As great as it would be for our marketing efforts to immediately convert leads, that’s not always the case.
A lot of the time a website visitor will browse your dental practice website – viewing your services and payment plans, and even looking at appointment options – only to abandon your page.
In fact, only 2% of website visits tend to result in a direct appointment or sale [1]. However, if you are tracking your web visitors and are actively learning about what they are searching for, you can retarget them later to convert them to a booking.
This tool is called smart pixels, and it’s a marketing tactic that can be used to customize messaging to match a specific search query. Let’s take a look at how it works, what it is, and how you can set one up.
What Is a Smart Pixel?
Used for marketing purposes, a pixel is a block of code that is placed onto your website. It tracks clickers’ interactions and conversion hotspots so that you know where your audience’s interest is directed to the most. This knowledge allows you to do a follow-up or a “retarget” for those who hover on specific pages of your website.
A Big Opportunity for Business Growth Through Insight
The smart pixel offers businesses a large opportunity for growth because it allows you to learn about your potential patients. Knowing what pages they hover on, what call to action buttons they click, and what services they prefer enables you to fuse this information with your digital advertising efforts. Focusing on specific data like this allows you to shape and mold advertising to attract the right patients. Having a smart pixel on your website helps with conversion tracking and retargeting lost leads.
Conversion Tracking:
You can use a smart pixel to keep track of conversions by simply identifying which events or actions cause conversion and then setting the pixel to fire off when that conversion happens. For a dental website, a conversion may be requesting information, booking an appointment, inquiring about payment plans, or searching for your physical location.
Retargeting Lost Leads:
A smart pixel can also be used to create retargeting lists based on particular audience segments. Perhaps you are going to run an offer for teeth whitening or regular cleaning in the near future and want to bring in new patients, simply use a smart pixel to create a retargeting list of everyone who landed on these pages.
How to Use Pixels to Target Website Visitors?
You can use pixels to target website visitors in one of three ways:
1. Optimize your campaigns.
Pixels will provide you with the visibility needed to know what works and what doesn’t in your campaigns. You can then tweak these campaigns and optimize them for what works best.
2. Understand your audience better.
Pixels will allow you to capture your website visitor’s behaviors. This means that you will actually be able to see where your prospective patients go after clicking an ad – giving you better insight into what your audience is looking for.
3. Figure out the impact of your media.
When using pixels, you can maximize your media budget by determining what type of impact it has. This allows you to tweak your budget and place money where it matters.
How Do You Create Pixels for Your Website?
Creating pixels for your website depends on what advertising platform you are using. You can create pixels on both Google Ads and Facebook Ads Manager – and we’ve broken down how to do so below:
Log into your Facebook Ads Manager dashboard and find the “pixels” tab, which is located in the “events manager” portion of the dashboard. Simply choose to create a pixel, give it a name, and add in your website URL to begin set-up.
Head back over to the “pixels” tab in the “events manager” and choose to set it up by clicking “set-up” and then “manual add.” Copy the pixel base code and place it in your website header in your website’s backend. Make sure to add the pixel code above the closing head tag and then hit “create” in the box that appears!
With Google
Log into your Google Ads account, head on over to the tools setting, and select “measurements.”
Click “conversions,” hit the plus button, and select “website.” Add your website name next to the conversion name, add a description under the category, and choose the value for each conversion. You will now be asked to choose either “one” or “every” – if looking to track leads, choose “one” and if looking to track sales, choose “every.” Next, click on the conversion window to set up the tracking time duration and then hit create! Make sure to add the global site tag and event code to your website.
About the Author:
Clayton Patterson is the founder and CEO of Digital Space Marketing. After spending nearly a decade developing websites and launching successful marketing campaigns for medium sized companies and startups, Clayton knows what truly drives conversions and brings growth to an organization. In addition to his extensive marketing experience, Clayton is a lawyer with a deep understanding of website accessibility laws and the technical requirements that all websites should abide by.
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