Why law firms can’t live without web analytics

Any good lawyer would not enter a courtroom without being fully prepared to plead their case. Armed with case details and maybe even special research, this information will make you more effective in winning the argument. In web marketing, there’s a similar example for being an effective marketing professional, and web analytics is an important tool to help you decide if your marketing spending is not being wasted. Web analytics is possible from tracking code that is placed on each page of the website and is accumulated into online reports. This is a totally accepted and legal practice in the United States, and addresses both visitor privacy issues and a website owner’s need to know. Web analytics will help you improve your law firm’s website content and the Return on Investment (ROI) of your marketing budget.

There are many options for installing Web analytic tools. Google provides a free tool to any organization or if you are looking for more advanced reports, companies such as Adobe Ominture, offer robust and enterprise solutions that can cost upwards to thousands of dollars a month. Google’s free option is typically selected by many small and medium sized businesses and has a surprising rich set of features for a free tool. It even allows customization as you advance your understanding and needs. The only drawback we have heard is a concern that Google “will have too much data on our business”, but considering how many people are using it, you would be in a small minority of people that succumb to that fear.

Google’s Chief Business Officer, Nikesh Arora puts things into perspective by saying:

Over 10 million marketers and websites globally use Google Analytics to measure the effectiveness of their online presence in real time.

Check out Marketing Land for more info on how widespread the use of Google Analytics is.

If you are spending money with them on PPC advertising, it’s also easy to overcome this objection because not having this tool will severely limit your marketing efforts.

Just keep in mind that Google Analytics also has limits. It is not as good at tracking beyond the last 30 days of activity. HubSpot is a tool that goes deeper by using cookies, which help them track if the visitor came a year ago from Facebook and then converted by filling out a free legal consultation form today, just after a Google organic search. This type of attribution tracking gives you an even deeper sense of how many mixed sources your sales are really coming from. So I suggest using both Google Analytics and HubSpot together.

Discovering answers on website marketing performance doesn’t happen right away, it takes time to collect and analyze the information after it’s installed. Also, the default dashboard summary is a good starting point, but you will need to drill down into reports to further understand the issues. Before spending too much time looking through the data, establish your key performance indicators (KPIs) as they will represent your business objectives. Having the KPI’s defined will help you focus on reports that matter to you the most. Typical examples of KPI’s are quality website visits, total web leads, or cost per leads. The KPI’s can then become part of your web analytics dashboard and provide a quick and vital report of how your marketing is performing.

When operating properly, web analytics will establish KPIs that will help report, advise and decide the right marketing strategies. Having this valuable data available instantly to your business will help win the argument if your marketing efforts are paying off, so how could you live without web analytics?

Photo credit: Vince Welter / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND