What is the best way to use web analytics for legal marketing?
Are there specifics that should be identified when looking at your web analytics? Thoughts on how to use web analytics would be appreciated
Good Answers (4)
William R.
Co-Author & General Manager at The College Unicorn
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Using web analytics in the legal arena is not much different than any other business service.
It's important to keep in mind what you want to track. Is it one page, or the general performance of the site? Are you tracking a specific marketing effort?
Depending on what analytics package you're using (Google, ClickTracks, Omniture, WebTrends, etc) there could be unique reporting functionality so it's difficult to get specific.
In general you'll want to follow this model:
1. Define your goals - Configure Your Reports
-What page do you want the visitors to find?
-What keywords do you suspect they will search to find that page?
-What do you want them to do?
-What are you doing that you want to track?
2. Organize a "prime the pump" effort
(you'll need data before you can begin tracking or adjusting, so you'll have to plan some type of marketing effort to make this happen)
3. Establish a baseline
-On the first round of tracking, where are we at?
-Where did the visitors go, what did they do
-What's the bounce rate
4. Monitor and Adjust
-Use the data to make changes in marketing efforts, the structure or design of your web presence.
5. Repeat
For a general overview of what some of the basic reports mean I've included a link below
Links:
Rachel,
I agree with William's answer. To give you some more particulars, I suggest looking at these stats:
Page Bounce Rate
Top Exit Pages
Top Traffic Sources
Top Keywords
Top Content (aka Most Viewed Pages)
Conversion Data
These report names correspond with Google Analytics and may be named differently in your analytics program.
These reports will tell you how visitors find your site, where they leave, what they look at, and what actions they take (ie. complete contact form).
Links:
John M.
Vice President at Formic Media, Inc.
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Rachel,
I agree with both of the responses, and would like to add an additional layer.
Once you've identified what your goals are (tracking a specific page, conversion action(s) or just the website in general), and set up the appropriate tracking, you'll want to monitor the success of your different marketing efforts.
For example, being a "local" business that most likely specializes in a certain geographic region (I'm assuming here that the law firm takes on local clients), you're going to want to understand how well your Google Place page is performing. Is it driving traffic? Are these visitors contacting the firm through your conversion action (most likely an online contact form)? Maybe you're running a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising campaign, you can monitor this data through analytics as well (or through the Google AdWords interface). If the firm is participating in social media, which site are driving the most traffic? Conversions?
It's really all about establishing certain goals based on your marketing efforts. Google Analytics, and other platforms, allow you to track specific links from your marketing campaigns. Tracking links from email newsletters, paid advertising, social media, etc. is all possible, and will play a huge role in determining what works, and what doesn't. If you aren't monitoring these things (visits, conversions, time on site, avg. pages/visit, bounce rate, etc) than you have no idea which traffic source has the highest value.
Another piece of advice, make sure to filter our all of your internal IP addresses, as you don't want to skew the data by folks in your office hitting the website.
I work with a ton of small business, law firms even, and we help set up/guide these firms in how to read their analytics package so they can understand what the data is saying.
Links:
Andy X.
Inbound Marketing Experts President, website development for business growth, social media, SEO
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All of the answers you've received here are excellent and should give you a lot of information as described. We take a slightly different approach that incorporates what's been outlined here, but we've found that what most businesses want is a better understanding of the ROI of their initiatives. Many company Presidents and CEO's that I speak with lately are frustrated that they've spent a lot of money on a website and there's been little or no return measured in new clients or revenue growth. With that in mind, what we do is set up closed loop marketing analytics which integrate each action into a marketing funnel so that you can see when the relationship started, what actions they took over time so that you can 'score' the prospect, and when they became a client. This approach allows you to quickly and effectively establish what's working and what's not and helps you determine what future actions you might want to take.
All of that said, we've never worked with a law firm so I'm not clear how this might translate to your space. As William suggested, I don't think it should be much different than any other business, but that would take some discovery to understand more fully.
Hope this helps.
