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2 Simple Steps To Measure The Success Of Your Dental Practice Website

You have a website, it’s doing the job it was meant to. Well, you think it is anyway. But do you really know how it’s performing?

Knowing your return on investment (ROI) is an important part of building a website for any business owner, including dental clinic owners. In this article, we’ll provide you with 2 simple tasks you can perform to find out what kind of traffic (and how much) is visiting your website.

Step 1: Setup Google Analytics

The first step is to install Google Analytics into your website, which will give you a clear picture of how your potential and current patients are getting to your site (search engines, referrals etc), what pages they’ve visited, how long they’ve spent viewing your content, and where they exited your website from.

This will show you your website bounce rate, a high rate means people are getting to the website and leaving without interacting, if this is happening, you’ll need to figure out what the cause is.

To figure out why people are bouncing ask yourself:

  • Does your website have the information they’re looking for?
  • Is it out of date?
  • Are your users having a poor experience?
  • Are you creating content specific to your target market?

If your visitors are getting to your site to read a blog article you posted on the Toronto Maple Leafs, but you’re offering a promotion on teeth whitening, once they’ve finished the article, they’re probably not going to stick around to check out what you’re offering even if it is the best teeth whitening service around.

Having analytics installed will provide you with some good insight into this type of behaviour and allow you to correct it.

Pro Tip: With “advanced analytics”, you can even go as far as creating goals to follow a user through steps and log if they complete whatever goal you have set (such as filling out a form or booking in for an appointment), but let’s save advanced analytics for another article and just focus on getting you set up in this one.

To install analytics and start collecting basic data from your website, you’ll first need to set up a free analytics account by visiting www.google.com/analytics and clicking on the big blue Start For Free button at the top right of the page.

Once your account is created, set up property within your analytics account (property is the term Google uses for your website) after the property is set up, you’ll need to insert the Google analytic code into your website, we’ve included a video below to walk you through these steps.

Step 2: Setup Hotjar Analytics

The second step is to set up a neat little heat mapping software called HotJar.

Hotjar tracks visitors throughout your website to help you better understand what your users want, care about and do on your website by providing you with a visual representation of clicks, taps and scrolling behaviour.

It also gives you the ability to see what your users see. You’ll eliminate guesswork with recordings of real visitor behaviour on your site.

By seeing your visitor’s clicks, taps and mouse movements you can identify usability issues on the fly and solve any other issues they encounter.

Find the biggest opportunities for improvement by identifying which pages get the most traction and what pages are hot spots for bouncing. This will let you figure out how long they spend on your site, and when they lose interest.

Hotjar has a few different pricing levels, but they also provide a free plan that still provides some decent insights to get you started on the path to really understand your end-user and improving your website to increase conversions and turn viewers into paying clients.

To install Hotjar into your website, check out this quick video from Hotjar.

While both software can provide you with insights on how people are using your website, each has its own unique offerings and they actually complement each other when they’re used together.

With Hotjar, you have the opportunity to see how viewers are using your site visually and make adjustments by looking through a visitor’s eyes. Google Analytics gives you the ability to create goals and more advanced analytical reports, as well as set up and run conversion tracking if you plan to run Google Ad campaigns in the future.

Wondering if your website is converting? Need some help implementing the above tasks?

We’re the experts when it comes to helping dental clinics thrive online!

Schedule a clarity call today, we’d be happy to help you improve your conversions and get more people booking in for dental appointments!

CASE STUDY

Dickens Yard Dental

Meet Dr. Sahil Thakkar. Owner, founder, and principal dentist of Dickens Yard Dental, a dental practice based in West London. As a brand new business, the main goal was to increase the number of new patients to kick things off.