Analytics Is the Best Thing About Dental Websites. Now Use It.

For years I assumed that if a small business had tracking running on its website, someone in the building was reading it.

Dentists are how I found out I was wrong.

Your trade installs the counting better than almost any trade I audit. Then it leaves the results in an inbox nobody opens, beside a homepage that never asks a visitor for a single thing.

I went digging through the dentist results looking for something to give you a hard time about, and I came out half impressed and half exasperated, which almost never happens.

The check your trade nails

70.7% of dental practices run analytics, where only 58% of small businesses have it.

Only six of the 47 trades I checked run it more often.

Adding it costs whoever built your site about ten minutes. They paste a snippet into the page and move on to the next ticket, and from that day it keeps a record whether or not one person in your practice ever opens it.

Nobody had to be trained, nobody has to remember it on a Tuesday, and no member of your team was ever asked to develop an opinion about it. Your trade is unusually good at the category of job that gets arranged once by a professional and then quietly stays arranged.

The jobs that need someone to decide something go the other way. Dentists sit near the bottom of every trade I audit for owning a website in the first place, which is an odd thing to read beside the tracking figure.

Now, dental sites score 73 out of 100 in my index, 18th of 47, so your trade is somewhere in the middle of the pack overall.

Analytics is the highest your trade lands on anything I check. And the placing comes with a catch attached.

The catch

26.7% of dental sites put a contact form on the homepage, against 28% of small businesses, so nobody in any trade is covering themselves in glory here.

Hold that up against 70.7% for a second anyway.

Most practices are counting their visitors. Far fewer are giving one of those visitors anything to fill in.

Chiropractors carry the same strange pair. One number puts them near the top of everything I check and the other drops them near the bottom.

So what is the tracking supposed to report on? Someone arrived, read about implants for ninety seconds, left again. Great. And then what?

A visit isn’t an outcome. A visit is a person standing in your lobby while the front desk stares straight through them.

You would never allow that inside the building. You’ve allowed it online for years, and you allowed it because the counting looked like progress.

The excuses, ranked

I’ve asked a lot of owners why the homepage doesn’t ask for anything, and I’ve kept the answers. Here they are in order, starting with the one I’ll accept and ending with the one I won’t.

1. “The form filled up with junk, so we switched it off.”

I believe you, and I’ve seen the inboxes. Bots find a form within days and they never get bored.

But how many actual appointment requests went into the bin alongside the junk before someone pulled the plug on the whole arrangement?

Verdict: holds up for a week, not for three years. Filtering the junk is twenty minutes of work for whoever looks after the site, and it stays fixed after that.

2. “Patients book in our scheduling software.”

Half true, and the half that’s true matters. Existing patients love a portal.

But the link on your homepage hands a stranger in pain a login screen belonging to a company she’s never heard of, around midnight, while a molar is going.

Verdict: partly holds. Keep the portal for the patients you already have. Give the strangers a way in that doesn’t need a password.

3. “The Book Online button already covers it.”

Does it, though? On a lot of dental sites I open, that button quietly launches the phone app.

Perfectly fine at two in the afternoon. Useless at eleven at night, which is when a good chunk of these decisions get made.

Verdict: doesn’t hold, and it’s the cheapest thing on this list to fix.

4. “Our patients prefer to call.”

The ones who reached you did, yes. You have no idea what the ones who didn’t reach you preferred.

By what mechanism would their preference ever have arrived at your front desk?

Verdict: doesn’t hold, because it’s a confident claim about people you never met.

5. “We’re not taking new patients right now.”

Fair, and true for about a year. Then a big local employer switches plans, or a competitor opens two streets over, and the book has gaps in it before the year is out.

Verdict: I argue with that one hardest. A form on your homepage costs you nothing at all while you’re turning people away, and it takes a couple of months to start producing appointments once you’d like some.

An owner who waits for an empty afternoon before commissioning the fix is committing to a stretch of empty afternoons, and I have watched several perfectly sensible practices do exactly that.

What building the thing actually involves

The whole thing is half a morning for whoever looks after your site. The slow part isn’t the building, it’s deciding what to ask for, and most practices ask for far too much.

Name, phone, what hurts, when they’re free. Nothing beyond those four, because every extra thing you ask for costs you people who were on the fence anyway.

Make the phone number a tap on mobile, instead of text a patient has to select and copy while holding a cheek.

Then decide who reads the submissions, because a form nobody checks is worse than having no form at all. I once found forty unanswered appointment requests sitting in a mailbox belonging to a receptionist who left the practice in 2021.

Nobody had ever been handed the job. Reading that mailbox belongs on the standing list of things a live website needs from a person, right beside renewing the domain.

Most of the dental sites I get hired to rebuild fail on exactly this, and the rebuild is mostly an argument about what to ask a nervous stranger.

Curious what the good ones do with the same setup? I keep a shelf of dental website examples here, and the difference is almost never the design.

Then point the counting at something

Installing the tracker and reading the tracker are two different jobs, and my whole complaint is that your trade nailed the first and stopped.

Washington DC taught me that as well. Plenty of businesses there are counting visitors, and the question I keep asking them is whether anyone in the office can still open it.

Once the form is live, tell your analytics to watch the form and the phone tap. Next month’s report then counts the people who asked you for an appointment, instead of the people who merely arrived and left.

Most owners can’t tell me how many people asked them for anything at all last month, and the ones who can are usually the ones already competing for the patients you want.

If your tracking can’t answer that question either, it isn’t broken. Nobody ever configured it to watch for an appointment request, because there was nothing on the page capable of producing one.

You already own the instrument. It’s pointed at an empty room.

Tonight

Open your own homepage on your phone and try to become a patient without making a call.

If you can’t, start there.