In marketing, key performance indicators (KPIs) are metrics used to evaluate the performance of your marketing activity. They can help give you insight into what is, and isn’t, working and can help you make improvements to your marketing strategy.
While there are many KPIs in marketing, in this post we are going to concentrate on some of the top online marketing KPIs you should be analysing:
1. Traffic Volume
Traffic volume can be measured in a number of ways. However, by measuring the traffic volume by channel and source, you get a better understanding of where your website, and content, is being found and linked from.
Google analytics lets you see a range of channels and their sources. For example:
Channels – direct, organic, referral, social, paid
Sources – Google, Facebook, Twitter, other websites linking to your webpages
Analysing which channels are producing the most amount of traffic to your website will help you understand the performance of your current online marketing efforts and where you would need to alter your marketing strategy depending on what you are trying to achieve.
2. Engagement
The amount of engagement your website receives from its visitors can be measured in a number of ways: number of pages viewed per session; bounce rate; and average time on page.
In order to determine that your website is performing well, you will be looking for the number of pages viewed per session to be high, the bounce rate to be low and the average time spent on each page to be high. These results will let you know that the content on each page is of interest to the user.
A low number of pages viewed per session or a low average time spent on each page – usually with a high bounce rate – may indicate that the website’s content needs to be improved. However, it might also be a result of a large amount of returning users looking solely for a contact number, but this can normally be verified by checking the number of existing patient enquiries during this period.
3. Keyword Performance
For most of our clients the main source of traffic to their websites is from organic traffic i.e. from their organic rankings in search results. And, most of our clients have search engine optimisation being carried out on their websites to help improve their search engine rankings.
In order to measure the effectiveness of the SEO, we need to set a benchmark for the keywords that you would like to rank for and then measure any improvements from this.
4. Number of Enquiries
I’ve saved the most important for last.
A website’s rankings and its traffic are good metrics to monitor, but the main metric most clients are interested in is the number of enquiries that are generated – and for good reason. It is the enquiries, from the website, that leads to new patients and revenue for the practice.
One way to easily measure the number of enquiries is by the number of contact forms you receive from the website. However, you would be missing out on the number of enquiries that came from phone calls, unless you are actively asking patients when they call how they found your practice, or if you have call tracking installed on your website.
It is often difficult to ask patients how they found the practice, so it might be worth investing in call tracking to help you record any enquiries that happen this way.
If you would like some help with your online marketing, please give Dental Design a call on 01202 677277.
Inspiration from IncomeDiary and Vertical Measures