Patient Acquisition Starts With Your Medical Practice’s Website Conversion Rate

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In elective health care marketing, one of the simplest, but most underutilized metrics in understanding patient acquisition marketing performance is “Visitor To Lead Rate”. Visitor To Lead Rate provides a clear understanding of how both your advertising targeting & advertising creative are working together as a lead generation channel. With respect to your Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s), this is something that should be measured for every marketing channel that you have.
“When actually measured, the average practice generates a 1%-2% Visitor to Lead Rate from their website. With proper targeting and design, Visitor to Lead Rate can increase by over 300%.”

In 99 percent of the practices in the country, the practice website is the number one opportunity for new patient acquisition (second only to referrals, a strategy to be discussed in later editions). Given this opportunity, we will use this marketing channel as an example for this discussion. Visitor to Lead Rate allows you to understand how your targeting (search engine optimization) is working on an integrated relationship with the advertisement you are displaying (website landing page). Only when you understand this conversion rate can you understand the lead generation potential of your website targeting and design.

If you measure rankings and website traffic without understanding their impact on lead generation you will have a financial opportunity cost in your evaluation, due to potential website design flaws that cost leads. If you measure only leads and not rankings and website traffic, you will have financial opportunity cost due to targeting issues that bring visitors that don’t convert to leads. Visitor to Lead Rate measurement eliminates these potential financial opportunity costs. As always, a lead for purposes of this math is defined as someone who by phone or email gives you their first name, last name, procedure of interest, phone number, and email.

When actually measured, the average practice generates a 1-2 percent Visitor to Lead Rate from their website. With proper targeting and design, Visitor to Lead Rate can increase by over 300 percent reaching to 3.5-7 percent. In 99 percent of the practices, Visitor to Website Lead Rate is not even measured or understood by the practice or it’s marketing partners. These practices and their marketing partners waste money and time chasing subjective interpretation of what rankings they have and should have, along with their opinions regarding why a landing page is useful or not. Measuring Visitor to Lead Rate allows you to eliminate subjective opinion on rankings and landing page design and understand your actual performance of the advertisement targeting (rankings) and lead generation capability of the advertisement (landing page performance). From this measurement, you can make changes in both targeting and creative and understand the impact to Visitor to Lead Rate. Evaluate and repeat…

“Measuring Visitor to Lead Rate allows you to eliminate subjective opinion on rankings and landing page design and understand your actual performance of the advertisement targeting (rankings) and lead generation capability of the advertisement (landing page performance).”

How to Do It

In order to properly measure Visitor to Lead Rate, you want to set up tracking for your phone calls and email leads from your advertising channel. This can be done manually, utilizing your front desk, but will be ripe for human error from both the consumer and administration. The ideal way is to set up tracking through cloud-based phone tracking and lead management systems. These systems are low- cost and reduce workload for your team. From there, you can match revenue from your practice management system and understand your overall impact to return on investment.

Conclusion

Generating the highest return on investment from your patient acquisition funnel is a game of inches. However, when you add up inches you get feet, and so forth and so on. Visitor to Lead Rate improvement will make immediate gains for you in regards to those inches of improvement and over the course of months and years, it will mean thousands in additional profits.