Website administrators routinely tell their clients that the number of practice website visitors (called Visitor Counts) is an accurate reflection of the level of visitor engagement and, therefore, a reflection of the success of the website. You may hear this from your web admin: “Wow, look at how many people came to your website last month!” While sheer numbers of visitors if a great thing, basing the success of your site solely on visitor count can be a deceptive metric for several reasons.
High Visitor Counts Don’t Always Correlate to Conversion
- High visitor numbers do not necessarily correlate with successful outcomes like sales. A small number of well-targeted, engaged visitors can be more valuable than a large number of indifferent ones.
- Metrics like engagement rates, conversion rates, patient acquisition cost, and lifetime value are more closely tied to practice success than raw visitor numbers.
Quantity Over Quality
- Even if your website attracts a large number of visitors, if those visitors are not engaging with the content (i.e., spending time on the site, exploring multiple pages, or asking for more information/setting a consultation appointment), the traffic is not valuable.
- A high visitor count can include people who are not part of your target audience, which won’t contribute to your practice goals.
Visitor Counts Are Easily Manipulated
- Visitor counts can be inflated by bots, which do not represent actual potential patients.
- Content or ads designed to drive clicks might increase visitor counts, but if the content doesn’t meet expectations, it can damage credibility and lead to high bounce rates. If you’re investing in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, it’s crucial to have effective landing pages. To boost conversions, your landing pages should include engaging visuals, concise copy, a strong call-to-action (CTA), and a simple form.
Visitor Counts Alone Offer Little to No Insight Into Visitor Intent
- While visitor counts tell you how many people visited your site, they don’t tell you why visitors came or what they were looking for. Without understanding visitor intent, it’s hard to gauge the effectiveness of your content or marketing strategies.
- A site with high traffic but a low engagement rate likely indicates that visitors are not finding what they need or want, making your traffic numbers less meaningful.
Lacks Actionable Insights Compared with User Flow, Time on Page, and other Metrics
- By assuming that your website is successful based solely on its visitor count, it overlooks more insightful Google
- Analytics 4 (GA4) metrics, such as engagement rate, conversion rate, and user retention.
The Bottom Line
Judging the success/value of your practice website based only on Visitor Counts can be a false indicator of success, which is actually based more on engagement or effectiveness. Focusing on more nuanced metrics provides a better understanding of how well a website is performing and where improvements can be made. Talk to your website administrator/team to get the whole picture of your website metrics! Need a website administrator or team? Contact PUMC today, we would be happy to help.