getting results bar graphIn the high-cost world of advertising, how do you know you’re spending your dollars in the right place?

Tracking your advertising and marketing results is incredibly important to ensure your campaign is not only branding your medical practice (making noise), but it’s also driving viewers/readers to your office (getting results). Better still, if you know what’s working you’ll be able to really drill down and focus your campaign that much more, bringing in more patients and more dollars to your practice.

So, how can you judge if your advertising is effective or not? Here are a few simple tips you can start using today.

Pay-Per-Click

If your practice is using an online pay-per-click (PPC) strategy to generate visits via Google AdWords or a similar program, you can track your ads down to the keyword level to see what people were actually searching for and clicking on to land on your website. These campaigns can be pricey though and you should have a budget outlined before starting any campaign.

Splash Pages

Let’s say you’re running a fancy new promotion and giving away free Botox samples if people go to your website, fill out a survey and schedule a consultation.

Instead of just having that survey on the main page, create a special splash (or sub) page for it. This is beneficial for several reasons. For one, you can now advertise this special page (www.YourOfficeName.com/BotoxSurvey, for instance) on all of your advertisements, social media sites and throughout your office. Secondly, by giving the promotion its own special page you can track the number of views for that particular page, where the links are coming from, viewers vs. entries, what website browser they’re viewing your website from and much more. We suggest using Google Analytics to keep track of your web statistics.

Dedicated Numbers

Does your medical practice run ads in area publications? No problem, tracking these is incredibly easy as well thanks to dedicated phone numbers and/or free tools like Google Voice.

You can set up dedicated phone numbers through your phone company that will forward directly to your main line. Then, simply insert one of the new number in “Advertisement A” and another in “Advertisement B” so you can tell where you’re getting more calls from and which has a higher return on investment (ROI) for your medical practice marketing efforts. You can also set up Google Voice numbers for free and have them forward to any number you like. Then you can just check your Google Voice account to see what number(s) are receiving the most calls. Note that while this method is free, there will be a short message from Google requesting the caller hold for a moment while Google Voice locates the user.

The above methods of tracking your advertisements are just some of the ways available for you to make sure you’re spending your medical practice marketing dollars in the right place. Remember that whenever you’re spending money on advertising, a tracking method should be included on your “to do” checklist.