John,

How can I find out how people are coming to my website?

Thanks,

Craig Howden, DMD

Hi Craig,

Dentists can track their website visitors through a stats program. You’ll want to monitor your site traffic in order to zero in on the most productive advertising efforts and keyword queries from search engines.

There are hundreds of reliable traffic stats available to analyze visits, both free and paid versions. Many people use the free Google Analytics, while others have their own preferences.

We use Opentracker since it provides a lot of statistical data such as:

• real-time visitors
• hourly, daily and monthly trends
• bounce rates
• visits by search terms
• referring websites
• most popular pages
• top entry & exit pages
• origin state/city/country location of visitors
• companies & organizations
• technical data: operating system, browser, screen resolution
• etc.

Opentracker is easy to implement plus they give you a 30 day free trial.

While usually rudimentary, most website hosting companies also include a free statistical analog with their hosting packages for checking traffic sources; whereas third-party providers provide a code that is placed into your site’s HTML mark-up; you then login to their online panel to review your stats.

Knowing how potential patients arrive at your dental website is instrumental to improving SEO and understanding your site’s conversion ratio. By placing tracking codes on an “appointment request sent” or “thank you” page, you can discover which keyword searches are working best for you.

jb

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