Understanding Your Dental Website Traffic

Basic Google Analytics concepts for business owners

When you’re blogging about your area of expertise, it can be all too easy to use terminology that readers may not actually understand, and I suspect I occasionally fall into that trap too. So once in a while it pays to step back and look at some of the basic concepts you are discussing and make sure that your readers can actually follow you without being too confused!

With that in mind, this blog will take a quick look at website traffic and how it can be differentiated in data analysis programs such as Google Analytics. This is so important to understand because, as we will see, website traffic comes from lots of different sources and not all of it is equal in quality, or indeed its potential to deliver new patient enquiries. Let’s jump in and get to grips with this sometimes confusing terminology and what it all means.

Website traffic – what is it exactly?

When users land on your dental practice website, they “clock up” visits or sessions which contribute to the overall flow of traffic to the site. However, these visits can come from various different sources and we can differentiate these within analytics programs. For the purpose of this blog, we will consider the hugely popular, free and excellent Google Analytics package, although others systems do exist.

Often you will see marketing companies simply publish overall traffic stats as part of their client reporting, however this alone is fairly meaningless. For example, it’s easy to get lots of traffic through to websites using social media channels, but it doesn’t mean that the traffic is converting to patient enquiries and treatments. It’s well known that social traffic is much less targeted than traffic from people searching with intent on Google for example.

Knowing the above, it makes sense to differentiate the traffic by source (or channel) and then also measure the number of enquiries from each of those traffic channels.

What are the main website traffic channels?

Google Analytics is excellent for drilling down into website data and you can really examine minute details if you choose, for example just how many clicks a particular section of your website is generating, maybe where you are running a promotional campaign. However, normally we just want to see an overview of how the website is performing, for example how much traffic is coming from pay-per-click, from organic SEO and so forth. For this we can start by looking at how much traffic is generated from each channel. The main ones are as follows:

• organic traffic – you can consider this as free clicks originating from search engines e.g. the likes of Google
• paid traffic – this is fairly self-explanatory in that it refers to traffic from paid channels e.g. Google Ads
• direct traffic – this is where users do not come from search engines, instead they type in your web address in their browser or similar, like a bookmark
• referral traffic – this is where users arrive typically from clicking links on third-party websites or some other source outside of search engines

These are the four most common channels we would normally examine and alone they will give us a good overview of how a website is being reached by users. There are many other options for differentiating and analysing, but these become a little bit specialist and wouldn’t normally be of too much use for a typical business user.

How can I see the data for these traffic channels?

As a matter of course, we set up Google Analytics for all of our digital marketing clients and we give direct access for business owners. In addition we also show performance by channel in our monthly reporting. If you do wish to use the Google Analytics program yourself, when you log in you will see a graph showing overall traffic trend. You can set different date ranges on this and also introduce trends for each of the main traffic channels. It’s quite fascinating!

But it’s not just about traffic!

We mentioned above how important it is to be able to see just how much traffic is coming to your dental website and from what source. But we also advised that the quality of that traffic can vary markedly. This is why we also need to extend the reporting to add what we call “goals” or “conversions”. This is a record of just how many people contact your business i.e. made an enquiry, and we can also record this based on the traffic channel they used. Moving on even further, we can also generate metrics such as “goal conversion rates” which give us even more insights into which type of traffic is working best and conversely, which isn’t.

So now we have data and tools at our disposal to allow us to monitor and manage digital marketing campaigns in very close detail.

There are many more types of measurements in Google Analytics but measuring traffic by source and how effective it is, is a key foundation when it comes to assessing how a dentist’s website is performing.

Summary

Today we’ve looked a little bit closer at how we can segment website traffic by source and also measuring how effective each source actually is. Many marketing companies only present the bare minimum of information to their clients, for example “overall” traffic, but you need to know much more than this, particularly where you are running paid digital marketing campaigns and SEO projects. So be sure to get the information you need to help run your business.

If you need more information about website performance or you’d like the team here at Dental Media to help enhance yours, then please get in touch on 01332 672548 and we’ll be pleased to assist.