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, a client, etc.

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% 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.

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

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, Adwords, etc.

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 and 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

This statistic is similar to cost per conversion, but here we are talking about what it costs your law firm to acquire a new, paying client.

A very important statistic to track, and also very 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 cost your firm to get each new client.

By keeping track of these metrics, you’ll always have a good idea of which parts of your firm’s marketing efforts are working the best, and exactly how cost effective that marketing is. This should enable you 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 client generating effort.