they originated, is very important in the overall return-on-investment calculation.
Website analytics
It’s quite straightforward to measure and report on the visits to a website and the enquiries (conversions) that result when a user completes your web contact form. These conversions can then be factored against the marketing spend to derive a “cost per acquisition” for the particular marketing channel used. However, data tells us that 3 – 4 times as many new enquiries to a dental practice come via the telephone versus website contact forms. If these calls are missed in the cost-per-acquisition calculations, then you can get a very skewed view of how a particular marketing channel is working.
Whilst most dentists run web analytics for websites, the majority don’t go the extra mile to measure ‘phone calls accurately and this can make a marketer’s job more difficult when it comes to calculating the true ROI for a particular marketing channel.
So how can ‘phone calls be tracked?
Having illustrated the importance of tracking telephone calls which result from marketing activity, let’s take a closer look at how to do it. On face value call tracking may seem very difficult but in practice it’s actually quite straightforward. By adding special code on your website, a unique telephone number can be shown to each visitor which then “tags” them and allows you to record their activity on your site, including when they make a call to the practice.
This data is collated and reported through to a web-based administration console where you can see the precise course of events. So what search terms they used to find you, the page they were looking at when they made the call and more. The system even integrates through to Google Analytics to give you a consolidated and detailed picture of your website activity and conversions – whether ‘phone calls or contact form submissions.
Additionally you can record the telephone calls and play them back at your leisure – this is useful for determining which are the best leads and most likely to lead to treatments, as well as a tool for auditing the performance of your front-desk team.
The system is not just designed to help track ‘phone calls which originated after someone viewed your website. You can also generate unique numbers to add to you newspaper adverts, leaflet drops etc. Everything can be tracked.
But hold on a moment, doesn’t this involve making lots of changes to my telephone system?
Actually no, there are no changes needed at all. The clever stuff happens behind the scenes where your own telephone number is linked automatically to the unique tracking numbers which are displayed on your website. This dynamic number replacement system does all of the hard work seamlessly and reliably – all you need to do is log in to the administration panel to view the data.
Won’t potential new patients be put off by seeing an odd telephone number format?
This concern is also covered. We all know that is can be off-putting to see a ‘phone number which is prefixed by ’08’ etc so the telephone analytics system cleverly prefixes the unique tracking number with your standard area code. In reality no-one knows the difference.
What does it cost to track calls to a dental practice?
The cost is surprisingly low for such a sophisticated system. There is a small monthly licence fee and cost per call but it’s well worthwhile for any dental business which really wants to understand how their marketing channels are performing – including the all important telephone calls. Please call us for more details on pricing and our preferential rates.
Summary
Here at Dental Media we have a great deal of experience with implementing call tracking for dental practices and using the data to help optimise marketing campaigns. We also have excellent preferential rates with our partners who provide the system, so we’d encourage you to contact us first before approaching the suppliers directly as we can save you money on set-up and running costs.
To see how telephone call tracking and analytics can bring a new level of understanding to your marketing campaigns, please get in touch with the Dental Media digital marketing team on 01332 672548.