We are all familiar with the old proverb “measure twice and cut once” that warns us to double check for accuracy in our lives. Let’s take that advice to our online activities. As you certainly know, everything you do online is trackable, whether you do it yourself, or let the NSA do it for you. The problem is of course, the NSA doesn’t share very well.
Do you have a website? If not, let me once of the first to welcome you to the 1990’s. Of course your practice has a website. Do you measure your website traffic? You or your web developer should be measuring your web traffic and your audience. You can purchase all sorts of audience measuring software, or you can install Google Analytics on your website for free (www.google.com/analytics).
Google Analytics is embedded into well over half of the world’s websites. With it, you can easily measure who comes (not individually) to your website, from where, and with what they are viewing your site with. You can review the browsers used, the speed of their internet, what pages are viewed, and how long people stay on each page. Best of all you can review where your visitors are coming from. In Google Analytics visits are broken down most simply into direct traffic (those who typed your URL into their browsers), search traffic (those who found you from searching Google, Bing, or Yahoo), and referral traffic (those who might come from a link such as from www.theopticalvisionsite.com) . In a perfect world everyone knows your name (hearing the Cheers theme song in my head), or in a mostly perfect world, your traffic would be evenly split into thirds; direct, search and referral.
If you advertise online (and if you don’t, why don’t you?) most sites are more than happy to provide traffic analysis of your advertising. The problem is, even with the best intentions, their numbers aren’t always accurate. How many times have you been searching a website and clicked on a banner or a link and had a new tab or page pop open? How many times have you closed that tab or page before it fully opened because you didn’t really mean to click the ad or link? In analytics, it doesn’t matter if you actually looked at the page, you clicked, it recorded it. I have purchased numerous campaigns over the years where the ad provider gives me very different numbers than my analytics have recorded. If those numbers are within 10%, I am fine with it. Sometimes they are double what my analytics show which means there is a problem. Either the advertising company is lying or the link they are sending people to is bad. If I didn’t have my own numbers however, I wouldn’t know.
What about when the numbers are fuzzy? Even though the legendary astrophysicist Carl Sagan once replied to a question about his gut feeling with the answer, “I try not the think with my gut”, we all know certain things just feel right, even when the numbers aren’t there to justify them fully. Can you give me the ROI of joining the Better Business Bureau? How about the ROI of keeping your sign lit to 10 instead of 9, even though you close at 6? Can you justify the ROI of new fancier business cards, a newer mobile friendly website, or an advertisement in the local high school paper? Some things you have to take on faith and intuition. If you sold tires, advertising in the auto section makes more sense than the food section, no? Not every advertisement, whether online or in the analog world will provide immediate and measureable results, even though you can measure a lot of things. Knowing how to measure and when to measure is an art as much as it is a science. But one without the other is never good for business.
