Many medical professionals with comprehensive practice websites make the common mistake of ignoring periodic data such as the number of unique site visitors in a month, page views for each web page, and the site’s average bounce rate. Such data is available for free through Google Analytics, which is a powerful analytical tool that tells the real story of your healthcare website’s reach and its engagement levels.

It is important to analyze the response rate of the visitors to your website. This can be gauged in terms of how many people actually performed some kind of affirmative action in response to your website. It could include the number of people who filled the contact form, the number of people who downloaded a particular article or PDF file or eBook, or the number of people who visited your social media networks through your website.

An improved response rate effectively results in growth in business, and your website can be directly credited with such growth. While it is important to know how many unique visitors viewed your website during a particular period, it is equally important to gauge the number of repeat visitors to your site. Reader loyalty often translates into actual business because repeat visitors are most likely to make a physical visit to your office for a consultation.

Lack of repeat visitors should be a cause of concern because you do not want dissatisfied readers who do not feel the urge to return or refer back to your website in the future. Similarly, bounce rate, which is one among key website metrics, indicates how many visitors moved away almost immediately after accessing your site. A high bounce rate could mean that something is conspicuously wrong with your medical or dental practice website design or content. Lastly, visit duration is a critical measure, which indicates the engagement levels of an average reader with your medical website.