For promoting your therapy practice, imagine how useful it would be to have detailed demographic data on who visits your site. You could use detailed demographic data to focus your efforts and grow your practice.
Examples of when a therapist would love to have detailed demographic data
Can demographic data help you grow your practice? Yes. Learn how to use demographic data responsibly.
Consider how you might use more information about who is coming to your website to help you sharpen your message.
- If you are focused on, for example, helping parents with hyperactive children, you would love to know what percentage of your visitors are parents.
- Considering offering concierge services? You should know how many of your visitors are “luxury shoppers”.
- If you offer holistic services, you should now how many of your visitors belong to a “Green Living” affinity audience.
What data would you be interested in for your practice?
Good News – you can get more demographic data
Using Google Analytics, you can get more demographic data and interest data about visitors to your site. Data can include age, gender, parental status, membership in “affinity groups” and more.
While Google Analytics does not provide data about individual web visitors, you can get reports on demographic and interest information aggregated over all the visitors to your sate. If you enable this data on your Analytics account, you can find demographic data and interest reports in the general report area.
Enabling demographic data and interest reports
Log in to your Google Analytics account. Click on demographics report enable this feature.
After you enable demographic reporting, you will be prompted to validate your Analytics code and to update the Analytics tracking code embedded in every page on your website.
If you are a TherapyEverywhere customer, TherapyEverywhere.com will handle the updates for you at no charge. If not, you should ask your webmaster for help or contact TherapyEverywhere for assistance.
Enabling demographic data means that you have to update your privacy policy
When you enable demographic data on analytics, Google will collect data about your visitors using cookies and identifiers, in addition to data collected through a standard Google Analytics implementation. Use of these identifiers enables Google to track and collect visitor information as your visitors browse the web, and uses information from many different sites.
Before you can go live with demographic data collection, we strongly recommend updating your website’s privacy policy. Feel free to call TherapyEverywhere or consult with Google for a sample privacy policy statement.
Caution – getting demographic data has a downside
As a mental health professional, data about your visitors is more sensitive than, say, their interest in lawn care services or other consumer products. Do you want to help Analytics gather information about your visitors that can be used on other sites in addition to being used by you?
How will your clients react to your updated privacy statement? Does gathering demographic data violate any regulations of your professional association or of the agency that licenses you? Before you move ahead, feel free to call and consult with TherapyEverywhere about the privacy implications of enabling demographic data collection.
Demographic data will not be complete. For users that have not associated demographics data, Analytics cannot provide information. As a result, demographic reports will usually represent only a subset of your users and may not be representative of your overall site visitors.
What's a therapist to do? Will demographic data help me grow my practice?
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Enabling demographic reporting can be enormously helpful to you, even if the demographic reports represent only a subset of your site visitors. However, you may want to consider other methods of collecting demographic data that don’t require you to change your privacy policy or share information with other websites about who is visiting your site.
Not sure how to proceed? Feel free to get in touch with TherapyEverywhere for guidance. Just call today, or fill out the contact form and click Send. We’re looking forward to helping you grow your practice!