In this episode, we will talk about another one of the 7 Deadly Dental Marketing Sins, which is not having the conversion goals set up in Google Analytics.

I was talking to Dr Rebecca, who owns two dental clinics, one in Manly, and one in Chatswood in the Northern suburbs of Sydney. She wants to grow her practice so she’s hired a new associate, and she wants to get her books filled.

She has been working with an SEO agency for a couple of years. She also used an SEM agency to do her paid ads on both Facebook and Google. And then she runs her social media in-house.

Despite all of these investments that she’s making in her digital marketing, she’s just not getting enough new patients to get her associates to book filled. After talking to a colleague of hers and hearing about us and the results that they’ve been getting, she decides to reach out to us and see if we can help.

Just like any treatment, the first step is a diagnosis. And that is what we did with Dr Rebecca. We got access to her Google Analytics, we want to see the conversion rate of the website. We want to see the performance. We want to see what the issues were, whether it is the website or whether it is the performance of the traffic channels.

When we logged into Google Analytics, guess what? No goals were set up.

This means we couldn’t see the conversion rate of the website. We couldn’t tell the conversion rate and effectiveness of each traffic channel. We couldn’t tell from the organic traffic or the paid traffic, how many leads, how many phone calls, how many enquiries they’re getting. You couldn’t see any of that.

Unfortunately, this is actually more common than you would have thought. Often, when we look in Google Analytics of dental practices sites, they just haven’t set up conversion goals.

Now, why is this a problem? Well, it’s a problem because you can’t tell the effectiveness of each of the traffic channels.

You might be ranking on page one for a bunch of search terms, which is how your SEO agency do their monthly reports to you, telling you your ranking for a whole bunch of search terms. But what you won’t know is how many leads and how many phone calls you are actually getting from your organic traffic.

Or maybe your SEM agency is reporting on how many clicks they’re getting you, how much you’re paying per click, or how many times your ads are being shown. What you can’t tell is how many enquiries and phone calls you’re getting from the Google ads, or how much it costs per phone call, or how much it costs per enquiry. So without your conversion goals set up in Google Analytics, you simply can’t tell that.

What it also means is that if you’re making some improvements or you’re making some optimisation on your website or you’re making adjustments to test different things you actually don’t know how effective are those changes. Is it improving conversions? Is it reducing conversions or simply doing nothing? Unless you have your conversion goals set up in Google Analytics, you won’t be able to tell any of that.

What To Do

What you want to do is that you want to make sure that your conversion goals are set up in Google Analytics. That means tracking how many people fill in the enquiry forms, how many people call you, etc. These are the things that you want to measure like real bottom-line conversion goals – not just how many people visit the contact us page.

But that’s another thing that we see when we look in Google Analytics – how many times someone visited the contact page. The contact page is great, but that doesn’t put money in the bank.

They go, “Well if someone went to the contact page then chances are they would’ve called you.” Well, set up that as a goal in Google Analytics, set up the enquiry form, the completion of the enquiry form, not just looking at the enquiry form, but actually completing the enquiry form – set that up as a goal.

For our Practice Growth Program clients, we make sure that all the conversion goals are set up properly. It ensures the accountability of performance on our part. This enables us to report properly as well.

It also helps us to measure the effectiveness of our optimisation. As I said, when we’re making tweaks and adjustments, we want to see if it does anything at all, is it flatlined or it is improving or is actually going backwards.

You want to be able to check and see all of that.

For example, by having that set up, let’s just say we made an adjustment and it actually improved the conversion from 4% to 5%, that extra 1% is a 25% increase in actual conversions. What it means is before the change, you were getting 100 calls a month, with that change and being able to set up the goals and be able to see it. That 1% difference is an extra 25 phone calls. This means from 100 calls to 125 phone calls. Now, unless you get goals set up you won’t be able to actually see it.

It is really important from an optimisation standpoint and from an accountability standpoint to have your goals set up.

Next Step

If you like our approach, our philosophy, and the way how we do things, then our Practice Growth Program might be suitable for you. It is designed to help dental practices double their business in three years or less. And we’ve done it numerous times for our dental clients all across Australia. We should be able to do the same for you, so long as we don’t have existing clients where you’re located.

Click the button below, fill in the enquiry form. We’ll reach out soon. Let’s have a chat and see whether we are right fit for each other.

So I hope you found this video useful. I hope you’re not committing this deadly sin. And if you are now, you now know what to do to fix it. See you at the next video, cheers!

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