The Metrics Lawyers Should Track & One to Ignore

Digital Marketing

No matter what your firm is currently pursuing marketing-wise, tracking and interpreting the campaign data is critical. It’s how you gauge success, plan for the future, and decide what didn’t work. Without data metrics attached to your digital efforts, the comprehensive approach you implemented will stay broad – and you’ll miss things.

Alas, prioritizing and weighing the significance of data gets murky for a bustling law firm. Not every lead is quality or even qualified.

What’s a lawyer to do?

Take a look at the marketing metrics lawyers should track and what you shouldn’t care so much about.

Organic Ranking & Map Position

The map pack is a group of local businesses that appear close to the top of Google search listings. Local Service Ads (LSAs) and other paid advertisements are higher, but ads they remain. Users recognize them and overwhelmingly still favor the map pack, followed by organic. This study, for instance, shows 68% prefer the pack, 27% prefer organic, and only 10% trust paid search results.

SERP still represents the best way to put eyes on your firm and present a ‘trusted’ snapshot of your law practice in a fast-paced world.

People want to find things quickly, and then they want to know what others think. This is what makes longtail keyword content and reviews important factors. But they are one of the many factors in a regularly updated system of SEO best practices.

Positions are open to change; however, they are definitely an important metric to track. Even with its variability, rankings lead to increased calls and more cases. Just keep in mind that it’s a gradual and shifting landscape.

Leads & Origin

These are your interested parties, and they are essential. They are, in fact, vital. Your potential clients are often classified in any number of ways and given designations like qualified, unqualified, inbound, or outbound leads.

You know you need to generate new potential clients, engage them, and count them. But it would help if you also asked where your leads came from. Knowing how someone ended up in your office or why they called is a sure-fire way to make concrete assessments about what’s producing vs. what’s not.

Tracking numbers and other web data collection tools offer a lot of insight. But they are not ‘set them and forget them’ features. They need to be regularly evaluated and approached with consideration for user behavior and intention.

Goal & Conversion Rates

At first glance, you may think conversion rates and meeting goals should be the most important thing. After all, they represent the user taking action, such as making contact or downloading a form. Case closed and job well done, right? Not so fast.

Like any lawyer will explain, you can be a great salesperson for your law firm, and people can download pdf forms all day, but if the phones aren’t ringing and no one can find your office, it won’t mean much.

Conversion and Goal Completion Figures

Having strong tracking conversion and goal completion figures is definitely a reason to celebrate. Further, they are also a decent barometer for your content’s effectiveness. A low conversion rate means not many people are doing what you want them to while on-site, and a high one reveals what is going well.

The Importance of Data Metrics

When you consider that according to Wordstream, conversion rate optimization has an average 223% ROI ($2.23 for every dollar spent), having metrics around user actions and working to improve them cannot be undervalued. If you see numbers dip, it may be wise to invest some time into page testing, updating CTAs, and improving page speed to boost your rates.

Mobile Traffic

Everyone is always on their phone. Well, a little over half to be specific. Statista reports, in the first quarter of 2021, mobile accounted for 54.8% of global web traffic, consistently hovering around 50% since 2017.

If more than half of the people looking for a lawyer online are using their phone to do so, you should think about how your site either makes their user experience better or worse. Are images formatted correctly and in the frame? Is a giant wall of text the first thing someone sees on your homepage? Where is your contact info?

Every Second Counts

Generally, you only have about 90 seconds before a user makes a subconscious judgment about your environment or product. That being said, evaluating mobile usage can help you avoid the conclusion that your site is outdated and hard to use.

Page Speed

In June 2021, Google began the rollout of its latest algorithm update, which will include new ranking signals dubbed “Core Web Vitals” (CWVs). These CWVs will focus on page experience when most users abandon a site because it doesn’t load in 3 seconds or less.

Tools to Test Page Speed

There are some quality tools available to test your website’s current page speed to see where you stack up. Here are a few:

• https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
• https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse
• https://gtmetrix.com/

If your site isn’t “in the green” for all the factors Google cares about, that’s ok. There are some straightforward development approaches to address lag.

Cost Per Case

Perhaps the most important marketing metric for lawyers is their cost per case. This represents the actual price you pay to bring that case in. This figure tells you a lot. It’s not enough to say your marketing effort resulted in 1,000 cases if your marketing spend didn’t match what the cases brought in.

Calculating Cost Per Case

Cost per case is determined by dividing all the costs associates with bringing in more cases by the number of cases in that period. If your firm spent $1,000 on marketing in 2020 and acquired 1,000 cases, then your firm’s cost per case acquisition is $1.00.

Assessing Client Lifetime Value

If your firm is monitoring cost per case acquisition and has the same mindset as the other metrics you care about, it delivers a good indication of your overall ROI. From there, you can even go a step further and start assessing client lifetime value in your marketing funnel, where you are “their lawyer.”

While this should always be the goal, the bonus of this lets you utilize their positive experience (reviews and referrals) into your ongoing marketing plan.

A Metric to Ignore – Bounce Rate

Attorney inboxes across the country are flooded with emails from SEOs telling them their bounce rate is too high and that it’s an indicator of – something. But in reality, lawyers shouldn’t worry too much about an ostensibly high bounce rate (90ish%) because people exit sites for too many reasons to quantify.

There’s always a reason to tweak your content and SEO plans, but a high bounce rate isn’t the clear-cut sign that everything needs to be replaced like most online marketers would lead you to believe. You should worry more about it being the right page for the user with the right content.

So Many Metrics. What Now?

Tracking marketing metrics is crucial, and it would be impossible to strategize for your firm without them. That being said, there are many of them, and some will be more important to your practice than others.

In essence, you should be aware of them and their role, but a comprehensive outlook that appreciates your goals is always the best way to grow.

Ready to talk with Postali about legal marketing done right? Call today for a free one-on-one chat.