Using Performance Metrics To Improve Client Acquisition in the Legal Industry

Tracking your law firm’s marketing performance metrics paints a picture of your campaigns to help refine your client acquisition efforts. You likely understand the whys of tracking—managing resources, dollars, ad spend, and client acquisition costs (CAC)—but how to track is where many law firms get stuck. That’s where ad agencies that specialize in the legal industry come in. Our metrics-driven marketers track key performance indicators (KPIs) at the top of the marketing funnel to determine what’s bringing in clients, and what isn’t, channel by channel.

With a few tweaks to how you monitor and measure campaigns, you can overcome the pain points of client acquisition to win more business through profitable marketing.

Understanding Marketing Performance Metrics

Setting up analytics for your law firm’s advertising channels takes time and effort, but doing it can be vital to managing client acquisition costs. The CAC encompasses all expenses associated with attracting new clients, including the pay-per-click (PPC) ad spend for your law firm, content creation efforts, and any outside resources, like partnerships with ad agencies that specialize in legal campaigns. Law firm stakeholders and partners may be especially interested in the CAC because it determines whether your marketing strategy is sustainable for long-term growth. 

Setting Legal Marketing Performance Goals

An acquisition strategy should measure analytics for each of the law firm’s advertising channels, including organic and paid social media, search engine marketing, and email campaigns. This begins by setting objectives for improving brand awareness and increasing your online presence to attract potential customers. To do this effectively, a law firm should set relevant, measurable KPIs directly related to client acquisition, such as website traffic volume, lead generation stats, and conversion rates, which can be tracked through Google Analytics and social and email platform insights. 

Metrics To Monitor for Client Acquisition

 A law firm must measure key marketing performance metrics for search engine rankings, click-through rates, returns on investments, and conversion rates across its digital advertising channels to inform future campaigns and increase advertising efficiencies. 

Here are a few of the metrics a law firm should monitor for optimal client acquisition advertising:

Search Engine Rankings

Monitoring and measuring organic traffic, page rank, and keyword rankings can tell you how visible your law firm’s services are to people searching for legal counsel. Optimizing your website for local search terms related to your practice areas—for example, ‘divorce lawyer near Raleigh’—can help increase performance metrics for keyword rankings and drive organic traffic to your law firm’s site. Likewise, when users land on optimized PPC ad landing pages, they will immediately see the solution they were looking for and a clear way to contact the firm.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

The Click-Through Rate—the number of people who click through from a link on one platform to another platform or landing page—is an essential KPI for PPC advertisements, emails, and website content that determines whether you’re engaging potential clients or if there’s a disconnect. When you identify content with a high CTR, you can understand what makes your audience tick and replicate these themes across channels to generate leads. Law firms can address low CTRs by optimizing organic and paid advertising with more compelling copy and headlines, better visuals, and proven calls to action. Tools for PPC ad extensions, audience segmentation, and email personalization can improve a law firm’s targeting and increase click-through rates. 

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

Pay-per-click ads offer effective targeting for a law firm to acquire specific clients and increase claims for a product liability litigation or class action lawsuit. Tracking ROAS for paid social campaigns offers insights into what resonates most with these target audiences. When you set up PPC ads and monitor them correctly, they can provide many quality leads for your firm. Create several ad versions to test various keywords and geographic terms and track the ROAS. Then reallocate your law firm’s PPC budget accordingly.

Website Traffic and User Behavior

Businesses need visitor volume to be profitable, but measuring website traffic alone isn’t enough. Analytics for bounce rate, pages per session, page views, and session duration indicate whether site visitors find value in your website, and whether your content is doing its job. If people quickly leave your site, you’ll see this reflected in your law firm’s website performance marketing metrics. By analyzing user behavior data on the links they click, videos watched, their interactions with forms, and pages visited, you can determine which content resonates and prioritize these marketing efforts.

Conversion Rates

Mastering conversion rates can transform clicks into legal clients. Monitoring this marketing performance metric tells you how effectively your campaigns entice visitors to take a desired action, like signing up for a newsletter, filling out a contact form, scheduling a consultation, or engaging with a chatbot. Ideas to improve conversion rates include optimizing calls to action, simplifying contact forms, increasing offers for consultations, and providing customer reviews and testimonials to build trust in your legal services. With tracking set up, you can test different approaches to see what drives the best results.

Client acquisition isn’t easy or automatic, but with the right marketing insights, you won’t waste time or resources on ineffective campaigns. If you’re ready to put data to work for you, contact Brandon today. Our ad agency knows the legal industry and which actionable insights will boost your firm’s online efforts and maximize your investments.