The Most Important Marketing Metrics to Track in Your Aesthetics Practice

We often see practices getting hundreds of leads per month but they are only converting a very small percent of them --which clearly is not great for business. When we see these numbers, we know we need to dive deeper to see what is going on. This is where the importance of reports from your marketing company or connecting your marketing agency’s reporting to the business intelligence dashboard featured within APX Platform comes into play. 

When you're interviewing a marketing company, one of the things that they're going to do is start digging in and gathering data. If you are already an APX Platform user, you can pull this data and reports on your own any time and have access to more than 50 integrations such as LinkedIn, other social media platforms, a website audit tool, Google AdWords, Google Analytics, E-commerce (if you have a Shopify site for example), email marketing, call tracking metrics, etc. 

Once you have all your reports and marketing analytics in one place, you can make informed decisions of what’s working and what’s not and determine where you spend your marketing dollars. 

Website Audit

Your marketing agency should provide you with a website audit tool and report. Basically, this audit tool will crawl through your website and look for errors or warnings. It will give you information, such as how your site ranks for organic Google searches vs. how many people are typing in your exact practice name into the search bar or a specific surgery, treatment, or product name.

Google is a search engine. When a patient is typing in specific keywords, Google is going to do its best to present the top-ranking websites based on the keywords the patient types in the search bar. There are multiple factors that play into what options show up in the search results based on an algorithm and how well your individual website ranks in terms of search engine optimization (SEO). 

Google is looking for a certain hierarchy and structure for content. They don’t want a bunch of run-on lines and endless content. They want paragraphs to be broken up. They need headers and subheaders and titles with meta tags. 

A website audit software understands what search engines like Google are looking for so that your site can be ranked properly. Google also penalizes websites for various factors. One of the biggest errors or penalties can be due to duplicate content. So, you don’t want to copy content from another website (or have multiple doctors within the same practice have the same standalone business website content) and put it on your website presenting it as your own information (e.g., taking content from a product manufacturer's website word for word). 

There cannot be more than 44 consecutive words that are taken from another website, or it will be flagged as duplicate content. Other common errors include missing meta-tags, missing headers or subheaders, missing titles, or missing alt tags that describe what appears in your photos as Google cannot read photos.

If a website audit is not something your current marketing company provides to you, you may want to:

• Consider asking them for an audit report
• Search for a new marketing company

(If you are an APX Platform member, you can activate your website audit tool by submitting a request to our support team).

Then, work with your marketing company to fix the errors that you find. Fixing these problems will help you increase your organic search rankings. In addition, if you are running paid ads, you want to make sure your website is optimized, so you are bringing people who click on your ads back to your website.  

If you are already an APX Platform client, you can ask our support team to help you add your website to our site auditor tool. You can see results instantly in our business intelligence dashboard.  Typically, a website or marketing company should send you a monthly report, but at minimum a quarterly report. If they aren’t, then ask why not or consider switching to another company.

Website/Marketing Company Recommendations

1. We recommend you use a marketing company with expertise in the aesthetics space and who will write content for you to make sure it is submitted and formatted correctly.  Many companies allow you to add your own content and blogs. This is convenient, but there is a much greater chance the content won’t be optimized for SEO and Google rankings. 

2. A common challenge with many of our clients is carving out the time to meet with their marketing company to go over the monthly reports. Sometimes six months slip by with no review.  It’s very important to prioritize those meetings to make sure you are all on the same page and that new content is being properly added. We recommend meeting every month to understand what is going on in the practice, how your website is performing, what leads are coming in, from what lead source, and for what treatments or services to decide what potential ads to run or promotions to consider. 

3. If you are an APX Platform client, depending on what you connect within our Business Intelligence dashboard, you’ll have the ability to look at all this data in real-time. 

Marketing Analytics

If you have APX Platform, please make sure that you are attaching your Google Analytics account. Again, your marketing company (if it's a good reputable company) should have a Google Analytics account setup and provide you with access and reports. 

It’s important to understand what data to look for within your account. If you are a practice that is generating hundreds of leads with a low conversion rate, you’re really going to need to understand why. Is it a training issue? Is it the quality of the leads, or where those leads are coming from? Are they leads from prospects completing web forms? Or are they from people calling the practice from a call tracking number on your website?  The bigger question is, how often do you analyze this, do you know how and how often do you set aside time to train and inspect what you expect which is high conversions?

Things you should know:

• What is my current conversion rate? 
  • Inquiry to consult 
  • Consult to close 
• What should my conversions be?  70% minimum 
• If no goals have been set, ask “Then how do you know how my campaigns or website pages are performing?”

You should be able to track how many people sign up for your newsletter on your website, how many people hit the schedule a consultation button, how many people are filling out the contact form, how many are using a live chat, or how many are calling your practice from the call tracking number. 

