The Importance of Reviewing and Tracking Website Performance on Google Analytics

How do you know where you are going, if you have no idea where you’ve been?

When you launch a new digital marketing strategy for your law firm, it’s important to know what kind of impact your efforts are making. Digital analytics can deliver a wealth of information about the effectiveness of your program as well as give you the tools to help you make better business decisions in the future.

Any law firm that cares about its online presence should also be familiar with Google Analytics. This tool allows your firm to track and analyze every detail of its website’s activity. Here is why using Google Analytics is vital, and some of the ways you can leverage different indicators to track your performance.

Why Legal Marketing Analytics Matter

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service that can help you shape the success strategy of your business. All you need to do to use the service is to set up your account and copy a simple piece of code onto your website. The system will immediately begin collecting valuable data.

The data you get from Google Analytics allows you to measure, analyze, and manage the performance of your online marketing efforts in real-time. In fact, there’s so much data available that it might be overwhelming if you don’t know how to customize it to meet your needs.

What Your Law Firm Can Learn from Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a vital digital marketing tool, but one that is seriously underused by most law firms. It allows you to measure the results of specific advertising campaigns, as well as the performance of your website and SEO efforts. Here are some of the things your firm can learn from Google Analytics:

1. Get to Know Your Visitors

When it comes to making business decisions, your firm likely wants to optimize the client experience so that it is as rewarding as possible. You’ll have a better chance of success if you can form a detailed picture of your site’s typical visitors and what they are doing while visiting your site. Some of the information you can extract includes:

• Demographics— When you know what gender and age groups the largest sections of your audience belong to, you can customize your site to make it more useful to them.
• Language and location— For the purposes of local search, where are most of your site’s visitors located? Do any require bilingual services?
• Device breakdown— If a large portion of your site’s visitors are using mobile devices, this underscores the necessity for making all of your online content mobile-friendly.

2. Identify Your Best Content

Google Analytics can show you which pages on your website get the most visits. You can drill down to the average time spent on each page, and the bounce rate for a page, so that you can optimize it for better engagement and create similar content that will bring in more visitors. Likewise, you can figure out what content doesn’t resonate with your audience so that you can focus your marketing dollars more effectively.

3. It Helps Your Site’s SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an essential part of any online marketing strategy and something that can drive business growth. If your law firm can achieve more organic (free) traffic to its site, it will also get more new clients.

Google Analytics can help your SEO efforts in a variety of ways. Some of the key performance indicators (KPIs) that help with SEO include:

• Website Traffic— You can monitor raw numbers and trends in website traffic, such as the total number of impressions and clicks, as well as the time spent on a page.
• Bounce Rates— Not every visit is a quality one. If a visitor comes to a page and then immediately leaves, you might want to revisit your content to make it more engaging and ensure that what is on the page matches the title and meta description.
• Top Search Terms— What are the top search terms that bring visitors to your website? Are these terms that convert to clients? If so, you can build more content around them.

4. Track Top Referral Sources

If your firm is getting its traffic and conversions primarily from one or two sources, you probably want to identify those and leverage them for additional business. Through Google Analytics, you can determine the top sources of your traffic in several ways:

• Traffic Channels— Google Analytics can tell you the percentage of your traffic that comes from organic search, direct, referral, display, and social media sources. If you are paying for traffic, such as with Pay Per Click (PPC) ads, you can use this data to determine your Cost Per Lead.
• Specific Sources— Beyond a traffic channel, such as social media, you can also pinpoint specific sources of traffic. For example, if you get a lot of traffic from Facebook or Twitter, it might be worth stepping up your social media marketing efforts on those platforms.

5. Analyze Audience Behavior

When a potential client reaches your site, what do they do next? Fortunately, this doesn’t have to be a mystery. Google Analytics can track each visitor’s behavior and give you insight into areas that you are doing well and some opportunities for improvement. Some KPIs include:

• Exit Pages— We already discussed Bounce Rates, but Exit Pages tell you the pages that were the last ones visited before a person left your site.
• Sequence Segments— You can also analyze the path that visitors take through your site to see which pages they visit and measure conversions based on those paths.
• Return Visit Behavior— Google Analytics can track the behavior of returning visitors to your site and tell you if these visits lead to higher or lower conversion rates.

Does Your Law Firm Need Help With Digital Marketing?

Most attorneys didn’t go into business or start their firm to build websites or concern themselves with online marketing campaigns. You should focus on the practice of law and serving the needs of your clients, while trusting an experienced legal marketing agency to work on improving your digital footprint, improving your online reputation and driving prospective clients to your firm.

Sundown Legal Marketing has years of experience in the digital legal marketing space and specializes in helping lawyers grow their firms through increased online visibility. Contact us today at (800) 864-1764 or reach us online for a free website and marketing evaluation.