Back in the dark ages of marketing, the amount of data you received about your marketing activities was minimal.
We now collect data on how people navigate pages, who they are, where they came from, and what they do while they are on the website. Using this information, we can improve, streamline, and develop the user experience to help more users find what they are looking for and ultimately use our services.
Digital marketing experts can now collect mountains of data. Instead of being in a data desert, we find ourselves in a data deluge.
At Audigy, that’s where we enjoy partnering with our Members. Through our experience with audiology practice owners, we know that the amount of time you have every day is limited. When you have patients, staff coaching, operations, and finance in front of you, spending hours analyzing your Google Analytics does not make it to the top of your priority list.
This is where Audigy’s digital team shines. We are not only experts in collecting data, but we also love to sift through it all to find information that will impact your business decisions.
What’s the point of data that isn’t actionable?
Report & Review
First, ask yourself if you are receiving a web analytic report from your digital marketing agency. If not, reach out now and ask for it. How can you gauge the success of your digital marketing without measuring its performance?
Second, ask yourself if you are reviewing that report regularly. If you’re not, it’s time to start using this data to confidently make changes to your marketing.
Reviewing your monthly reports can be cumbersome if you are given too much data. At Audigy, over the years we’ve learned our lesson. We used to send our Members as much data as we could and kept adding to our reports. It made us feel smart, but it didn’t help our Members achieve their goals.
After talking with our Members, we recognized the need for simple, clear reports. We still grant them full access to their website data and Google Analytics accounts in case they do want to research more, but most of the time they prefer an executive summary.
Sometimes the hardest part of reporting is understanding the terminology. You can’t properly interpret the performance of a digital marketing campaign without knowing the definitions of a few key metrics.
Website Metric Definitions
- Calls — How many people called from the website?
- Prospects — How many callers were potential patients?
- Appointments — How many of those potential patients set an appointment?
- Forms — How many online forms were submitted to the website?
- Organic Traffic Sessions — How many people came to the website from a search engine such as Google or Bing?
- Direct Traffic Sessions — How many people came to your website directly by typing in the URL?
- Referral Traffic Sessions — How many people came to your website from another website?
- Device — What devices are people using to view your website? Desktop, mobile, or tablet?
- New vs. Returning — How many people are visiting your website for the first time or returning?
- Traffic by Location — Where are people visiting your website from?
- Demographics — What are the ages and sexes of those who visited your website?
- Top Landing Page — Which page do people visit first when they come to your website?
- Organic Pages per Session — How many pages do people visit on your website in one session?
- Organic Keywords — What keywords did people type in that brought them to your website?
PPC Metric Definitions
- Calls — How many people called from the landing page or paid search ad?
- Prospects — How many callers were potential patients?
- Appointments — How many of those potential patients set an appointment?
- Forms — How many online forms were submitted from your landing page?
- Device — What devices are people using to view your paid search ad? Desktop, mobile, or tablet?
- Impressions — How many people saw your paid search ad on Google while performing a search?
- Clicks — How many people clicked on your paid search ad on Google?
- Clickthrough Rate — What percentage of people who saw your paid search ad on Google clicked on it?
- Conversions — How many people made a phone call or submitted a form on the landing page?
- Cost per Click — How much do you spend per click?
- Cost per Conversion — How much does it cost to get someone to make a phone call or submit a form?
There are an incredible number of additional metrics that we could review, but these are the most essential to an audiology practice owner. Let’s take a look at how we can use these metrics to impact our marketing efforts and to determine their effectiveness.
Start With a Question
Before looking at any numbers, it’s essential to start with a question.
Just looking at data and acknowledging its existence doesn’t achieve anything. By thinking about what your business needs or the investments you are making, you can then narrow your search and discover a clear answer.
For example, is my SEO agency actually improving my results?
Let’s break this down. Search engine optimization would be focused on increasing traffic to the website from search engines. This means we would want to look at the number of organic traffic sessions. Since we want to see our improvement, it would then make sense to look at the historical trend of organic traffic sessions since we hired the SEO agency.
If we see a steady increase, we can say with confidence that yes, the agency is improving results. If we see a decline, we now know that we may need to put more attention into our SEO efforts.
Patterns & Trends
One bad month doth not a failed campaign make.
Resist the knee-jerk reaction to a negative-looking report. Sometimes when we don’t see immediate results, we abandon our marketing efforts.
Putting this in terms of audiology, you would ask your patients to give their new hearing aid technology some time; they might need to adapt to a change in their lifestyle with the device. They may need some fine-tuning of the device to meet their needs. They may even just need greater attention from you before they are able to see the results they’d like.
Frequently, we see audiology practice owners experience a dip in calls, prospects, forms, or traffic in one month and decide that the marketing has stopped working.
Just because your paid search campaign was slow this month doesn’t mean that it’s dead. Look at the months before and see if this is part of a larger pattern. Is this a seasonal trend? How are things pacing this month?
Point out the dip to your agency and ask what they can do over the next month to improve your results.
Consider the Big Picture
All of your marketing efforts work together. None of them are completely siloed.
This is incredibly important to consider when you are looking at the results of a particular marketing tactic. People will interact or engage with your brand several times before moving forward. Each of these interactions plays an important role in driving the user to that final conversion.
Let’s use paid search as an example. Maybe this month you only saw one appointment from paid search. You might be tempted to cancel your campaign.
However, if we look closer at the results you received on your website this month, it appears that most of the users who converted on your website interacted with paid search ads multiple times before that.
We call this an assisted conversion when one tactic supports the success of another tactic. This occurs consistently across all our Members’ websites that use multiple marketing tactics.
Now imagine if you canceled that paid search campaign. Would those users who converted on your website have interacted with your brand that first time? Would they be familiar enough with your practice to click on your organic website link?
It’s important to remember that your digital marketing should be holistic and reach users across all tactics.
Your Digital Partner
We don’t want digital marketing to be a mystery to any of our Members. We do our best work when we are full partners with our Members on driving their marketing forward.