Introduction to Digital Marketing Analytics for Law Firms – The National Law Review

Analytics is the science behind the art of digital marketing and is an invaluable part of any law firm’s marketing strategy.  Digital analytics can provide a wealth of information that not only tells you how effective your digital channels are, but if analyzed properly, can provide fact-based information that can help identify prospect behavior and needs.  Legal marketers must be familiar with the proper web analytics tools to be able to capture and interpret the performance of their website but must also be able to go beyond their website to properly assess the performance and return of their digital marketing efforts. In this article we discuss  how law firms can merge web analytics and digital marketing analytics to improve the overall performance of their online marketing efforts.

Why Marketing Analytics Matter

To benefit from your marketing analytics, you must understand why they are important.  Analytics enables you to measure, analyze, and manage the performance of your digital marketing strategy in real time.  Legal marketers can leverage analytics to pinpoint problems and uncover areas of opportunity and potential growth. Knowing which digital marketing analytics are important to your bottom line will help you stay focused on the metrics that matter.

Why You Need to Measure Your Efforts

Your analytics should always include a measurement of your efforts. This is for one simple reason, sustainability. Essentially, you want to ensure that your marketing efforts are contributing to the growth of your firm and producing a positive return on investment (ROI).  By learning to create custom reports and glean actionable insights that actually matter to your firm, you can begin to make data-driven decisions and strengthen your marketing strategy.  At any point during your campaign, you can apply the data to tweak or remove tactics that are not producing the desired return.  By effectively leveraging data intelligence, you will build a more insightful and effective marketing plan.  The good news is that the process of tracking digital marketing has become very straightforward.  Your chosen marketing tool probably has analytics built-in, helping you measure your efforts.

Web Analytics Can Measure Those Efforts

Supplementing the built-in analytics with your marketing analytics is simple. Numerous websites offer web analytics tools, with Google Analytics being among the most famous and most popular. The most attractive reason to use Google Analytics is that it’s free!  Google Analytics will show you the number of views and visits to your website, where those visitors come from and what pages they are looking at. This information enables you to easily see how your website is performing in real-time. Google Analytics will even allow you to organize and track website data across all devices – smart phones, tablets, computers and even smart TVs.  To learn how to create a custom Google Analytics report, checkout this blog post.

Using KPIs

Evaluation of your efforts will come down to KPIs or Key Performance Indicators. You choose these criteria as measurements to demonstrate how effective your marketing strategies are at achieving your key business objectives. As such, they let you see if you are meeting your business goals, whether they are brand awareness or lead generation. Your marketing plan should include the KPIs that most closely meet your specific business objectives. Consider the following KPIs, as they are the most important for optimizing your campaigns:

• Qualifies leads: This KPI lets you confirm that your campaign is generating qualified leads for your law firm
• Cost Per Conversion: This metric allows you to evaluate how much you pay for each conversion to help you confirm that your marketing expenses are worth the expenditure.
• Online Marketing Return on Investment: It should go without saying that your return on investment will let you know whether your efforts are worth it.
• Form Conversion Rates: Form conversion rates help you determine how well your content marketing drives people to your law firm’s website and encourages them to take action. You can even use the combination of data from the forms and the form conversion rates to develop strategies that boost conversions.
• Reach and share of voice on Social Media: Don’t forget to consider the conversions that you get from social media as one of your KPIs. This lets you determine which social media network is the best for you so that you can concentrate your efforts for the best ROI.

Takeaway

As a legal marketer, you must understand the impact of your marketing efforts through the effective use of digital marketing analytics and web analytics.  Applying data intelligence is invaluable to the process of improving and optimizing your marketing strategy.