Proving the ROI you’re getting from your website and digital marketing is paramount to making informed, profitable business decisions for law firms. You need to be able to justify that the money you’re spending on marketing is leading to new business.
Evaluating that ROI is most easily done with intelligent reporting and analytics that perform the calculations for you and help you visualize your digital marketing performance. But not all reporting will clearly point to your marketing spend and ROI. Specific reports and analytics are essential when it comes to proving your digital marketing profitability.
Website Traffic & Performance Reporting
If you have a law firm website and prospective clients are contacting you, you know that they’re finding you one way or another. But knowing exactly how they’re finding your website provides valuable information that you can act on.
For example, a reporting dashboard that shows your overall website traffic and performance provides insight into how visitors interact with your website in multiple ways.
A breakdown of web traffic by source tells you what sources bring the most visitors to your site, such as paid channels, social media, organic searches, and others — and indicates where to invest more resources to gain more traffic.
Trend reporting helps you spot year-over-year and year-to-date trends, identify common dips and spikes in web traffic, and allow you to plan annual marketing budgets and allocate resources more effectively. In addition, metrics showing the average amount of time spent on your site are an indicator of quality — generally, spending one minute or more on a web page indicates higher quality content that’s providing value to your visitors.
Performance metrics can help you assess your website’s overall health. Seek out reporting that shows your site’s page speed or load time, bounce rate, and error rate, which can all provide a quick view into areas to fix. The better your site performs, the better experience visitors have, and the more likely potential clients will click through your site and contact you.
Content Reporting
Your law firm’s web content helps position you as a knowledgeable, trustworthy source who educates potential clients with your legal expertise. Content that educates is also what helps you show up more in search results and stand out compared to your law firm competitors.
But how do you know what content is the “right” content? It’s true that content’s ROI is tough to measure and prove, but it’s not impossible. You can start understanding your content’s effectiveness with reporting that displays the traffic you get from your content, and then compare your content to distill the topics that are resonating most with visitors.
Does your reporting dashboard show that a blog post about how to hire the right lawyer drives a significant amount of traffic to your site consistently? That’s likely a topic to focus and on build more content around.
Marketing Services Reporting
Tracking the performance of your various marketing and advertising tactics can be tedious, so you want a report that shows the ROI of these activities at a glance.
For example, seeing the leads and conversion rates from your pay-per-click advertising tells you how much those ads cost and what they’re doing for you. Did you get at least one prospective client who clicked a sponsored ad on Google? If yes, then your marketing services likely paid for themselves. If not, then you might need to adjust your strategy.
The faster you see what’s working and what isn’t in a visual marketing services report, the faster you can turn activities off and on to maximize your investment, and the better you can build things like seasonal fluctuations into your next budget cycle.
Local Service Ads Reporting
Running Local Service Ads (LSAs) can be an effective way for local law firms to generate leads directly through phone calls or messages. There are several differences between pay-per-click ads and LSAs, but the key point is pay-per-click ads charge you every time someone clicks on your ad, and LSAs charge you only when someone becomes a lead.
As with any marketing activity, you should seek reporting that visualizes your Local Service Ads usage and lead trends by tracking cost per lead, monthly spend, budget, keywords, and more.
Lead status is an additional metric unique to LSAs — and it’s important to pay attention to. Local Service Ads offer the chance to dispute charges from leads that are illegitimate (such as robocalls or telemarketers), or that the law firm can’t service (due to location, service expertise, or other reasons), and be reimbursed by Google.
A clear, easy-to-read report helps you see the status of your LSA leads, so you can act quickly, get reimbursed, and reinvest that money elsewhere.
Is Your Marketing Working for You?
At the end of the day, you want to know if your marketing investments are worthwhile.
Reporting dashboards that present your marketing analytics in terms of ROI add clarity and context and help optimize your overall marketing strategy. Being empowered with this insight allows you to reallocate resources as needed, double down on what’s working, and reap the business benefits of your law firm’s marketing strategy more quickly.
Legalfit’s robust, easy-to-read dashboard gives you clear proof of your marketing ROI. With built-in intelligent reporting and analytics, law firms get the digital marketing performance insight they need to make strategic business decisions. See it in action!
