Cosmetic Dentistry Blog

How do I know if a paid online service is worth the cost?
When trying to evaluate an online service such as Press Releases or Ad Campaigns, try to integrate them as much as you can with Google Analytics. With Google AdWords, integrating with Google Analytics is a snap, just make sure that you set up both your AdWords and your Analytics account with the same email address, and follow Google’s instructions. You can also use Google’s URL Builder to create a custom URL to use in press releases and banner ads that will track clicks on the URL in Google Analytics.

By tracking clicks and ad campaigns in Google Analytics, you can easily compare your different online investments and see which ones are sending the most valuable traffic to your website. This integrates well with external campaigns such as radio ads – if you purchase radio advertisements, ask to also get a link from their website using a custom URL. You might be surprised at how much traffic that link will send!

How can I measure my website’s performance?
While your website’s positioning in search engine result pages (SERPs) may be entirely up to your internet marketing company, you can control how well your online visitors convert into patients by tracking their movements through your website.

One great basic way you can do this is by setting up Goals and Goal Funnels. A “goal” on your website is a specific page that you want your future patients to land on; for most websites, it is the “Thank You” page that visitors get after they’ve filled out a contact form. A “funnel” is an ideal path that your patients might take through your website. One example of a funnel might be:

Home Page > About Dr. Dentist > Dental Financing Options > Contact Page > Thank You Page

By setting up a funnel, you can see where visitors on your website enter and exit an ideal path. It is not necessarily bad that visitors exit the funnel, so long as the page they go to next makes sense.

Another great way to track certain visitor actions is Event Tracking. You may want to work with your dental web marketing company on getting Event Tracking set up, as it is a little more complex than other tracking methods. Event Tracking allows you to track certain elements of your site that a visitor might interact with, such as a button, image or link. This is a great way to know which dental forms are downloaded, which dental coupons or promotions are more interesting, or even whether a top navigation link is more effective than a side navigation link.

How do I know whether or not my content is effective?

There are a ton of reports in the “Content” section of Google Analytics that are designed specifically to answer this question! Your “Top Landing Pages” report will show the pages that visitors “land” on the most, meaning that is the page they enter your website on. Some metrics you’ll want to keep your eye on are “Time on Page” and “Bounce Rate“.

Time on page is pretty self-explanatory; it’s the average amount of time that visitors spend on that page. If this number is lower for some pages than others, you know your content is not very engaging.

Bounce Rate is the percent of people who land on that page and then leave without visiting anything else on your site. A high bounce rate is a big red flag for your pages – if you have a lot of visitors going to your tooth whitening page, but that page has a 100% bounce rate, you’ll want to have the content for that page revised STAT!

Do you have any other questions that might be solved with web analytics? Please feel free to post them in our comments section!