How to Improve Lead Attribution for Dental Offices

Lead Tracking for Dentists

Do you know where your dental practice’s new patients are coming from? 

When it comes to digital marketing for dentists, lead attribution (sometimes referred to as lead tracking) is critical to maintaining — and improving — your online success in growing patient volume. At DentalScapes, one of the first things we do when starting a new partnership with a dental practice is to ensure that lead attribution is correct. Without insight into what online channels are working (or not), it’s impossible to responsibly allocate your marketing budget and maximize your return on investment. In this blog post, we break down 5 ways to improve lead attribution for your dental practice:

Use Call Tracking

Are you taking advantage of call tracking for your dental office? There’s no better way to understand where new patient phone calls are coming from — and it’s critical that dentists, orthodontists, and other specialists enable this technology. With a tool like CallRail, you can set up dynamic call tracking numbers specific to each online source. 

Use Form Tracking

What’s the use of building a website if you don’t know what it’s doing for you? In order to attribute your leads and make the best use of your dental practice’s marketing dollars, you don’t just need to know when leads are coming from phone calls — but from form fills on your website, as well. Form tracking and call tracking are often bundled in the same software, but they’re both uniquely important. 

Use UTM Campaign Tracking

Do you know how effective your dental practice ads, emails, or social posts are in driving traffic to your dental practice website? If not, it might be time to consider implementing UTM campaign tracking. UTM, which, believe it or not, stands for “Urchin Tracking Module” (shoot us an email — we’ll tell you about it), is a Google-developed system designed to help marketers understand where their website traffic is coming from. 

Using easy-to-create UTM parameters, you can track many variables for a specific referral link, including source, campaign, content type, etc. This information directly feeds into your Google Analytics account, where you can measure traffic and associated "goal completions" (conversions). With lead attribution data gleaned from UTM campaigns, you’ll know which online channels are performing better than others to drive traffic to your website and generate new patient appointments, and can allocate budget more effectively.

Track Sources in Your Practice Management Software or CRM

Most dental offices use either practice management software or other customer relationship management (CRM) software to organize their patient’s contact information and dental records. In addition to this data, however, it’s important that dental practices incorporate lead attribution. The source of the patient must be saved to his or her record, period — whether it's referral, PPC, organic, social media, etc. You can integrate various software or set up automation to import this information.

Tracking lead sources in your practice management software or CRM allows your dental practice to understand performance and better allocate your marketing budget.

Keep in mind that integrating lead attribution with your PMS or CRM can be complicated and time-intensive. If you’re running into roadblocks, consider contacting a dental marketing agency like DentalScapes for help.

Make Data-Driven Decisions

It’s one thing to implement lead tracking for your dental practice, but it’s another to actually apply the data. To best apply your dental office lead attribution data to your marketing decision-making, make sure that the information is easily available and frequently reviewed. At DentalScapes, we recommend setting up automated reports in your lead tracking software to ensure that lead attribution stays top-of-mind. 

Need Help with Marketing for Your Dental Practice?

At DentalScapes, we help small to mid-size dental practices (general, orthodontic, and other specialties) grow their online presence and maximize profitability. Set up a free discovery call with our team today.