Dental Marketing 101: Google Analytics for Dental Practices

As a dentist, you most likely spend a lot of time implementing strategies to boost your dental practice’s patient acquisition rate. While it is essential to generate patient leads, you should have a structure to assess and measure the performance of your lead generation efforts. To do this, you need to use and integrate Google Analytics into your dental marketing toolkit. 

This article introduces Google Analytics and discusses how this tool can support the work you do. You’ll also learn how to set up Google Analytics for your dental practice and tips on what metrics to look out for to assess your patient lead generation strategies. 

What is Google Analytics for Dental Practice?

Google Analytics is a free tool that helps you better understand your patients. It provides you with insights into how prospective patients find your dental practice online, how they interact with your dental website and lets you measure your online marketing ROI. With this tool, you can gather and leverage data to improve your patient experience and achieve your marketing and business goals. 

Why Dentists Should Use Google Analytics

We can’t overstate the importance of having a well-designed, mobile-friendly, and high-converting dental website. Your website is usually the first point of contact between you and your prospective patients. If you don’t have a dental website, give us a call, and we can get you set up in no time. If you have a website, you can use Google Analytics to measure its performance and determine if it’s giving you your desired results. 

With Google Analytics, you can learn how many people visit your dental website over a period, how long they spend on your website and what webpages they visit the most. This information can help you understand how to improve your website’s design, optimize your website for search engines, and attract more patient leads. In other words, you need Google Analytics to get the most out of your digital and dental marketing efforts. 

If you’re not convinced yet, here are four more reasons you should set up Google Analytics for your dental practice: 

1. Learn How Patients Find Your Website

The internet can feel like a wide, wild west, and, in many ways, it is. Without proper guidance and smart strategies, you can spend a lot of money and time on dental marketing strategies without getting much in return. Google Analytics gives you a clear view of how patients find your dental website. Armed with this data, you can create highly targeted PPC campaigns and a comprehensive marketing strategy that gets you results. 

2. Learn More About Your Patients

The best patient experiences begin even before the patient shows up for an appointment. As a dentist, the onus is on you to improve the quality of your patients’ interaction with your dental practice. To do this, you have to know more about your patients. Who are they? How old are they? Where do you typically come from? How do they find your practice? Google Analytics can give answers to these questions and much more. 

3. Assess the Performance of Your Appointment Page

By now, you should be offering online appointments. This saves your team time spent scheduling appointments over the phone. Suppose your patients are making appointments on your dental website. In that case, you should use Google Analytics to measure that webpage’s traffic, how long patients spend on that page and how often they leave the page without actually taking action, i.e. booking an appointment. This data helps you understand if your appointment page is working out for you or not. 

4. Google Analytics is Free

You already spend a lot of money and time managing and growing your dental practice. Google Analytics will cost you less because it is absolutely free. That said, if you’re not quite tech-savvy, you may need the guidance of a dental marketing expert to ensure your Google Analytics is correctly set up to track the metrics you need to know. But if you’re willing to give the setup process a try for yourself, read the next section for instructions on how to get Google Analytics up and running for your dental practice. 

How to Set Up Google Analytics for Your Dental Practice

1. Set up Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager acts as a link between your dental website’s data and your Google Analytics account. You need to set this up first before you do anything else. To do this, go to Google Tag Manager Dashboard, add your account name and a name for your container (this can simply be your website’s URL), select Web and click create. You’ll be given a code snippet that you can copy and paste on every page of your website. Remember, if you’re not familiar with inserting codes, you can contact a Connect the Doc expert to get you all set up. 

2. Set up Google Analytics

The next step is to create a Google Analytics account. To do this, simply sign up on the Google Analytics homepage. Add your account name, your dental website URL, and select healthcare as your industry category. Once that’s done, you will be given a tracking ID and code. 

3. Connect Google Tag Manager to Google Analytics

Next, return to Google Tag Manager Dashboard, click on Workspace, then Overview and finally click on Add a new tag. You’ll be taken to a page where you can set up your new tag. Click on Tag Configuration, select Universal Analytics, and click New Variable. You’ll be taken to a page where you can insert your Google Analytics Tracking ID. Next, go to the Triggering section (which is below the Tag Configuration section). Here, you can choose a trigger. Be sure to click on All Pages. Once you’re done, click Save - and that’s it! 

Now that you’re all set up on Google Analytics, you should take some time to determine your goals and key performance indicators. Decide the metrics you want to track using this tool and set clear benchmarks for these metrics. Metrics, such as page views, bounce rate, sessions and average time on page, are great for understanding how patients interact with your dental website.

You may need to appoint someone on your team to manage and regularly check your Google Analytics account and stay on top of your performance levels. Better yet, consider working with a Connect the Doc expert to assess your dental website’s performance and recommend metrics you need to track. Our team of dental marketing specialists work with dentists from across North America to optimize their marketing strategies and improve the work they do. You don’t have to do any of it alone, contact Connect the Doc to get the support you need.