Measuring the Success of Your Private Practice with Website Analytics

Do you know where your website traffic and clients come from? What sources are the most important, and which are a waste of time? 

Are you, as they say, “winging it”? Or do you have a testable, modifiable plan? 

The success of your practice, at least in part, relies on your ability to maximize what works and limit what doesn’t. So, if you don’t know — if you’re flying blind — it is costing you time, clients, and money. But it doesn’t have to be that way. 

Many tools can pinpoint your data precisely, providing data that will inform better choices and enhanced results. Data that can be the difference between muddling along and exploding your practice impact and growth. Data that can forever change the game. 

So, let’s look at how analytics — collecting, analyzing, interpreting, reporting, and using data — can provide insights to help you make informed decisions that work. 

Set goals for your website’s performance 

Did you know you can set goals for your website?  

When you set a goal, you monitor specific user interactions. A visit to a particular page, filling in a contact form, booking an appointment, purchasing a product, or signing up for your newsletter. 

Google Analytics (GA4) makes this process easy. 

In the GA4 world, goals are “a versatile way to measure how well your site or app fulfills targeted objectives. You can set up individual ‘Goals’ for discrete actions like sessions to a ‘Thanks for registering!’ page, a ‘Download’ completed screen, a minimum session duration, or a specific purchase amount.” 

Goals give you insight into how users are interacting with your website. You can see where your strengths and weaknesses lie. Then you can make the most of what you do well and improve what you currently do not. With this information, you can make informed decisions to improve the user experience and bolster your results.   

Setting goals helps you keep tabs on how well your website performs and what changes you can make to optimize it. 

To learn more, read Google’s tutorials at:   

• Create and manage goals 
• Create, edit, and share goals 

Or ask us for help. GA4 is vital to your practice’s success, but it’s not the most straightforward platform to interpret. 

Understand and analyze key metrics like traffic, bounce rate, and conversions 

You can — and should — track your site’s performance to ensure it’s attracting visitors who stick around and convert in some way. These factors can be summed up as traffic, bounce rate, and conversion. 

Traffic refers to the number of people who visit your site. Traffic is divided into categories: page views, new versus returning users, traffic channels (like social, organic sources, direct, and other), and source or medium (like Pinterest, Facebook, and Google). 

By analyzing your traffic data, you can identify the pages that draw in the most traffic and the sources that drive the most visitors to your site. 

The bounce rate signifies the percentage of users who leave your website after viewing a single page. A high bounce rate can indicate that users are not finding what they’re looking for or that there’s an issue with your website’s design or functionality.  

You can identify problem areas on your site by analyzing bounce rate data. Then, using this data, make necessary changes to improve user engagement and decrease your bounce rate. 

So you have a guide; HubSpot reports that an optimal bounce rate range lies between 26% and 40%.  

Next are conversions. Conversions represent the number of users who take a desired action on your website — making a purchase, filling in a form, or making a booking are examples. You’ll learn which pages and campaigns drive the most conversions by analyzing your conversion data. 

You guessed it; then, you can make data-driven decisions that optimize your website’s performance. 

Track your site’s search engine optimization performance with keyword and backlink metrics 

Search engine optimization (SEO) is, as we say in the post, The Ultimate SEO Checklist for Therapists, “essentially the practice of following a series of steps so that Google [and other search engines] will show your site in its search results.”  

While SEO is complex, keywords and backlinks are crucial to its success. You can track these two factors. 

Keywords are the specific words and phrases users search for on search engines. For example, “Relationship counseling Lehi, Utah” or “Licensed therapist who treats depression.” By tracking keywords, you can learn how your website ranks for specific keywords and phrases and identify areas for improvement. 

When you notice your website’s not ranking well for a valuable keyword, you can adjust your content strategy, optimize your website’s on-page elements, and improve your ranking. 

Backlinks refer to the number and quality of external links (links from other sites) that point to your website. These are important because they give a virtual tick of approval when they are of high quality. The more high-quality links, the more the search engines notice, and the more likely a page (and the site) will be to rank. 

You can see who links to yours by connecting your site to Google’s Search Engine Console. 

You can identify potential opportunities to build high-quality links by tracking your data. If you discover a weak backlink profile, you can focus on building high-quality links from relevant, authoritative sources. But if you don’t know your data, you won’t know where to focus your time, efforts, and limited resources. 

Analyze user behavior and engagement with heat maps and other tools 

To sound like a stuck record, you must know how people behave and engage with your site to improve your results. Wonderfully, there are more tools available than Google’s alone. Heat maps and A/B split testing included. 

Heat maps graphically represent how visitors engage with a webpage. They reveal the areas of the page where users click or spend the most time. Heat maps can then tell you the elements of your website that gain the most attention and identify the areas that get ignored. With this knowledge, you can optimize your site’s design and layout to boost user engagement and conversion. 

Where can you grab a tool like that? 

Try HotJar or Crazy Egg.  

Then there is A/B split testing. Split testing compares one page to another: page A versus page B. Two webpage versions get designed for this test, with a single element or feature differing between the two versions. Say the headline, the color of the opt-in button, or the size of the font. 

Tracking data then determines the better version for the desired outcome — say, user engagement or conversion rate. 

Tip: It takes sufficient data for the results of a split test to be significant. One hundred-odd visits aren’t enough. So this approach can benefit pages that move the needle in your practice. Those you will drive traffic to. For example, your booking or free opt-in offer pages. 

Identify and address areas for improvement to optimize your site’s performance 

While we’ve discussed this above, it’s important to emphasize this point. By tracking and analyzing your data, you can identify areas on your site that work and those that don’t. Then you can optimize performance for bigger, better results; attract more traffic; woo higher quality clients; build a robust practice; and increase your bottom line. 

Your website should act as a powerful business tool — a dynamic, evolving platform. Accurate data — gained through regular analysis — helps to make this dream a reality.

About Jocelyn Van Saun

Jocelyn is a Marketing Manager at Brighter Vision. When she's not creating and sharing content for our network of therapists, she loves spending time outdoors - rock climbing, trail running, hiking, camping, mountain biking, and skiing!