Are you looking to improve how you market your law firm online? It may be time to consider tracking conversions. Tracking conversions on a law firm website can help you determine if you are spending your marketing budget as efficiently as possible and give you measurable results that help you develop more succinct marketing strategies and goals as your law firm website grows.
What Are Website Conversions?
Website conversions are measurable actions taken by users when they visit a site. Examples include form completions, downloads, and phone calls. Conversions can also be actions like clicking on an image, link, or button.
No matter how many digital marketing strategies you implement for your law firm’s website, you are not collecting data and analyzing results comprehensively if you are not tracking conversions. As a result, you could be wasting precious marketing dollars on ineffective strategies.
Tracking your website’s conversion actions can give you insights into your website’s performance and help you understand how visitors are interacting with your web pages. You may consider experimenting with different conversions to determine which features perform the best.
Methods for Tracking Conversions on a Law Firm Website
According to Google Ads, you need to start by choosing the tracking method to track conversions. You may want to see how your advertising methods are helping another client contact you. You may also be interested in learning about the behaviors of your previous clients.
Keep in mind you do not need to choose just one tracking method. By using Google Analytics, you have the option of setting up multiple conversion actions. You could be analyzing data regarding potential clients, referred clients, pending clients, existing clients, rejected clients, or lost clients. No matter how you choose to track those client types, a data funnel will improve customer relations.
Ultimately, the methods you choose in terms of conversion tracking depend on your Law Firm goals and website functionality. Some of the most common conversion tracking methods include the following:
Contact Forms
Within Google Analytics, you can set up an editable contact form. On a contact form, you might include a “Submit” button that would be tracked every time it was clicked. Users can be redirected to a “Thank You” page after submitting the form if you choose to use destination pages. When working with long conversions, consider using events as goals. That way, you can track conversion based on user action.
Downloadables
Examples of downloadable content include white papers and PDFs. They can be great resources for potential clients looking to expand their knowledge about a particular legal topic. White papers, in particular, can help law firms build online authority. They are also a primary way to collect email addresses. Attorneys that serve individual plaintiffs, like personal injury victims, could present a downloadable brochure or instruction sheet for actions to take after an accident.
Email Link Clicks
When you track email link clicks, you can first tell whether the email content was interesting enough for the reader to open it, read it, and want to read or learn more. You can also gauge the interactions of past clients versus potential clients. Most marketing emails are sent to past clients and individuals that have provided their email addresses to you for downloadable content or another service.
Live Chat Requests
Live chat conversions can be integrated with Google Analytics. Live chat metrics tracked include initiated chats and qualified leads. Initiated chats refer to how many live chats have been initiated, while qualified leads refer to the number of initiated chats that become leads for the law firm. Analyzing initiated chat data can help you understand if the chatbox catches visitors’ eyes. In contrast, qualified leads can help you determine any issues with the chat dialogue.
A significant number of law firms utilize live chat services. Most of these services are externally staffed, so lawyers need to ensure the operators are friendly and aware of how to qualify case leads.
Phone Calls
Call tracking allows you to display different phone numbers for other users to track different target marketing channels. Say you want to track calls from a specific ad campaign. You would use a unique phone number on the advertisements and a tracking program to inform you when the campaign resulted in a phone call.
There are two ways to track calls from your website. You can use one number for all website interactions, or you can use multiple numbers for different referral sources. The pool of numbers is more effective as you can determine where the conversion originated from.
If you are unsure where to start, CallRail is a popular phone call tracking service that integrates with Google Analytics.
Why Should Law Firms Track Conversions?
Without conversion tracking in place, you will not be able to make data-driven decisions for your campaign strategies. Conversion tracking also helps you identify top-performing keywords and determine the strength of your ad copy and website content. With the conversion data, you can highlight areas on your website that need improvement and take steps to optimize them for better user performance.
Setting up conversion tracking can seem challenging at risk, but there are significant benefits to tracking law firms should consider. Conversion tracking can become a crucial component in determining which keywords, ads, and campaigns influence actions on your website. You can also use the data you collect to learn how to better compete in competitive practice areas or cities.
Digital Marketing: Next Steps
Tracking conversions on a law firm website provides empirical data to help attorneys understand which marketing strategies and sources work best for their goals. The data may also help you make decisions on changing or updating your website to improve conversion rates.
No matter how you look at the data, you can use it to push you in the right direction for lead generation. However, if the idea of tracking conversions is overwhelming or just outside your wheelhouse, you may want to consider outsourcing your website marketing needs.
Annette Choti graduated from law school 20 years ago, and is now the CEO & Owner of Law Quill, a legal digital marketing agency focused on small and solo law firms. Law Quill is the only legal digital marketing agency that provides unique, SEO-optimized content, pre-packaged content, and courses for lawyers to learn SEO themselves through Law Quill Academy. Annette used to do theatre and professional comedy, which is not so different from the legal field if we are all being honest. Annette can be found on LinkedIn or at annette@lawquill.com.
