To get the best from the marketing you do for your counselling or therapist website, you need to know what’s working and what isn’t. You can save yourself time and money once you know what works and what doesn’t. Measuring this can be tricky, but read on for some tips.

Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools

An absolute must for your website is to install Google Analytics and Google Search Console and link them together. You then get statistics on who is coming to your site, your most visited pages and where your visitors come from. This can be very useful in working out which one of your marketing activities is bringing in the most visitors – social media updates, directories or paid ads.

Conversion Tracking

Once you have Google Analytics installed you can set up goals such as ‘enquire using contact form’ or ‘signup for newsletter’ and start to get a picture of how people use your site once they have found it. For an counsellor’s website, increasing enquiry form submissions could be your goal.

Tracking of clicks in your email newsletter can also be used to see what your list are interested in. The number of clicks on each link within a newsletter will show you what to focus on, whether that’s links to info or special offers.

If you are using Pay Per Click marketing like Facebook ads or Google Adwords, the conversion tracking is essential to see what keywords or areas are worth continuing with and which are just using up your budget without leading to new clients.

Landing Pages

You can set up dedicated ‘landing pages’ on your website that are not linked to from the main menu or listed on search engines. These special pages could then be the destination for online campaigns such as a Faecbook ad campaign or an email newsletter. You can then see the page views on each landing page to see what has worked the best for you. If one landing page gets a lot of traffic, whatever newsletter or advert sent the clicks is worth repeating!

The Simple Method – Ask People

Especially for telephone enquiries, it can sometimes be as simple as asking people where they found out about you and your services. It only takes 30 seconds, and people are usually happy to let you know. As phone enquiries can’t be tracked like contact forms, getting into the habit of asking can give you good data on how people find out about your counselling services.

Summary

Working out the most effective marketing campaigns for your potential counselling clients relies on good measurement. By using these free tools and ideas you can start to see where to focus your efforts and make the most of your time and marketing spend.