Is your Web site working? Track your hits and measure your success


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Issue 12 - September 2004

Is your Web site working?
Track your hits and measure your success
By Gina Cavoores

Is your Web site working? How well? If you have a Web site, you have invested time and money in it. Of course you want it to pay off for you. And fortunately, you can use a couple of different ways to measure its success.

What goals should your Web site have?
Some of the most common goals for Web sites include:

• Advertising your services or products;

• Generating online sales;

• Publishing articles;

• Providing technical support;

• Gathering opinions; and

• Educating visitors. As a chiropractor, your more specific goals may include:

• Providing information on office schedules;

• Posting office policies;

• Publishing newsletters and special announcements;

• Providing information on the staff’s credentials and specialties;

• Posting FAQ (Frequently asked questions) about chiropractic;

• Selling ancillary items online; and

• Soliciting patient comments.

Before you can begin to measure success, however, it is essential that you have defined goals for your Web site. Goals set the baseline for measuring effectiveness. As the saying goes, “If you don’t know where you are going, you won’t know when you get there.”

Assuming you have defined goals, you can measure results either by analyzing online inquiries or by using statistical reports — or by using both of these methods.

ONLINE INQUIRIES

Online inquiries include:

• Form completion requesting information;

• E-mail responses;

• Requests for ancillary product information; and

• Online product sales.

Look at the response rate for each of these items. Is it steady? How many requests do you get each week? Each month? Can you attribute an increase in patient visits or ancillary product sales to Web traffic?

Answering these questions can give you a good sense of how well the site is working.

STATISTICAL REPORTS
Another way to track success is through Web statistical reports. When someone visits your Web site, the Web server stores this information in a log file. This data enables you to analyze the traffic on your site, which in turn helps you to meet the needs of your patients.

Tracking software enables you to find out how many people are visiting your Web site; where they come from to get to your site; the most popular and least popular pages on your Web site; and peak times that people visit your Web site.

• Hit reports. Tracking software typically gives you reports on hits, visits and page views. That is, you can get reports on the number of hits to a page or the number of requests for a page — by hour, day, week or month.

What is a hit? Although definitions vary, according to the software used, the broad definition of a hit/visit is “one or more accesses made by the same visitor, within a set time limit between accesses.”

Web site essential: Advertising

It is, perhaps, an irony that for your Web site to succeed in marketing your practice, you have to advertise your Web site. The idea is that the more people who visit your Web site, the more of a success the site becomes.

How can you do this?

• Media advertising. This includes TV, radio, newspaper and magazine ads. Develop ads that announce the site.

• Business cards. If you do not want to place an ad in the media, at least add your Web address to all of the office documents, receipts, appointment cards, business cards, newsletters, pens and all other items your patients may take from your office.

• Mailings. Send out announcements and/or newsletters and e-mails to your current patients announcing the Web site and what they can find on it.

• Search-engine submittal. Search engines are a valuable tool for your potential patients to find your Web site. And your site may already be listed in the search engines without your involvement, since they use “spider” programs that reach into the Internet to find new Web sites.

To find out if your Web site is already listed on the search enginges, check three or four of the popular search engines, such as www.google.com, www.yahoo.com and www.dogpile.com. Type in the name of your practice and see if your Web site comes up in the search.

If you didn’t find your Web site listed, you may want to submit your Web site to the search engines. For more information on search engine submission procedures go to www.searchenginewatch.com. Another option is to hire a company to submit your Web site to the search engines.

An access is a single successful request made by the Web browser. Every request made on the Web server, whether for an image or a document is regarded as an access. For example, if you have a Web page with five pictures on it, the statistics program would count the page and each picture separately. The page would have one hit/visit but would log six accesses.

Your reports will probably show more accesses than hits/visits. It is common to see both hits/visits on the same report as total accesses.

• Domain analysis report. This report lists the top referring Web sites of your visitors before they clicked to your Web site. This information can be helpful in showing what your patients’ interests are and Web sites that are linked to your site.

• A report on Internet browsers. Knowing what type of browser (for example, Internet Explorer or Netscape) visitors to your site use can be helpful in the development and maintenance of your Web site. If most of your visitors are using an older version of an Internet browser that does not support a more advanced technology such as Flash, you may want to hold off on putting Flash technology on your Web site. The idea is to offer your visitors the most enjoyable experience on your site without giving them technical headaches.

• A search engine keyword report. This shows which keywords users typed into the search engines to locate your site.

Most Web hosting companies offer Web statistical reports as part of their hosting service agreement. Check with your hosting company for more information on these reports and supporting documentation.

If your hosting company doesn’t offer statistical server reports, ask it to recommend a product you can load onto your Web site that will track this information. Another option is to outsource the tracking service to a software company that specializes in Web tracking. A free option is www.sitetracker.com.

Analyzing hits, browser version, e-mail response and the time visitors spend on your Web site allows you to create content that will keep your visitors coming back again and again.

Gina Cavoores is the Web master for Chiropractic Economics. She can be reached at gcavoores@ChiroEco.com.

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