Website conversions

How to measure the number of enquiries from your website.

This article is a quick recap on “conversions” – the simple way to measure how many people get in touch with the practice by completing your contact form or by telephone enquiry.

Measuring the success of your dental website is so fundamental but you might be surprised to know that very few actually do it.

It seems that some digital marketing companies specifically avoid setting up conversion analyis and monthly reporting which is odd in that it doesn’t actually take a great deal of time to do. The cynic in me thinks that it may be a deliberate attempt to mask the success, or otherwise, of poor digital marketing campaigns and to generally limit transparency. Other companies will only set up conversion analysis if you subscribe to the their expensive packages which seems a bit cynical too.

But of course you need to know exactly how well those campaigns are performing, large or small, and conversion analysis is key to this. So my recommendation would be to insist on it and also to make sure that you have access to the data. Even if you don’t have time to read you SEO report in detail each month, a quick glance at the trend of conversions/enquiries is sufficient to give you an idea of what’s happening.

How do you set up conversion tracking?

First off you will need Google Analytics set up on your website. Other “enterprise” packages are available but they aren’t really suitable for dentists – the Google package is free and will give you all of the data you need to measure things like contact form completions, downloads of your e-book etc.

Once the Analytics code is installed on the site, it’s then a relatively straightforward process to tag and record various interactions which occur; so for example when a potential new patient completes your enquiry form. Like all of the data in Analytics, the information can be charted, trended and reported on a daily, weekly or monthly basis as required.

Differentiating the conversion sources

This is all about understanding if your enquiries are coming from organic (free) traffic or paid traffic e.g. AdWords. Pay-per-click is increasingly popular but can be a money-pit unless it’s carefully monitored and managed. By linking your AdWords and Analytics accounts, it’s easy to see the number of enquiries generated from which source. All too often we see AdWords campaigns which perform badly but which dentists pay hundreds per month for, oblivious to the data – conversion tracking will help you avoid this. You can also track the progress of your social media advertising in a very similar way.

Telephone call tracking

There is often a “black hole” when it comes to tracking how many ‘phone calls were generated as a result of a user finding your practice website. However, this is not the case where our call analytics system is installed. This is a very clever technique which uses “dynamic number replacement” to show a different telephone number to each visitor who uses your website. It integrates seamlessly with your own number so you don’t have to make any changes – all of the configuration is done by our team.

By issuing unique ‘phone numbers to users, you can track their activity and so record who called you and even the content which stimulated their interest. So it really is powerful. The call tracking system has it’s own user-friendly admin. panel and also links very nicely through to Google Analytics. You can also play back telephone calls later which is useful for follow-ups and also for procedural auditing. Oh, and it’s also cost-effective to run.

Summary

Tracking the number of enquiries from your website, whether from your contact form or by telephone call, is essential to understand if your digital marketing campaign is working.

User friendly tools are available to provide this information and to allow busy dental practice owners and managers to get a clear insight on performance. Providing basic data such as contact form submissions is easy and should be part of your digital marketing service by default. Telephone tracking does incur fees to run but is cost-effective and well worthwhile considering.

If you would like to discuss the performance of your website in more detail and how to measure its effectiveness, please call the Dental Media team on 01332 672548.