3 key digital marketing KPIs to track in your practice

Digital marketing KPIs provide a clear, objective answer to these questions on how your marketing efforts are really doing

Trying to market your practice in this current digital age can be overwhelming. There are seemingly dozens of abbreviations for terms you might not understand – SEO, ROI, and MQL, just to name a few. What do these terms actually mean, and are they important for your digital marketing KPIs (key performance indicators) plan?

In simple terms, these abbreviations are all quantifiable KPIs that can help you determine if your digital marketing plan is succeeding and, if not, where you might need to change things. As to whether or not KPIs are important for your marketing plan, that’s not as simple as just a yes or no response. The answer depends upon which KPIs you choose to use.

What are digital marketing KPIs?

As mentioned, a key performance indicator is a quantifiable metric that allows you to measure a particular aspect of your practice’s performance. KPIs can measure any number of aspects of your practice, such as employee performance, product sales, or number of referrals.

Digital KPIs are those related to your online marketing strategy. They will encompass everything from your social media channels, to your website traffic, to your online sales revenue, and more.

Why you should track your KPIs

Is your practice successful? If you answered yes right away, do you know which areas of your practice are the most successful? Where might you need to invest more to improve your bottom line?

If you can’t immediate provide a clear, objective answer to these questions, digital marketing KPIs can help you do so. Digital marketing KPIs are particularly well suited for this task because you can see in the numbers where you need to improve. As an example – if you see a steady downward trend of people purchasing products via your website, compared to in-office, it may be a good indicator to shift your focus toward in-office sales.

Which KPIs to track

Customer lifetime value: Customer lifetime value (or in this case, a patient) is how much revenue a patient generates for you, over time. This value could vary, depending upon your retention rate, back-end products, and your service menu.

Obviously, your goal is to make your patient lifetime value last as long as possible. As an example, if you offer your patients a discount code for purchasing products via your website, you can track online sales as a KPI to see if that increases customer lifetime value. In other words, if online sales increase, digital marketing KPIs tell you that you are getting more lifetime value out of your patients who purchase online than from those who purchase in-office.

Customer acquisition cost: This KPI is determined by how much you must spend to get a new patient. It will include the cost of marketing, including any follow-up calls or emails that will help convert prospective patients into actual ones.

In this case, you want to keep the cost to convert prospective patients into actual ones as low as possible. For example, if you hand out 100 flyers at a community health fair directing people to your website for a discount coupon on their first visit, but only five used the coupon, that customer acquisition KPI shows that your cost far outweighed what you gained.

Return on investment: You are likely most familiar with this particular KPI. The return on investment (ROI) tells you how much value you will get back in relation to how much revenue you have invested into acquiring patients. Let’s go back to the health fair example. Obviously, your cost of printing 100 flyers exceeded what you gained, which was not a good ROI. You may want to try only printing 50 flyers for your next event to see if your ROI improves.

It’s all too easy to view the success of your practice in subjective terms. You are seeing a full waiting room, many patients are buying your back-end products, and your website is booming with traffic. However, unless you are looking at quantifiable numbers, you aren’t really getting a full picture. Digital marketing KPIs can help you do just that.