In the world of marketing, it’s all about focusing on dozens of things at one time. Sure, there are certain statistics that you’ll want to focus on regularly, but a fixation on one specific stat over and over again may end up making your campaign seem stagnant, or like an overall failure. On the flip side, looking at too many statistics can cause a great deal of confusion as you won’t be entirely sure as to what is contributing to your overall success.
So, what things should you be looking for?
Website Data
Your website is ultimately one of the main drivers of new patients to your practice, so there are tons of data points you’ll want to view here. The fun part (says every marketer) is that these data points aren’t always found within the same programs and thus require a little more research to find. Here are some helpful tips.
Google Analytics
Really, Google Analytics is a rabbit hole of tools that allows you to drill down on the performance of almost anything on your site. From buttons to landing pages and everything in between, analytics can give you statistics on who viewed what and when, leaving you with valuable insights for your future marketing campaigns. It’s not a bad idea to play around with the program at some point if you have some down time, but if you don’t, then focus on your core elements like users, sessions, and conversions/events.
The easiest one to start with is a user, as they are essentially the beginning of your conversion funnel. When looking at statistics, “users” are considered the new and returning people who visit your site during the selected reporting period, which is most often equal to one month of data. When defining users, it’s important to remember that they can be split into new and returning, as these can mean drastically different things when determining your incoming traffic. Every user gets assigned with a “cookie” from Google Analytics that will actively identify them as they navigate your site. The first time they visit, it’s considered “new,” and then any visits after that are considered “returning.” When looking into this in more detail, there are ways that a returning user can be counted as a new user, but for the sake of understanding user flow, this is a good start.
Sessions are important because they’re the actions that users will take within your site. Once someone is able to get to you (via great SEO of course), the goal is to make sure they are active in engaging with your site. In many instances, users can account for multiple sessions, but there are certain situations in which a user can account for only one session or perhaps none at all. In checking your analytics, the easiest way to gauge success is by ensuring that users and sessions are both growing and are close to equal in the amount increased. This will basically tell you that people are finding your site and engaging with it based off of their searches.
Last, but certainly not least, conversions and events are some of the most important metrics when determining if your site is successful at generating new patients. If your site is tracking these elements properly, you’ll know when a potential patient makes any sort of action on your site. Of course, phone calls and form submissions tend to be most important because they usually mean that a lead has made its way to your front office, but any sort of action on the site can help give insight. For example, someone clicking on a specific callout on your homepage and only staying on the site for a few seconds may indicate that the service page they landed on didn’t contain sufficient information. Regardless of what the action is, use your conversion and event data to determine what will help you generate new patients fast!
Google Search Console
As important as Google Analytics may be for gauging the success of a marketing campaign, Google Search Console may just be the most important for gathering stats on how your site is performing on Google specifically. Just like analytics, though, there are an incredible number of areas in which you can begin searching for data, but the core elements you should focus on for results are impressions and clicks.
When looking at impressions you are basically analyzing how many times your site actually appeared in a search that was done by a user (see the connection there?), which is a clear indication of how well any SEO efforts put into your site are doing. If you’re consistently adding fresh content to your website, then it’s likely that you will see a consistent increase in impressions for quite a while. However, you may see a drop in impressions here and there, which is simply Google making the search results more relevant and refined for its users. For example, if you are a podiatrist, but you’re coming up for a search on “dog outfits,” you probably have some impressions that aren’t quite necessary. Over time, Google will filter some of these out, making your sum total of impressions seem a bit lower.
Clicks, on the other hand, measure the amount of times someone actually made it to your site from a search. In the online marketing space, we often see clicks as being a bit more valuable as they will be a good indicator of how people are actually making it to your site to convert. For example, take the podiatrist reference above. If someone were to search “ingrown toenails” and saw your website as a result, they would be an impression. But if they searched “ingrown toenail treatment,” found your website, and then clicked the result to actually land on your website, then their action would register as a click. As you can see, clicks and impressions are related, but the crucial difference between them is what helps your statistical knowledge go a bit further as you draw conclusions from this data. CTR, or click-through rate, is the measure of clicks divided by impressions multiplied by 100. In less mathematical terms, it is the percentage of users who saw your site’s link and clicked on it to see the full page. This will be a good metric to provide as a measure of how well your site is able to convert!
Offsite Properties
The beat goes on…and on….and on. What we mean is that there are dozens of statistics out there that you can check to find out how things are performing. In fact, you can even go as granular as checking each individual listing’s performance to see how it adds up to what’s coming in to your site. The good thing is that Google Analytics has most of this already covered, so here are a few things to look out for that may not be so obvious:
- Google My Business Insights
- GMB Insights can help you determine how well your profiles are performing for your providers and locations. Most of the time you’ll notice that this data far surpasses your website’s data in the amount of impressions and conversions being counted, and that’s fair. GMB is a quick way for someone to find everything they need like a phone number, an address, or an appointment request form.
- Facebook Insights (or any of your social media platforms)
- Don’t count out social media as a strong driver of traffic to your practice. Having a great presence on these platforms can lead to strong numbers whether that be via conversion or just general visits and engagement. Regardless, take a look each month and see how these things are performing and you might be in for a treat…or a shock.
- Reputation Sentiment
- We’ve said it before and we’ll continue to say it over and over: know your reputation! Each month you should be taking some time to analyze your review sentiment across all properties to make sure people are finding an accurate depiction of you and your practice. If you’ve attracted some bad reviews over the past month, that’s a statistic that you’ll want to focus on for the upcoming period.
Although this is definitely a good starting point, there are a multitude of other ways in which you should be tracking your website’s performance. Contact Practis today to learn more about what we’ll look for each and every month to make sure that you’re getting the patients you deserve!