…and you’ve got a website, I can virtually guarantee you’re missing out on more patients than you might ever imagine, and you or your web “pro” is very likely screwing things up and neither one of you knows it.

Worse, since no one knows it, they have no idea how to even fix it.

Yes, that’s a damn strong statement.

You see, that WAS me. Up until about 30 days ago, that was yours truly – the self-proclaimed Internet Idiot (‘ii’ for short).

If it wasn’t for an amazing piece of super-simple web-based software like WordPress, I’d not even have a website. Thankfully, it’s just like typing in Word, so I can handle it. (whew! aren’t you glad?!)

So, back to this “online practice building.”

I won’t go into ALL of the details here, but I will whet your appetite a bit.

In the last two days, I have spent exactly $61.07 with Google Adwords.

Here’s the chart:

You can see that I have had 7 people click my ads out of 3,460 “impressions.”

That’s a miserable 0.20% CTR (click-thru rate). In fact, I have no idea if that CTR is good or bad, but I can tell you this…which is THE MOST IMPORTANT METRIC OF ALL in generating new patients:

OF THOSE 7 CLICKS (and I can assure you one is from a pissed off little dentist here in Salem), 4 called, 2 are patients we’ve already scheduled and seen, and a 3rd is a “I’ll call back in a bit to schedule” patient. Sure, she might not call back, so let’s not count her, ok?”

So if 2 of 4 that called scheduled, in this small test, that’s a 50% conversion of callers (we usually are at 85% or better) which are new patients, and of the 7 CLICKS, that’s almost 30% of the people that clicked, CALLED TO SCHEDULE.

Now, this is a small test group. I understand.

But, here’s the point: If 28.5% of the people (or even 5%) seeing my ad and acting on it are sitting in my chairs at the office at a cost of $61.07, that’s a good, very good, no, DAMN good deal.

And, if each patient is worth, say, $500 to the office (I realize the national reported average is triple that, supposedly), then is that a good ROI? Hmm. Let me see… Yeah. OK. Yeah, I’ll take it.

But, you see, there are two critical components or attributes of these ads and the process I’ve not yet revealed.

So, here they are:

1) I am not sending them to the SofTouchFamilyDental.com website. Nope. Won’t risk losing them there.

and,

2) I am doing something I think, eventually, Google will outlaw: I’m putting a special, ninja tracking phone number in our Google ad, so people don’t even have to wait and go to my website to scratch their itch…they just see the offer and…CALL.

Look, I’d like to tell you more about this, but I have to leave my office, run some errands and get home to see my kiddos. So, tomorrow, I’ll tell you more. OK?

Adios.