Website Analytics

The term website analytics is used very broadly, but it refers to the ability to measure and report on your website’s vital statistics. The statistics in turn help you characterize the visitors to your website and make informed business decisions based on this information. Using even the most basic analytics you will be able to see valuable information such as how many people came to your site, what general geographic location they came from, what pages they looked at, and how long they stayed on your website. This list just scratches the surface of the power of analytics, and in the analytics chapter of this book I will go over some basic analytics data that you need to know.

Tracking and Conversions

The “tracking” portion of Phase III refers to what we marketers like to call “conversions.” A conversion is defined as any goal or task you wish a user to complete on your website which you will track. For example, a common conversion goal is defined as when someone fills out a contact form on your website to contact your office. You would calculate the conversion rate by taking the number of people who browse your website and dividing it by the number of people who used your contact form to reach you. So, if 50 people visited your website last month and 5 people contacted you using the contact form, your conversion rate for the contact form is (5/50) or 10%. So that means that for every 10 people that come to your website, one person will on average, contact the office.

As you get more comfortable with analytics, you can start to use methods such as goal tracking and A/B Testing (Split Testing) to calculate the cost of contact requests and be able to calculate, on average, how many contact requests you will get in a given time period. Knowing these numbers will help you make informed decisions about how to spend your advertising money. And while it’s up to you and your staff to take those contact requests and turn them into new patient appointments, the hard work of getting the patient to contact you has been done for you by your website. As I said earlier, website analytics is important!

Google Analytics 4

Google turned off the Universal Analytics software that we've all used for a more than a decade and replaced it with Google Analytics 4 in July of 2023. Thus, any analytics examples I share in this book will be with GA4.