Chiropractic Marketing | Chiropractic Advertising | Chiropractic Ads

Google Analytics is a free website tracking program,  to use it you’ll need a Google account setup (like gmail, Adwords, etc). If you haven’t, you can (and should) get started with Google Analytics at http://www.google.com/analytics/

It’s fairly easy to install and I’ll show you again in the beginning of today’s video. If you have a techy person who does things for you, the installation should take less than 5 minutes.

Here’s how analytics works. Enter the website you want to track, then they give you a short “script” to put on your page.

Every time someone comes to your website, the script is activated and starts tracking what that visitor does. The script is hidden in your website code, so it’s not even visible on your page.

What This Software Can Tell You

Analytics offers many features and Google adds new features monthly. What I want to do is show you which aspects you need to use and how it will increase the amount of new patients you get from the internet.

Here’s what Analytics reveals about your website and why it’s important to you.

Unique Visitors. What you need to know is the number of “unique visitors”. The stat only counts the visit when they first arrive on the site. No matter how many times they return to the website, they will only be counted as one visitor.

Time on site. Time on site is almost always a good thing. Assuming you have some content on your website (articles, videos, etc) the longer a person stays there, the more involved and interested they are in what you have to say. This is not justification for putting up lots of boring content, as people will still leave fast if it’s not interesting.

Sidenote: Also, “time on site” is very important to your Quality Score when running Google Adwords. You may remember in the last lesson we spent some time on quality score. At this point in time, it appears 1 minute is the critical time for your Adwords landing page. If visitors are staying less than 1 minute, you will be punished on your quality score.

Page Views. Depending on the type of website your tracking, a higher number of page views can be a good indication. For example, a blog site where you aren’t selling anything but just giving away free information is a place you want people to view a lot of pages. This is an indication of someone who wants more information from you.

If you have a “traditional” website with navigation bars and links, a high number of page views may be a bad sign. It’s likely that people are clicking around and having trouble finding the information they want.

Pages/visit. “Pages per visit” is a similar stat to the above page views. This is an important number to track if you have a blog. When running a blog, you want visitors to visit quite a few pages per visit. The reason you want this is because it means they are connecting with you each time they come to the site.

Traffic sources. In my opinion, this is one of the most important stats you can know about your website. Your traffic sources will tell you exactly where people are coming from when they land on your blog, landing page or website.

It will tell you if most of your traffic is coming from Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc. Use this information to go to these search engines and do pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. If you’re already doing PPC,  use this info to increase the PPC according to where your traffic is coming from.

You’ll also know if another website has linked to you, since people will click through the link and visit your site. The traffic sources page can tell you if your social networking is effective, since you may see visitors coming from LinkedIn or Facebook.

After you release a press release on PRweb, you’ll be able to tell how effective it was as a traffic generator. The same goes for posting articles on sites like Ezinearticles.com

Location of your visitors. Analytics will tell you where your website visitors are located down to the city level. This can be valuable if you practice in a populated area with many surrounding cities. You may notice a majority of your traffic coming from a certain area. Using this information, you can make some offline marketing decisions like where you want to advertise in the newspaper, with direct mail, etc.

Bounce Rate. This is one stat you want to be low. The bounce rate is how many people only see one page of your website and “bounce” off. So if you have a 71% bounce rate, that means almost 3/4ths of the people visiting your site are leaving before viewing another page. A high bounce rates means that people are not finding what they want and are hitting the “back” button on their browser. (A high bounce rate can also hurt your Adwords Quality Score.)

A good bounce rate is between 50-60%, as you can’t expect everyone that hits your site to view more than one page.

In 2009, a chiropractor can not rely on simply having a website to bring him new patients from the internet. It’s simply not enough anymore (and likely hasn’t been for a few years.)

Now if it was still 1999, and you were the first to get a website up in your town, then you could expect to get new patients from it over the next few years.

But by 2004-2005, just about everyone had a website in your area. This brought up a new problem, since there was now quite a bit more competition online.

So what happened?

Overpriced SEO services happened. Web designers came to you and offered to “search engine optimize” your site for around 2,000 dollars or more! For this amount, they would go in and “tweak  your code”, essentially stuffing keywords and meta tags on your site, somewhat optimizing it so you would come up high on Google and Yahoo’s free listings. (Turns out it’s not so “Free” if you have to pay someone $2,000 to do it!)

This worked for a short while, until search engines like Google figured this out and developed a program to detect all the fake “stuffing” that was going on. (Believe it or not, there are still SEO companies out there today spending 10 minutes doing this and charging chiros a ton of money.)

So now it’s 2009. What’s changed? Well, quite a lot has changed on the internet. Many industries have implemented new technologies and moved on into the whole Web 2.0 phase. Even many small businesses have realized they can get new customers online at a less expensive cost, thereby cutting ineffective offline marketing.

But where are most chiropractors?

Still stuck in 1999, simply thinking a website alone will work? Or in 2004, thinking if they have a website all they need is some quick optimization to help it out a little?

If you’ve been thinking these things too, it’s really not your fault. No one has really stood up and said…

“No, it doesn’t work like that anymore!”

Instead, website companies just update their graphics and make their site look prettier, knowing they can sell you on looks instead of effectiveness.

But no matter how good you dress it up, a website is not enough (unless you practice in a very small town and you’re the only chiropractor there.)

