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The Most Important Google Analytics Metrics for Your Veterinary Website

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Understanding how people engage with your website will help you determine what you need to improve in order to reach more local pet owners. Google even provides a free analytics tool that collects data from your website to measure its performance.

However, Google Analytics provides such a wide range of metrics that interpreting its data can feel overwhelming—how do you know what the most important Google Analytics metrics are for veterinarians? If you want to efficiently monitor your website’s performance, check out this guide from the team at New Wine Digital.  

The Four Most Important Google Analytics Metrics for Veterinary Clinics

1: Traffic Sources

Google Analytics not only tells you the amount of traffic your website gets, it also reveals where that traffic comes from. You can choose to divide your visitor tracking results into several categories, but the main ones you should monitor include:

  • Direct Traffic—users who visit your site directly by entering your vet clinic website URL or clicking a link in an email or text message
  • Paid Search Traffic—users who click on your pay-per-click (PPC) ads in Google search results
  • Organic Search Traffic—users who click on a link to your website from organic search results (the results below the ads)

Knowing where the majority of your traffic comes from shows you where you need to make adjustments in your marketing campaigns. For instance, if you’re running a lot of PPC ad campaigns but are seeing low paid search traffic, then you will need to target different keywords. If your organic search traffic results are low, you should use search engine optimization (SEO) to boost your visibility. 

2: User Location

Since your target audience is local pet owners, it’s also important to know where your web traffic comes from geographically. The Demographics section on Google Analytics will tell you everything it knows about the visitors to your site, including their location (down to the cities they visit your site from), their age ranges, and even their top interests. You can use this data to make your website more relevant to the users who find it. 

For instance, if you notice a lot of traffic from out of state that doesn’t make sense, you’ll need to adjust your location keywords so that you can reach your local audience. You can also check the affinity categories to make sure that the people who visit your site are pet owners. 

Affinity categories relevant to veterinary clinics include:

  • Lifestyles & Hobbies/Pet Lovers
  • Pets & Animals/Animal Products & Services/Animal Welfare
  • Pets & Animals/Animal Products & Services/Pet Food & Pet Care Supplies
  • Pets & Animals/Animal Products & Services/Veterinarians

3: Conversion Rate

You can even use Google Analytics to track conversion rates and find out how many new clients are booking appointments for their pets online. To improve a poor conversion rate, you may need to change the call to action on your website or improve your SEO to help you reach more local pet owners through Google search results. It’s also a good idea to claim and optimize your Google Business Profile, where users can find a link to your website, call your phone number, or click a button to conveniently make an appointment. 

4: Bounce Rate

The bounce rate refers to the number of users who visit your website and exit it without clicking through to any other pages on your site. If your website has a high bounce rate, it’s important to look at some of the other metrics to determine what’s happening. 

For instance, looking at the demographics may show you that you have a high number of visitors that don’t align with your target audience. This could mean that your marketing is targeting the wrong people, so they’re bouncing away because you aren’t offering what they need. For example, if you don’t offer services like pet boarding or emergency care, make sure you aren’t ranking for keywords that relate to those services. 

However, if users in your target audience are quickly bouncing away or spending little time clicking through your site (determined by the average session duration metric) then there could be a problem with the website itself. Making sure your website is user-friendly will ensure a good user experience and lower your bounce rates. 

Digital Marketing Services for Veterinarians

Whether you need to build a new website for your veterinary clinic, optimize an existing one, improve your SEO, or start a PPC ad campaign, New Wine Digital can help. We build and optimize clean, modern websites and monitor their performance using the most important Google Analytics metrics. Our experts can demonstrate how our services will help you reach more local pet owners—call us at 480-516-1819 to get started. 

Images used under creative commons license – commercial use (10/12/2022). Photo by Myriam Jessier on Unsplash

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