Measuring the Results of Dental Internet Marketing

To make the best use of your dental website, you need mechanisms in place to be able to measure its effectiveness.

A start is to get good data on the traffic your website is getting. There are software programs that analyze your traffic, and you should use at least one of them. These programs are usually installed by your host.

Data You Need from Your Host

You want to know how many visitors you are getting and where they are coming from. For your visitors coming as a result of Internet searches, you want to know what they were searching for.

We provide our clients with thorough data on their website visitors. We primarily use two programs: Webalizer and AW Stats.

AW Stats gives quite refined and sophisticated data on the number of visitors and other performance parameters. It will filter out visits from search engine spiders. This gives you a lower number of visitors, but it is more accurate if you want to know the real impact you are having on potential clients. It is the program we recommend to give the most accurate assessment of your website performance. It also gives a detailed breakdown of the number of referrals from search engines, the search terms used, referrals from other sources, duration of visits, most popular pages, and the average number of pages viewed by each visitor.

Webalizer is a more commonly used program. It gives some basic data on the number of visits and the number of pages viewed, as well as information about the top search terms used to find your site. We recommend using this program to compare the results we are getting for you with the results of other website companies. Since it is a more commonly used statistics program, it will give you a more fair comparison. However, the traffic data will include visits from search engine spiders, so it won't give you as accurate a picture as AW Stats will of how you are performing with visitors who could become clients. But it is good for measuring your impact with the search engines.

Call Tracking

We strongly encourage all our clients to let us track the calls they are getting from the website. To do this, we create a toll-free number that is only published on the website. It forwards to your main office number, and when it is answered, your staff won't be able to tell that it came through this toll-free number. But you will be able to look up on the Internet the list of calls with their caller ID and the length of the call. If you choose, you can also have the calls recorded. Tracking this will also enable us to tune your website for its maximum effectiveness. We will also monitor this information and will take responsibility for increasing the number of calls.

Information to Gather from Your Patients

The bottom line of any marketing effort is the number of actual patients who come to you and follow through with treatment, and how much dentistry they pay for. Effective dental offices will ask their new patients when they register how they found the practice. And if they found you through your website, you should also find out how they found your website. For example, it helps immensely to know that they found your website by searching for "scared of the dentist," as opposed to finding it by searching on your name..

If you track these patients and track how much dentistry they do, you will find out how effective your marketing dollar really is.

Beware of Irrelevant Data

When we were just getting established in the website business, we had one prospective client who ended up selecting another company to optimize his website. He was excited over the results he had gotten because they made him number one for "New Jersey smile makeover." It sounded impressive. But when we looked into the matter, we discovered that the number of people who were using that search term, "New Jersey smile makeover," was too small to be measured. There were, however, an average of 590 searches per month on Google for "New Jersey cosmetic dentist," and 140 per month on "New Jersey porcelain veneers." So his #1 ranking for "New Jersey smile makeover" was nearly meaningless.

So beware of impressive-sounding numbers that may not mean anything. You want to have high rankings for search terms. But more than that, you want visitors to your website. Beyond that, you want people to call your office. And the real bottom line is that you have people making and keeping appointments and then actually having work done and paying for that work.

When you sign on with Infinity Dental Web, you will find we get very nosy. We promise you a certain number of visitors per month. But we want to deliver more than that. To do that, we will contact you every month to get information about how many people are calling, whether or not they make appointments, and the quality of those leads. Since we are run by a dentist, we understand the real bottom line, and that's where we want to make you successful. Are we helping you be productive? And are we helping you do the kind of work you find particularly satisfying? That's our objective.

Give us a call to find out what we could do for you.