Let’s look at the offline world. You have a sign on your door or on the front of your building, correct? This sign is important, because it tells people where your office is and if they are driving by they know how to find you. But does this sign magically go out and tell people to come into your office? Does it go 5 miles down the road and find qualified new patients?

Of course not! You have to do other types of marketing first to get people over to your office and come in as a new patient.

Your sign is part of your offline marketing system, but it does not make up 100% of it (unless you are in a really small town). Well the same goes for your website. Your website is not going to go out there and grab qualified prospects for you. Sure, a few people may pass by your site and come in as a new patient, like a walk in would when driving by your office. But do you just want to live off of walk-in traffic?

Look, here’s how internet marketing works. You must have 3 steps running all the time.

#1. Source of qualified traffic. (Pay per click, articles, organic listings, blog, incoming links, press releases, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Some of these work better than others.)

#2. Conversion of that traffic to scheduled new patients. (This is where your website comes in. But just ‘any ole website’ won’t do. You have to have good copy and layout to make it work.)

#3. Automatic follow-up with the traffic that doesn’t call and schedule. (Here you use email autoresponders to do the work for you.)

If all you have is a website, you only have  #2 covered above. And judging by most chiropractic websites out there, they struggle with even doing #2 right.

I know, we are chiropractors. We’re not trained to know all the ins and outs of internet marketing. Nor do we have time to keep up with all this “new fangled” stuff. That is why sometimes I hear the following statement…

“Dr. Beck, I don’t understand all that internet marketing stuff out there.
But I get that you need a website. Can’t I just get by with that for now?”

My answer: sure, you can “get by”, but don’t be upset when you don’t get many new patients from your website.

And not understanding how internet marketing works is no excuse not to learn it or pay someone else to do it for you. Most patients don’t understand chiropractic when they first come in to see you. But it doesn’t take them long to appreciate the benefits of your care.

The same goes for all the components of internet marketing. You don’t have to understand it all the mechanics of it to reap the benefits of having tons of new patients come in to your office from it.

We know people are searching everyday in your area for a chiropractor, or solutions to problems that you can help (they are because we can see that with Google’s keyword tool), then why aren’t they finding your website and causing the phone to ring off the hook?

Do patients find your website when someone types in “fibromyalgia treatment” on Google? What about “neuropathy”? Sciatica?

I can make that happen with ChiroPatients Online. There are still a few spots left for October, as long as your area has not been taken already.

Are you using pay per click (PPC) internet marketing to bring in more new patients?

Most search engines have PPC as part of their services. Google has it’s Adwords program, Yahoo has Search Marketing, and MSN has AdCenter. Adwords is the biggest PPC marketing platform because Google controls so much of the online traffic right now.

Some chiropractors are starting to realize that they can get new patients at a low cost using PPC marketing. But the key is knowing what your doing so you don’t end up overspending (or worse — getting a bad “track record” attached to your Google account, increasing your PPC cost forever.) In the video below from ChiroMarketing Academy, you’ll see the first section of the “Google Adwords Training Video”.

Do you have a chiropractic website? Does it bring in new patients?

Most chiropractors sum up their whole internet marketing plan
with one sentence…

“I got a website”.

These websites might look pretty, have flashy graphics, music, and lots of other cool things, but they don’t even scratch the surface at being an automated chiropractic marketing machine. Even though it may have cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars to design and put up, it fails at getting new patients through the practice doors. Why don’t “traditional” chiropractic websites work?

2 Big reasons:

1.) Most chiropractic websites don’t give the person visiting any relevant information. Think about it this way…

A new patient walks into your practice. They’d like to find out if you can help them with their headaches. But the first thing they see is a flashy banner sliding in front of them. Then, you turn up some loud music or a video educating them about chiropractic.

Next, they are given the option of going through one of 10 different doors.Each door has a word written on front of it. Words like… “Home”, “Location”, “Conditions”, “Contact Info”, ”FAQ”, “Chiropractic”.

They really aren’t sure which door to pick. None of them really say “headaches”, which is what they were thinking you could help them with. So the new patient goes about opening one door after another, trying to find something relevant to their problem. Finally they give up and hit the “back button”, walking out the door to look somewhere else.

Is that what your do in your practice? No chance right?

Here’s the point, a website needs to give relevant information to the person landing on it. If it doesn’t, they aren’t going to hang around very long, much less make an appointment. Most people searching for your services don’t go online to receive an education about chiropractic history. They want to know how chiropractic can help them.

2.) Websites are just one piece of the puzzle, not the complete puzzle.

In my ChiroMarketing Academy course, I teach members the four pillars of building a chiropractic internet marketing plan. Only one of the four pillars is a website (and even then, it’s not the typical website you see every chiropractor with).

Here are the other three pillars…

-You need a source of web traffic. Just like your offline marketing, you need a
method to get new patients to your web pages.

-You need a method of collecting information, like first name and email
address. This can be in the form of a landing page, or simply a email form on your main website.

-You need a follow-up system that continues to remind and educate
them about how your unique care can help with their problems.

We go into each one of these in detail in the ChiroMarketing Academy course.

So if you have website, look at the other three pillars I mentioned above and see how you can improve it. Remember, the purpose of an internet presence is to bring in new patients. You don’t need an online brochure, you want to use technology to automate your marketing.