Measuring Marketing ROI With FlexSchedule Online Tracking Links
Marketing is the food that feeds every business to help it grow, including dental practices. No matter the industry, a good marketing approach consists of several key components: building a brand, generating interest in your product/service, acquiring new customers, and fostering successful relationships to create repeat business. And, at the end of every successful marketing initiative, you’ll want to measure where your best leads came from so you can optimize your marketing budget and calculate your return on investment. Just like every business, your dental practice needs to be able to attribute your marketing wins to their respective campaigns so you know which of your investments is working the hardest.
In this article, I’m going to show you how to utilize the tracking links feature in FlexSchedule online scheduling to help determine the ROI of your practice's marketing strategy.
Become a Marketing Detective
Right now, do you know exactly where your new patients learned about your practice? Did they see an ad on Facebook? Did they catch your latest Instagram post? Did they click on your Google My Business profile? It can often be difficult to tell which of your marketing efforts generated these prospective patients unless you have the time to dig around in Google Analytics and hunt down this information.
In order to really understand where you are having the most success, you need to know which avenues are giving you the best return on your marketing spend. Enter FlexSchedule online scheduling and its available tracking link feature.
What Is a Tracking Link?
Tracking links allow you to use a dedicated target URL (the destination a potential patient will visit once they click on the link in your ad) for each specific marketing campaign where you promote your online scheduling site, giving FlexSchedule a method of tracing the origin of each completed appointment.
For example, you might use www.flexschedule.me/yourpractice/website for your main website’s online scheduling page, while choosing www.flexschedule.me/yourpractice/facebook for use in your Facebook ad campaigns. FlexSchedule is able to “see” each unique URL that a patient clicked to book an online appointment, compile that data, and provide analytics on which tracking links perform the best. More on that in a few.
Tracking Link Placement
Tracking link placement ultimately depends on the tactical focus of your marketing campaigns - here are a few suggestions:
- Your practice website
- Google Ads
- FaceBook profile and ads
- Email campaigns
- Your website
- Automated recall texts/emails
- QR codes for print advertising
Ultimately, any marketing campaign that drives prospective patients to book online appointments can utilize a tracking link to assess performance.
FlexSchedule Tracking & Analytics
Once you’ve implemented your tracking links and prospective patients begin responding to your marketing, you can run a FlexSchedule report that provides:
- Tracking link/source of every appointment
- Number of appointments booked via FlexSchedule for each tracking link
- Appointment date
- Whether the patient is new or returning
- The patient’s insurance status
Not only will FlexSchedule show you which campaign is getting the most traction, but you can drill down into the data to learn more about the types of patients that are responding to your campaign. This data can be invaluable in determining how to optimize your marketing budget.
A Simple Method for ROI
Now that you’ve set up your tracking URLs, utilized these links in your marketing campaigns, and compiled your data on appointments booked via FlexSchedule, you can calculate a simple ROI on your digital marketing efforts based upon your budget spent on each campaign. So, you’ll now be able to compare how Google, Facebook, Yelp, Instagram, email campaigns, or any other marketing investment performs. You’ll be better positioned to place your efforts in the strategy that provides the highest return for your dollar, which is ultimately the name of the marketing game.
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