The Leading Law Firm Web Analytics Tools

Your website is the face of your firm. It not only creates a first impression, but also provides important marketing and is often a key step for prospects searching for legal assistance. You want to make sure that you’re leaving the best first impression possible, and also doing what you can to lead prospective clients down that path to retaining your services. To understand if you’re accomplishing these things, we suggest using at least one web analytics tool for your law firm.

The best way to obtain analytics is through third-party tools. There are a lot of them out there, though. How to most effectively measure what is working (and what isn’t) is a question we get often from clients.

Here’s our take on the best tools that can help you understand and improve your law firm’s web presence:

1. Google Analytics – No surprise here. With Google being the most important search engine in the world, their analytics platform provides the bulk of information that savvy web marketers need. From understanding visitors’ behavior to which pages perform and which are lacking, Google Analytics will help you understand how to improve content and provides key insights for tactical optimization of your website. 

2. Clicky – Many digital marketers rank this tool almost as highly as Google Analytics. Often, people see Clicky as the next step up from Google Analytics in website measurement. That’s because Clicky offers information in real time (not from a previous period, like the day prior, that GA offers). It can be important to note spikes from particular sources – for example, if your firm has a speaker at a conference, you might want to see what is happening from an hourly standpoint during the day of that event. 

3. Open Web Analytics – This is an open source platform that, according to their website, “provides website owners and developers with easy ways to add web analytics to their sites using simple Javascript, PHP, or REST based APIs. OWA also comes with built-in support for tracking websites made with popular content management frameworks such as WordPress and MediaWiki.” Since many websites in the legal industry are created in WordPress, this built-in support is very helpful. Bonus: because of it’s open source framework, it’s free. 

4. Clicktale – A tool that enhances existing analytics with behavioral reporting, Clicktale can help marketers to add context to the interactions behind the data. Their focus is on analytics for overall digital experiences, so they offer several solutions that can help with your website, blog, mobile user experiences, and more. Though they don’t have free offerings, they do have several premium platforms that can be helpful to firms of any size. 

5. Crazy Egg – A company from KISSmetrics co-owner Neil Patel, this site offers several visual ways to understand what’s happening on your website. Their “map” offerings – such as a heat map, to see where people clicked on your site – can help you to understand what people are gravitating toward and what they aren’t. You can also see how far down the page people are scrolling on your site, the number of clicks on each element of your pages, and more. They offer a 30 day free trial, so you have nothing to lose by trying it out!

6. SEMRush – Marketed as an all-in-one toolkit for digital marketing professionals, this tool helps companies to manage SEO, paid traffic, social media, and more. Use it to perform day-to-day tasks like pulling keywords and integrating findings into content, as well as bigger initiatives like market research, SEO audits, and comprehensive digital reports. 

Takeaway

When it comes to law firm web analytics tools, legal marketers tend to only think of Google Analytics.  The truth is, there are many other tools with more robust capabilities that can be used instead of or in conjunction with GA.  If you need some assistance setting up or further evaluating any of the analytics tools listed above, let us know!

Are you using any other tools to understand and optimize your website? Any favorites we should add to this list? Let us know in the comments section below as we would love to hear from you.