Where do consumers go if they need something? Not too long ago, it was the Yellow Pages, but today, 93 percent of consumers look online to find a local business. Therefore, your law firm’s website is one of your most essential marketing tools for attracting new clients, which is why it is so vital to know exactly how your clients are coming to your website. By knowing what is or is not working as a method of generating new business, you can determine if your marketing strategies are worth the effort and expense.
As a lawyer, you probably do not have the time or resources to waste on ineffective marketing strategies. Thus, it is important to know how to accurately measure and track the efficacy of each of your advertising campaigns, so ineffective strategies can be eliminated or changed. However, because it can be challenging to understand the wealth of marketing data that is available to you, many lawyers accidentally look at the wrong web analytics and metrics to measure the success of their law firm’s marketing strategy.
Broughton Partners is committed to legal marketing as it should be, centered around a law firm’s needs and the benefit of a plaintiff. Broughton Partners achieves this by understanding the legal industry and the value of a law firm’s time.
The Basics of Web Analytics
Web analytics refers to the measurement, collection, reporting, and analysis of website data. Its purpose is to study user activity and behavior on your website, covering everything from:
- What your visitors are doing while on your webpage,
- Where they come from, and
- What content they viewed.
By collecting web analytics data, you will be able to identify the success or failure of your content and marketing strategy. By knowing what works and what does not work, you can drive your website in the right direction and improve user experience.
Although web analytics are often monitored by legal marketing firms, such as Broughton Partners, it is possible to track some of the relevant data on your own. To do this, an attorney must define their objectives for the website and visitor goals for the call-to-action. In addition, it is important to identify key performance indicators (which will be discussed in more detail later) to measure the success or failures for those objectives and calls-to-action. Since having a successful website is so essential to your firm’s success, here are some simple ways to understand and track your marketing results.
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You only need to follow the metrics that matter.
For most law firms, the primary objective of their marketing campaign is to help more clients and make more money. If attorneys consider metrics at all, they often make the mistake of only thinking about obvious metrics like organic rankings in Google, engagement with social media posts, e-mail list subscription rates, and the success of pay per click ad placements.
However, some of the most important metrics attorneys should be tracking are:
- Lead volume and quality
- Total number of new clients
- Lead-to-sale conversion rate
- Cost per lead and cost per acquisition
- Click-through rate
- Revenue
- Return on investment
By tracking your leads, you can better tailor your marketing strategy to the firm’s needs and improve performance. A lead-to-sale conversion rate is the percentage of people who visit your website, contact your firm for your services by either calling your office or submitting an online contact form, and then become clients. The lead-to-sale conversion rate is the percentage of leads who purchase legal services.
The click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who click through to your website after seeing your advertisement, snippet or call to action. If your CTR is rising or consistently strong, it tells you that your website, ads, or content is performing well, resonating with your target audience, relevant to what people are searching for in your field, your messaging is appealing to others, and people are interested in learning more about what your firm has to offer. A low CTR means that you should change up your marketing strategy because, in SEO, the CTR is an essential component of your Google quality score and ranking in their search results.
If a lot of people are clicking through to your website, but you are not getting a lot of conversions, it is easy to identify some common culprits by asking yourself the following questions:
- Is your website content easy and enjoyable to read?
- Is the information helpful and relevant to your ideal client?
- Is the design of your website attractive and easy to navigate?
- Is your contact information easy to find on every page of your site?
If your answer is no to any one of these four questions, then you may have identified the culprit of your low conversion rates. Recognizing the potential problem is the first step in improving your conversion rates.
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Remember that leads are not clients.
It is common to focus on building traffic, improving keyword rankings, and bringing in new leads. However, more traffic and improved visibility are worthless if it is not generating business. The problem is that some legal marketing agencies do not want to call their customers to cross-reference the conversion rate with the number of new clients to know whether their marketing strategy is generating more business for the law firm. Some legal marketing firms worry that if they did cross reference the data, it would highlight to their clients that their marketing strategy is not bringing in new clients, just more traffic to your website.
At Broughton Partners, we do not just care about bringing more traffic to your website or generating more leads, we also care about the lead-to-sale conversion ratio and delivering qualified retainers. We will ensure that potential plaintiffs meet the requirements for a lawsuit and are delivered to law firms with the necessary case documents needed to begin working with the plaintiff immediately. Our team of marketing specialists is engaging with potential plaintiffs from the moment they begin to search for information on their injuries.
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Evaluate your law firm’s marketing success using key performance indicators.
Key performance indicators are used in legal marketing to determine if the law firm’s website is reaching its targets effectively. There are two types of key performance indicators: quantitative and qualitative.
Quantitative indicators are measures of quantity, such as:
- Conversion rates from the website,
- The number of website visitors who fill out the online contact form or call the law firm, and
- The number of leads who become new clients.
Qualitative indicators measure people’s perceptions, judgments, or feelings. To understand how these qualitative indicators impact potential clients, an experienced data analyst or statistician can quantify the human experience for a more straightforward analysis.
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Track your return on investment.
It is expensive to market and advertise a law firm. To know whether the money you are spending is worth it, law firms must track their return on investment to ascertain whether the firm is making money and the practice is growing due to marketing efforts. However, many law firms make marketing decisions based on their feelings rather than on numbers.
Looking For Better Lawsuit Leads?
If you’re interested in receiving qualified retainers, you can quickly take action today by contacting Broughton Partners to attract new leads that are a great match for you.
Continue doing what you do best, and let your trusted legal marketing team execute a campaign that provides your practice with qualified lawsuit leads.
Call Broughton Partners today at (855) 463-1735, or contact us for your free consultation. Together we can ensure there is “No Claimant without a Claim.”