2 Metrics That Reveal If Your Private Practice Website Is Losing Visitors

Your therapy website is the first place that a potential client visits even before visiting your actual clinic. It is more like an online brochure with which your potential client interacts.

But just having the website is not enough. It should be converting too. Is your private practice website also converting? As a private practice therapist you may be looking at how many visitors visited your website, but have you ever checked out of them how many actually converts, gave a call to you, or filled the enquiry form. That’s real data to check.

If you are not checking that data then below are two website metrics you should watch closely to spot if your site is quietly pushing people away.

1. Engagement Rate

Engagement rate is a metric that tells how much a visitor was engaged with your content during a session. A session is the time period during which a user is engaged with your therapist website.

If the incoming visitor stays on your private practice clinic website for more than 10 seconds, trigger an event like fill a form, click on a button, or has more than 1 page viewed, then this session of the user will be called as engaged session.

Also read: How to decrease website loading time of a therapist website

The engagement rate then is a percentage of engaged sessions by incoming visitors on your website. It is a important metric in the sense that it tells the percentage of users who actually engaged with your therapist website.

Higher the engagement rate better the conversions. To know about your website’s engagement rate you can setup Google Analytics on your website and add engagement rate metrics to the report. Here is the official setup guide provided by Google on how to setup engagement rate.

If your private practice therapy website engagement rate is low then it means that users are not able to find what they are looking for. Either your content is not going well with them, maybe they were looking for something else and your website says something different, the CTAs are not properly placed, font is too small, etc. Whatever the reason a low engagement rate is not good for your private practice therapy clinic website.

I have explained everything to increase engagement rate of a private practice website in this article – simple ways to increase private practice website engagement rate

2. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of people who land on your website and leave the website without clicking on any other page or taking action. In simple words if a visitor leaves a website within 10 seconds of its visit without taking any action then it will count as 100% bounce rate for that visit. Bounce rate is the opposite of engagement rate.

If your private practice website has a high bounce rate then it means that the incoming visitors are not satisfied with your website’s content.

Either your website is loading slow, doesn’t have proper CTA buttons, not have the content they are looking for. This ultimately means that they are not satisfied with your website. As you are aware that your website is visited by those who needs help. They may be feeling low, depressed, having sleepless nights and wants to talk urgently to someone. But if your message is not clear they will leave the website disappointed.

For example, if someone Googles “anxiety therapist in New York,” clicks your homepage, and leaves in 5 seconds, your site might not be answering their question or building trust quickly enough.

If that is the case, then chances are you are leaving potential clients unconverted. They may be getting disappointed with your website’s content and moving on to the next private practice website to get that information they visited your website for.

To check bounce rate of your website there are various tools available. The most popular one among them is Google Analytics. According to Semrush, a bounce rate of 40% or less is ideal. To see the bounce rate of your website, you can setup Google Analytics on your website. In the new GA4, bounce rate and engagement rate are not included by default in the report. You will need to customize the report to include these metrics in the report. Follow this link, to setup bounce rate and engagement rate metrics to your report.

If you don’t have time to read the full article here are the steps to setup engagement rate and bounce rate metrics to your GA4 dashboard:

Google Analytics -> Select Reports in left menu -> Business Objectives -> View user engagement and retention -> Pages and screens -> Click Customize Report in the top right > Click Add metrics -> Search for Bounce rate -> Select -> Search for Engagement rate -> Select -> Click Apply -> Save

I my article on simple ways to reduce bounce rate of your therapist website, I have written in detail on how to reduce therapist website bounce rate. Do check it.

Final Takeaway

Your website isn’t just about attracting visitors only it’s about keeping them long enough to connect, trust, and take action.

By watching engagement rate and bounce rate you can quickly spot if your site is losing potential clients and make necessary changes that lead to more booked sessions. Work on reducing the bounce rate and increase the engagement.

You can work on decreasing the load time, write content which in not too clinical for the readers, adding images of your private practice clinic, giving the right information to the user, placing the contact form and buttons at right places for improving these metrics.

These two metrics are a crucial way to make sure that the incoming visitors are not leaving the website without engaging with your website.

Start tracking these two metrics today, and your private practice therapy website will work harder for your practice even when you’re not online.