Once you can see the numbers from various conversion paths, you can determine what needs improvement and what is working well. For example, if most of your website visitors are on their mobile phones, and your site is not optimized well for mobile, your contact form may not be easy to fill out. 

Marketing Metrics/Terms to Know

• Lead Acquisition:  How you are acquiring a lead – what is the lead source driving that prospective client to call you or direct them to your website?
• Lead Acquisition Cost Formula: (Total Expected New Revenue – Operations Margin – Direct Sales Expense – Target Profit Margin) / # of Leads Needed
• Organic Search: Organic search is when people go to Google or other search engines and type in keywords and your website comes up.
• Direct Search:  A direct search is when someone knows your website URL and types it in the search bar. 
• Referral Links: An example of a referral link is if you are listed as a provider on the Allergan page, and a patient finds you, there clicks to your website, and is referred to you that way.  
• Social Media Leads: These are prospects coming to your site by interacting with a social media post. Typically for a plastic surgery practice, we usually don't see a huge number of leads coming from social media. However, social media leads are more common for med spas.
• Email Leads:  Email marketing platforms (such as MailChimp and Constant Contact) do have the ability to directly track how much traffic is directed to your website from each email newsletter sent out.
• Pay-Per-Click:  These are leads from, for example, Google AdWords which allows you to track how many leads come from clicking on your paid ads displayed in Google searches. 
• Location of Leads: Knowing the location of where leads are coming from geographically can be extremely helpful. If your practice is in New York, but 30% of your website leads are coming from California, there is likely something off (unless the doctor markets their practice to people all over the country as the “go-to expert”).  If your lead locations seem off, you need to go back to your marketing company to understand why you are ranking for those keywords in another location. Sometimes it can be malware and someone is running some kind of business on the backend of your website. 
• Bounce Rates: Bounce rates tell you how long or how much time people are staying on your website pages before they leave. An ideal amount of time is between 1-2 minutes on average per page. That means they are likely reading what is on the page or viewing the pictures. If they are spending too much longer, there might be too much content to sift through. You want them to visit multiple pages, read about the doctors, etc. 

The length really depends on the goal of your website. Do you want to educate fully and have people spend time reading and watching videos? If so, then perhaps 5 minutes is a good range. But, if your goal is for them to read a bit and take action to get a conversion, then the 1–2-minute range works well.  Bounce rates on average are 26%-40 but we want to keep as low as possible.  

• Page Views: Page views show you how many pages on average visitors are clicking on each session before they leave. Knowing this information gives you an opportunity to improve the user experience.
• Landing Pages: A landing page means that a visitor comes from an external source and “lands” on that page for a particular purpose. So, landing pages are important because they need to be structured to capture interest quickly with a conversion goal in mind. 

If you are spending money on Google AdWords for breast augmentation, for example, and your ads feature before and after pictures, and the reader clicks on that ad and it just takes them to your website homepage, that person is not going to be happy having to navigate your site to find the breast augmentation services page and bounce. 

The same goes for social media posts. Make sure you are utilizing landing pages from social media campaigns. 

• Site Speed: Site speed is very important. Everybody today is very impatient. We are impatient for people to call us back or people to text us back. We are very impatient with slow websites. So, please make sure that your website is not slow to load as people will just leave. 
• Pixel: A Facebook pixel is a piece of code embedded on your website so that you can see how many people that are interacting with your Facebook or Instagram pages are interacting with your website. 

This is another item to ask your marketing company about. If they don’t know what you're talking about, this is another red flag as a pixel is a very common thing. 

• Open Rates: If you use email marketing newsletters or campaigns, it is very easy to track your open rates. Rates should be at least 17-30%. When you see the recipients who do not open the email, we recommend your marketing agency resend it a few days later again. We also recommend list cultivation—meaning keep track of those subscribers who always open your emails. These are your core subscribers and your biggest opportunity. So perhaps there are 300 people who always open your emails. You can move them to a “superstar” list, and those may be the people you invite to private events, or market a loyalty program to them. 

This is just an overview of some marketing metrics and terms and questions to ask of your marketing agency. APX Platform members have access to connect all these metrics and many more in our Business Intelligence Dashboard. Our customer support team can help you get set up.

We encourage you again, to have regular communication with your marketing agency and make sure you are requesting and reviewing all reports on a regular basis. 

We hope you found this helpful as marketing is a big expense. Our team at APX platform is here to ensure you are educated and informed on what to do, what to look for, and what changes you can make that will have an impact on your business.

If you struggle with this, or training and need to increase or improve your conversions, we invite you to schedule a discovery call. You can learn more about our Sales Training curriculum and how that training alone has yielded a high ROI.