Practitioner Tools: Tracking Your Traffic
How will you know whether your mental health practice is benefiting from your strategic marketing activities? Site traffic, in terms of visitors or page views, provides one of the main measures by which you can track the impact of your marketing activities — but with an array of confusing terms like ‘hits’, ‘page views’, ‘visitors’, ‘unique visitors’, and more, how can you be sure you’re tracking the right things?
One of the primary aims of strategic internet marketing is to increase the number of targeted visitors to your site — where ‘targeted’ means the kinds of visitors who will be interested in your services. So, while overall site traffic itself isn’t everything, it does provide one of the main parameters you can measure to get an idea of the impact of your strategic marketing activities.
As a mental health professional in private practice, how can you choose what to measure, to gauge whether your marketing activities are bearing fruit? How do you distinguish between ‘hits’, ‘page views’, ‘visitors’ and other such terms? And once you’ve decided on an appropriate quantity to measure, how can you make sure the numbers are accurate and not skewed by spambots, search engine spiders, hits on RSS feeds, advertising code loaded separately from your main pages, and other such factors, all of which can inflate and distort your apparent traffic?
Our article on Quantifying Your Own Site Visitor Numbers and Traffic Levels, part of our Internet Marketing section of the new Therapist Business Centre, helps you sort through what all the terms mean and highlights a few caveats when it comes to tracking your own traffic.
