Top 7 things Law Firms should track in Google Analytics

Avoid getting overwhelmed by looking at too much web analytics data and focus instead on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will matter to your law firm. You can even customize your Google analytics dashboard to include these KPI’s and get a quick daily or weekly views of how your marketing efforts are performing. Here are our top five KPI’s for law firms.

1. Tracking Types of Leads

If you aren’t tracking phone calls with a tool like Mongoose Metrics, form submissions via the amount of thank you page visits, considering adding live chat with a tool like Ngage Live (which is highly focused on law firms), email sign ups and ebook downloads you won’t have a full picture of where your leads are coming from. Make sure that you have tracking set up each type of lead.

2. Types of Web Traffic

Much like a well-balanced diet a good mix of the type of visitors to your website will also indicate a healthy marketing effort. This KPI pie chart would show the percentage of visitors coming from various sources such as organic search, direct, PPC, email, display ads or social media.

3. Tracking Trends in Quality Visits with Average Pageviews

Not all visits are created equal in an online world. A visitor that bounces by leaving the website after just looking at a single page, is not a quality visit. If you are modifying or creating new content for your website this KPI that compares average page views against website visits is a way to indicate improvements on your website relevancy as you improve it. Having a blog with quality content broken out into categories by your different practice area experts is a great way to deepen engagement. You can highlight blog posts that people might enjoy when looking at practice area pages. Conversely you can make links from blog posts about specific practice areas into the main service level pages.

4. Bounce Rate and Exit Rate

When somebody lands on an individual page right from the search engines and then never visits another page, that is considered a bounce. You need to look at the pages that have the highest bounce rates and figure out how to make them more engaging. The same is true for exit rates. You need to look at the pages that people most commonly exit from and add something to keep them engaged. Again, adding links to and from blog posts and to multimedia content like video, infographics and podcasts are great ways to keep people interested.

5. Total Number of Leads

Marketing for law firms is typically based on generating leads. This KPI tracks the total number of leads and should be broken out by the various channels with an associated conversion rate. The insight from this KPI will help decide if increasing your attention (or spending) on a particular marketing channel will create more traffic and leads.

6. Overall Website Conversion Rate

If you’re actively doing conversion optimization projects for your website, an overall conversion rate KPI will help report if your changes are improving sales. Even if you are not doing conversion rate optimization, tracking upward or downward trends should be monitored as this affects your lead volume. It’s also not uncommon to see changes in various marketing channels such as PPC, where sudden drops or increases in the number of leads occurs without any changes made by you. But don’t forget, many businesses have seasonal aspects to their marketing efforts, so don’t overreact to a dropping rate without considering other external factors.

7. Cost per Lead

If you have an unlimited marketing budget maybe you don’t care how much each lead is costing you, but understanding the right marketing channel to focus on is using your marketing team’s time wisely. Google Analytics will even automatically link this data from their Google AdWords PPC to report the cost per lead as a summary report or by an individual campaign. And with a little customization you can even assign a specific lead value for organic search or other channels such as social media.

Now that you have a few focus key performance indicators to review in analytics, make sure someone at your law firm and or a subcontractor is assigned to check on these things at least on a monthly basis. Great websites are made through constant iteration based on analyzing critical data.