PPC | measure your return on investment
For local service based businesses such as Dental Practices, PPC is one of the most effective ways of marketing to and acquiring new patients. Unlike SEO, campaigns can be setup and your ads can be showing at the top of Google immediately. Apart from almost instant results, PPC campaigns for local businesses can be particularly fruitful due to the amount of campaigns that aren’t setup correctly (from incorrect location targeting to budgeting mistakes and bad ad copy – a well run campaign will stand out from the crowd and be profitable.
As shown by the number of poorly run PPC campaigns, they are complex to set up and manage. Equally, measuring how well a campaign is performing is a task in itself and has a number of pitfalls.
Conversion tracking for local service bases businesses such as dental practices is often more complex than, say, an ecommerce site in which the entirety of the transaction takes place within the confines of the website. Specifically, this is due to the fact that the most compelling and beneficial action a user can make is to pick up the phone and call. Whilst Google analytics is a powerful tool which you can use to measure useful metrics such as visitors and clicks – it can’t tell you how many phone calls you Practice has received as a result of a campaign.
They are, however, a number of solutions that you can use to help measure ROI more accurately.
Tracking Level 1: Conversion Data
Conversion tracking can be setup in Google Analytics and Adwords, but for forms only. To do this you place the tracking code on the form submission confirmation page – every time a user submits a form it is recorded, and through analytics you can easily see how many forms have been generated from the PPC campaign. Whilst this gives you an idea of how well a campaign is performing, calls cannot be tracked. To get around this, when your practice receives a call from a new patient the receptionist can ask and log how they found the practice. Again this will give you a good idea of what channels are generating calls but you most probably wont be able to differentiate between PPC and SEO, as most new patients will reply with just ‘google’ when ask how they found your practice.
Tracking Level 2: Advanced Analytics
There are now advanced analytic products available that not only can track form submissions but call tracking as well. Call tracking is an exceptionally powerful method of collecting phone call data. Essentially, a phone tracking service providers issue businesses additional phone numbers that forward directly to a main line. Coding is added to the website and every time a visitor visits your website, a dynamic number is assigned to them based on which channel they have arrived from and what keywords they used to get there. Conversion data from both calls and forms are collected – essentially closing the loop meaning much higher accuracy when measuring return on investment.
Phone calls and form submissions are the life blood of your online marketing, it doesn’t matter how many clicks your PPC ad is getting or what position it is in if your aren’t getting the conversions. Accurately measuring conversion performance from a campaign then gives you the opportunity to make more informed and profitable marketing decisions.
Dental design are pleased to announce the for our Premier clients, we offer advanced analytics for both SEO and PPC campaigns. Please call us on 01202 677277 for more information.
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