Converting Law Firm Leads: What Metrics You Should be Tracking

In the realm of online marketing, you hear the term “conversion” a lot. A conversion is when a visitor to your website completes some action that you wanted them to complete.

Depending on your intentions, an actual conversion can be many different things. It could be someone adding their email address to your law firm’s mailing list. It could be someone scheduling an appointment for a consultation. It might be someone registering for a webinar that you are participating in.

The point is that you wanted them to do something, and they did it. You converted a visitor into a lead that you can nurture on a journey to becoming a client. 

When you hear the term “conversion,” it’s often part of the phrase “conversion rate.” This is the rate at which visitors convert into something more. For example, if you get 100 visitors and 10 of them convert, you’ve got a 10 percent conversion rate.

Your conversion rate is an important statistic to be aware of, but it doesn’t stop there. If you really want to know what is driving the returns your law practice sees from its marketing efforts, you need to break things down further. By keeping an eye on the following metrics you’ll be able to see exactly what is driving your conversions and where to make adjustments to get better results.

Total Conversion Rate

Your starting point is going to be the most general statistic, the overall conversion rate that your law firm is seeing. Conversion rate is the amount of visitors who have completed a goal on your website. The higher the conversion rate, the more successful your marketing campaigns.

This is easy to calculate. Simply define a time period and divide the total number of website or specific landing page visitors by the total number of conversions during that time period. The result will be your conversion rate expressed as a percentage.

Conversion rate is often tied to conversion rate optimization (CRO) which is marketing tactics like A/B testing to optimize a web page.

Campaign-Level Conversions

Taking it a step further, campaign-level conversions look at the conversion rate for specific marketing campaigns and goals. For example, your law firm might be running one campaign designed to get email list subscribers and another geared toward registering for a webinar.

It’s important to set up a tracking mechanism for each campaign separately. This is the only way to know which of your overall conversions are coming from individual campaigns. Depending on how detailed you want to get, you might even want to break down something like email conversions into individual traffic sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Ads, LinkedIn, etc.

In order to track conversions at the source level, legal marketers can add UTM tracking codes at the end of the campaign URLs. With UTM tracking parameters, you’ll be able to see, for example, what social media networks and what posts and campaigns are generating the most conversions.

A UTM code looks something like this:

• http://yourwebsite.com/your-post-title/?utm_source=facebook
• http://yourwebsite.com/your-post-title/?utm_source=google
• http://yourwebsite.com/your-post-title/?utm_source=linkedin

Click-Through Rates (CTR)

Your click-through rate is the rate at which people are clicking on a link or advertisement. It is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks an ad received by the total number of impressions (displays) for that ad. So, for example, if an ad is shown 1000 times and 20 people click on it, that ad would have a click-through rate of 2%.

You’ll need to keep track of this metric to fine tune your advertising. You should remove or rework ads with the lowest click-through rates while taking advantage of ads that have an exceptionally good CTR.

Cost Per Conversion

This metric is extremely important because it gives perspective to your conversion rates. Even if you have a high conversion rate, you can still end up in a negative ROI situation if the cost for those conversions is too high.

To find your cost per conversion, divide the money spent on a campaign during a certain time frame by the number of conversions that came from that campaign. To maximize your investment, you want to keep this number as low as possible while trying to keep the conversion rate as high as possible.

Leads to Close Ratio

Another important metric that helps bring context to conversion rates is the ratio of leads that turn into new clients for your law firm. A high number of conversions doesn’t mean anything if none of the new leads become revenue generating clients.

To determine your lead to close ratio, simply divide the total number of leads over a given time frame by the total number of clients created.

Cost Per Acquisition

Cost per acquisition (CPA) is the price you pay to acquire a new, paying client. It’s similar to conversion rates, but with CPA, you can directly measure the impact of marketing on revenue.

A very important statistic to track, and also easy to calculate. Just divide the total spend over a particular period by the total number of new clients acquired over that period. The result will be how much it costs your firm to get each new client.

Related: How to Measure the ROI of Your Law Firm’s Digital Marketing Campaigns

Takeaway

By keeping track of these metrics, law firms will have a better idea of which marketing tactics are the best at converting leads. This should enable firms to maximize what is working, and cut out what is not. With a bit of time, and a few adjustments, your law firm’s marketing will become a fine tuned and efficient lead generation engine.

At Good2bSocial, we have a full team of experienced digital marketing professionals who know the best ways to evaluate your online success. Our team covers a wide range of specialties from SEO to social media and beyond, and they know all the best ways to make sure you see the returns you want from your marketing dollar.

Contact us today to create a measurable digital marketing plan for your law firm!

Originally published on April 13, 2018.