Are you in the dark when it comes to fully understanding how your dental practice website is performing? Perhaps you\u2019ve installed Google Analytics to get an idea of how much traffic the website receives but other than that, you\u2019re unsure how many enquiries were generated and from what source?<\/p>\n
This is a picture we see all too often when dentists approach us for advice about making best use of their website. Many of them have had a website built but then been left in the dark about how it performs. In an effort to get some insights they often have a member of the reception team trying to record enquiries on a spreadsheet, checking to see where an email came from or asking patients on the \u2018phone how they found the practice. As you probably realise, this is very inaccurate and simply not good enough to get a clear understanding of how your website is performing.<\/p>\n
How then, do we help dentists track website users? Even more importantly, did they make an enquiry and what mechanism did they use \u2013 \u2018phone call, contact form, chatbot or WhatsApp?<\/p>\n
Without this knowledge, you can\u2019t measure your website\u2019s performance and consequently you can\u2019t manage it.<\/p>\n
First let\u2019s take a look at Google Analytics and how it can be used to provide a holistic performance assessment of your dental website.<\/p>\n
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Before we step in to the detail, let\u2019s take a look at how this free and fully-featured tool is essential for capturing raw data from your website. Also how it can be extended to capture all the enquiries that originate from there, irrespective of the source.<\/p>\n
Google Analytics is comprehensive and easy to implement, simply by adding a few lines of code to all of your web pages. If you are familiar with your website CMS, e.g. WordPress, this is easy enough to do yourself but failing that, it\u2019s a 15 minute job for your preferred dental website designer<\/a> or developer.<\/p>\n A very basic install of Analytics will allow you to monitor lots of different aspects of your website traffic and see how it develops over time, but there\u2019s far more to it than that. You can also see all types of user information to help you understand your website performance including how many new visitors you received, where they came from and how long they stayed on the various pages of your website. You can track all sorts of user activity, albeit anonymised, from start to finish.<\/p>\n This is all very useful but you can also add bespoke configuration to Analytics to allow you to record how website users contacted you, whether that was via your contact form(s), chatbot, WhatsApp or \u2018phone. Let\u2019s take a look at each of those elements now \u2013 in our discussion we\u2019ll use the term \u201cconversion\u201d which basically mean when a website user gets in touch.<\/p>\n This is the most common conversion which you will find recorded in Analytics and you may have conversions recorded for one or more contact forms on your dental website. Usual implementations include for general enquiries, new patient registrations, registering interest in open days, referrals and so on. Typically the user completes the form, submits it and an email is pinged to the address of your choosing.<\/p>\n When the form submission completes, you can configure a specific \u201cevent\u201d to be recorded in Analytics. This event can further be designated as a \u201ckey event\u201d if you want to prioritise it above other slightly less important events such as page views. By marking each of your website form submissions in this way, you can use Google Analytics to record from which source a user found you e.g. a Google search or maybe from a paid ad, and if they subsequently went on to contact you.<\/p>\n Recording contact form conversions as key events in this way, allows you to see which traffic sources are yielding the most enquiries.<\/p>\n The chatbot is becoming commonplace on dental websites and is an increasingly popular way for web users to make an enquiry. But did you know that you can use Analytics to record the performance of your chatbot over time and the types of enquiry that was made using it? For example, you can record when a chat was started, completed, whether a \u2018phone number or email address was submitted and more.<\/p>\n In a similar way to contact forms, the events generated by a chatbot can be designated as key events and then included in your reporting. This way you\u2019ll know if your chatbot is performing as expected and justifying the fee you pay for it.<\/p>\n Similar to Chatbots, dentists are now consistently including WhatsApp call buttons on their website and it\u2019s important to record the enquiries (conversions) which go via this route. In the same way as contact forms and chatbots, specific events can be attributed to WhatsApp enquiries for later analysis and attribution i.e. which traffic source led to the enquiry.<\/p>\nWebsite contact form<\/h3>\n
Chatbot<\/h3>\n
WhatsApp<\/h3>\n
Telephone call tracking<\/h3>\n