When you first began working with the company you hoped would get your dental practice found online, the marketers you spoke with probably made all sorts of promises. They may have mentioned specific google rankings, a website that would be fleshed out with all the bells and whistles, and, of course, an entire army of hungry new patients they assured you would come rushing through your dental practice doors.

But too many doctors find themselves waiting for results, and they don’t quite know if their chosen marketing company will actually follow up on all the promises made. So how can you be sure if you made the right choice in hiring the dental marketing firm you hired? You can pay attention to the metrics, for one.

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All dentistry marketing firms worth their weight in gold should be providing you with regular progress reports. But even if you’re getting regular reports, that doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll be able to decipher them. If you’re not sure what all those facts, figures and graphs truly mean, it sounds like you need a ‘key’ to follow.

Well, doctor, you’re in luck. Here are the exact facts, figures and report items you should be looking for if you want to know – is my marketing company good for my dental practice, or is the firm I hired holding my business back?

Gauging the Effectiveness of Your Dentistry Marketing Firm

• Traffic to Your Website: The reports you receive should let you know how many people are visiting your website on a daily/weekly and monthly basis. This lets you know that the company is indeed making your dental office visible and noticeable online.
• New Visitors vs. Returning: It’s important to pinpoint exactly who is visiting your website. Are they brand new visitors or are they visitors returning to your site again and again?
• Phone Calls: The marketing reports you receive may include phone tracking. If so, you should be able to determine who called, when they called, the duration of each call and possibly even what was said.
• Most Pages Visited: Your website isn’t likely to consist of a single page. There are probably going to be quite a few pages – a home page, about page, services pages, a contact us page and a blog with many blog posts. Your dental marketing report should allow you to see – at a single glance – which of your pages is the top dog, and which ones are lagging behind.
• Visitor Duration: Not only should your regular reports tell you who’s visiting, but you should know how long each visitor is spending on your various web pages. The end goal is to always make web visitors want to stop and stay awhile – at least long enough to call or visit your dental health practice in person.
• Bounce Rate: Web visitors are said to ‘bounce’ when they land on your website and then immediately leave. This usually happens when a website is non-engaging or when a web visitor lands on your site by mistake. You always want your bounce rate to be as low as possible. If it’s high, that means something’s wrong, and your dentistry marketer’s first priority should be to fix it.
• Top Referrers: The marketing and advertising firm you hired should be telling you where your website traffic is coming from, whether it’s from Google, another website like Yelp or whether it’s from social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.
• Daily Processes: The company marketing your practice should let you know exactly what they’re doing day in and day out. Are they working on listing your dental practice with the 50+ local directories online? Are they making sure there are no search engine errors, which can hold your rankings back? Or are they twiddling their thumbs? Those processes should be listed in your dental marketing report PDF in black and white so that you always know what’s going on.
• Paid vs Organic Leads: Most firms that market small-to-medium sized businesses will focus on search engine optimization so that your dental practice shows up in the Google search results. This is known as producing an organic search presence, and the leads that originate from those organic search results should be clearly marked on your regular dental marketing reports.

If the company is also handling a pay-per-click or other paid marketing campaign on your behalf, the leads that come in through your paid campaigns should also be clearly marked so that you know precisely what’s working and what’s not.

• PPC Marketing Campaign Reports: Speaking of paid marketing campaigns, you should know how much each lead is costing you, as well as how many leads are being generated. The bottom line is that your PPC campaigns should be earning you a high ROI (Return on Investment). If they’re not, maybe it’s time to get rid of the PPC campaign in question (or the marketing firm altogether).
• KPIs and Goals Reached: Key Performance Indicators are clearly labeled metrics that show you – by the numbers – whether or not your dental marketing campaigns are performing. These can include hits to your website, phone calls coming in, certain pages visited and any other metrics included in this dental marketing report ‘key’.

The KPIs listed should also come with specific goals, and those goals should be reached when promised (or you might want to look for another dentistry advertising firm to work with).

Now that you know exactly what to look for when hiring and working with a marketing firm, you should be able to determine your next course of action. Should you keep working with the company in question or should you let the company go?

Because time is of the essence and you should never waste time with a company that’s not performing for you. Instead, find a company comprised of professionals who know how to market a dental practice, just like this one right here.