One of the great things about Google Analytics, is how simple it is – easy to set up and easy to use. But if you want to get the most out of your website data, there is additional functionality you can enable that isn’t turned on by default.
Find below a checklist for running Google Analytics for Dental Websites to its fullest potential – because better data means a stronger ability to form better insights and make better decisions around your digital marketing activity.
1. Goals
If you are asking the user to take an action on your site, such as filling in a contact form or siggning up to a practice newsletter, you should be tracking it. Setting up Goals allows you to not only measure and report on these conversions, but to analyse the traffic source, device, and location. A monetary value can also be assigned to each goal to assist in ROI reporting and optimisation.
2. Event Tracking
By default, other than tracking which pages a user visits, Google Analytics doesn’t tell you a lot about how people interact with your site. To measure interactions, such as how many people click on a share button, or how many users watched a video, you need Event Tracking. To better understand these behaviours, each custom interaction can be manually tagged to report directly into Google Analytics each time the event is trigged.
3. On-site Search
What users search for on your site tells you not only what people are looking for, but also what they couldn’t find. The most searched for queries inform you about what content is missing, or if it couldn’t be found easily in the navigation or on the front page. By default Google Analytics won’t report on these searches, but it’s usually not hard to set it up. Learn more about Site Search here.
4. Google Account Linking
Google Analytics integrates incredibly well with the rest of Google’s products such as Adwords and Adsense. Manually linking these accounts automates much of the reporting, and gives you greater insight across the products and puts all your data in one place.
5. Exclude Internal Traffic
If you, or your employees, are constantly on your site there’s a good chance they’re skewing the data. Measures like conversion rates and dwell time will be softened by internal traffic and testing. Avoid this by excluding this traffic based on a specific IP address.
6. Cross Domain & Sub Domain Tracking
If your site has sub domains (eg. blog.brand.com and www.brand.com) or you need to track across different domains, ensure all your data is being captured and sits in the one Google Analytics profile. Setting this up also allows you to manually exclude domains as you need to.
7. Enable Remarketing
If you’re going to run remarketing on the Google Display Network, make life easy by turning on the remarketing feature. This will allow you to easily create custom audiences and export them to Google Adwords.
8. Enable Demographic Reporting
Google Analytics can report on demographics and interests of your visitors – you only have to turn on the functionality. Using data from across the Google products, you can better understand who your visitors are and how to target new leads.
Dental Design’s SEO account team are all experts in Google Analytics and are Adwords qualified. Contact the team on 01202 677277 to discuss how we track and monitor dental practice websites using Google Analytics.