Website Conversion – Why It’s So Important And Why You Need To Measure It
Are you missing out on new dental patients because of an underperforming website?
One of the key measurements of the performance of a dental website is how well it converts traffic to meaningful enquiries. We can measure this using the extremely useful Google Analytics software.
As part of our monthly reporting for our dental marketing clients, we show how well their website is working through various metrics, one of the most important being the “goal conversion rate”. This compares the number of visits to the website versus how many of those visits resulted in an enquiry. It’s easy to see how this is so important and what a useful metric it is. The measurements can be produced globally across the whole website, or defined more specifically for certain pages and different sources of web traffic.
What is a satisfactory conversion rate?
As a general rule-of-thumb, we like to see websites with goal conversion rate in excess of 3% – very simply, this means that for every 100 website visitors, 3 made an enquiry. There are different permutations for this measurement but this will suffice for the purposes of this blog and to give you, the dentist or practice manager, a handy metric to use.
If your conversion rate is above 3, then generally all is well and there is little to be worried about in terms of how well the website is performing. However, there is always room for improvement and we have a number of client sites which convert well in excess of 10% of their traffic.
Conversely, if the conversion rate is below 3%, then it’s time to start digging deeper to find what is going wrong. Very often it is simply a symptom of the age of a website and that it has become unappealing and no longer engaging for those people who are visiting it – for a dental website this of course means missed new patients!
Case studies
We have several real-time examples where our clients with older websites have upgraded on the back of this type of information and the results have been dramatic.
As website get older the conversion rates typically tend to fall progressively as the information and the aesthetics of the website become stale and degrade. In a couple of recent cases, we strongly encouraged our clients to upgrade their websites where we saw their conversion rates slowly slip below 2 and then down even further to near 1. The websites in question were 5 and 6 years old respectively and the clients had not had many updates done over the years.
Interestingly, both websites were still very prominent in Google and receiving good traffic, however, a lot of this was being wasted simply because visitors were bouncing away after they’d landed.
Following updating to modern new websites incorporating new information and features which are well-proven to engage users, goal conversion rates jumped very quickly to levels well in excess of the rule-of-thumb 3 which we like to see.
In terms of return-on-investment for the website upgrade spend, this was huge. The number of new patients and treatments requests coming in near tripled and the revenue potential from this was significant.
Despite the success stories, unfortunately we still have quite a number of clients who insist on running with an old website, even where we’ve illustrated just how detrimental this can be. Notwithstanding budgetary constraints, this really is a ‘no brainer’ to prioritise.
Key actions
To make sure you understand exactly how your own dental practice website is performing in terms of patient enquires and conversions, please do the following:
- Ensure Google Analytics is installed on your website
- Ensure that conversions/goals are configured and can be measured e.g. for website contact forms, chat bots and potentially ‘phone calls too
- Ensure your marketing partner collates this information and reports transparently every month
- Monitor progress with website conversion rate and be prepared to take action if this falls away
Summary
Measuring the goal conversion rate for your website is an essential part of evaluating its overall performance. You need to ensure that this is being done and reported back to you so that you can make informed decisions, for example improving the content of a website or potentially fully upgrading it. The results from doing this can be dramatic, not just in significantly improved enquiries, but also as a real boost for your SEO. Remember that it isn’t just website users who like fresh and engaging content, Google tends to prioritise it too.
For more information or a free audit of your existing website performance, please contact the team at Dental Media on 01332 672548.