If your law firm has invested in advertising, you should be tracking the data it produces—but there’s so much of it that you might not know where to start, what to focus on, and what’s just filler. Find out the best law firm advertising data to track here.
Why is it Important to Track My Law Firm’s Advertising Data?
There are countless reasons why you should be tracking your firm’s advertising data. Essentially, it all boils down to ensuring you’re not wasting time, money, and effort on useless marketing practices. After all, if you don’t track and analyze something, you can’t improve it!
Here at Kirkpatrick Creative, we’re all about measuring data and refining the results we see to create the best advertising possible. It’s what we like to call advertising engineered to work. While there’s no “one-size-fits-all” rule for measurement, we’ve seen a lot of firms that waste far too much time and energy worrying about advertising metrics that are outdated or simply not that useful.
What’s the Best Advertising Data for Law Firms to Track?
It’s easy to feel inundated with all the data out there. Your firm probably already tracks quite a lot of metrics related to business development and case info, making it even more difficult to wrap your head around yet another set of data.
We’re here to clear up which advertising data is valuable to law firms—and some of these metrics may surprise you! Here are some of the most important advertising data sets that your law firm should be paying attention to.
Track Page View Sources, Not Just Total Page Views
Remember those old Javascript “hit counters” people used to put on their websites to show off how many visitors came to the page? They may have been neat twenty years ago, but they’re pretty much useless now. Why? Because, over the past two decades, total page view stats have devolved from impressive feats to vanity metrics.
Instead of tracking how many visitors you get to your firm’s website, track where those visitors are coming from and how they found you. That way, you can figure out the best places to invest your law firm’s advertising budget—and where you may be wasting your money.
For Example: If you discover that your blog posts get a lot of views but that your digital ads aren’t getting much interest, you can try investing your firm’s digital advertising budget into promoting your blogs instead. Or, you can start running A/B tests to try and narrow down why your ads aren’t performing as well as you’d like. The possibilities for improvement are endless—but first, you have to know where to focus your efforts, and that only comes from tracking the right data.
Track Visitor Behavior, Not Just Visitor Numbers
In a similar vein, go deeper than the numbers you see and track behavior. Studying your visitors’ actions, such as where they go on your firm’s website and how they interact with your ads, can tell you a lot. For the clearest picture possible, note and track your prospects’ engagement patterns at every touchpoint.
“You need to understand how relevant your web content is over time,” says data analyst Vondrae McCoy. “Multiple visits show that people keep coming back (which means they find the content valuable). This is an especially important data point for content management, such as blogs or your resource page.”
Keep in mind that it’s important to track the less-flattering metrics, too: things like bounce rate (visitors coming to one page and immediately leaving) and poor-performing content give insight that’s just as valuable as the more satisfying metrics like conversions.
“Look at the pages that most people commonly exit from and add something to keep them engaged,” suggests marketing executive John McDougall. “Adding links to and from blog posts and to multimedia content like video, infographics, and podcasts are great ways to keep people interested.”
For Example: Rather than just focusing on the views the various pages on your website get, concentrate on what people are doing when they get to each page. Are they looking at your About page first? What about looking for a blog, or searching for a specific term? Are they arriving from Google and bouncing, or are they discovering you through paid ads and exploring beyond your landing pages? Discover your website’s strongest assets. In most cases, you’ll want to invest in those rather than try to get a struggling page to reach the same level of performance.
Track Client Journeys, Not Just Client Results
There are a lot of different paths prospects take on their journey to retaining a lawyer, whether they found you in the Yellow Pages, got a recommendation from a friend, or clicked on an ad online. But unless you have some extremely advanced (and expensive!) tracking technology, it’s hard to find out where your clients are coming from and how they found you.
“With the right marketing strategies and proper tracking in place, you will…discover that many people do not come to your firm from one source alone,” explains marketing executive Mark Homer. “It might start with a referral, followed by a visit to your website where they might sign up for your newsletter, and you may remarket to them with a branded Facebook ad. Finally, the process ends with them calling you one month later.”
Every prospect varies greatly in how much research they do and how much time they take to decide. It could be weeks or even months before they finally schedule an appointment with your firm, so you may not realize that the client who called your main phone line was also the one who clicked on an ad a week ago. When performing intake for a new client, gathering detailed information about how they found you is essential for client journey analysis.
For Example: The ideal client looks very different across various areas of the law. Criminal defense clients (hopefully) aren’t likely to return over and over, family law clients could be with you for years, and business law could have you retaining clients for decades. Because of this, it’s important to not only identify who you want to target but to find out what makes those targets tick. That’s the key to drawing in more clients like them with the specific content and tactics that attracted converting clients in the past.
Start Tracking the Best Advertising Data for Your Law Firm
Now that you know the best advertising data for law firms to track, it’s time to integrate all that data together for even more insight. After a few months of successful tracking, gather all your data and analyze it against your firm’s goals.
Need help? You’re in the right place! At Kirkpatrick Creative, we track and measure everything we do, and we have a proven track record of helping law firms in Arkansas and Kentucky streamline their marketing efforts to be more successful and more efficient. It’s all part of our philosophy of creating advertising that’s engineered to work.
If you’re ready to start tracking the advertising data that matters most to your law firm, contact Kirkpatrick Creative today.
Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash