If someone asked you whether you had received a client from your website during the past 30 days, would you know the answer? Surprisingly, when we asked roughly 500 webinar participants this exact question, more than a quarter of them indicated they had no idea.
You invested in a website so it would help grow your business. To understand the return on your investment, you need to track who found you through your site. Even if your website serves primarily as a calling card and not a lead generation vehicle, you still should be monitoring a few key data points to make certain your site is performing properly.
Behind the scenes, your website is home to a vast repository of valuable visitor data that you can pick and choose from to learn more about your prospective clients and your site’s performance. Today let’s focus on the “bookend” data sets: Visitors and Conversions. Or, to put it differently, let’s understand the traffic coming to your site and the traffic coming from your site to you. If you track no other analytics but these two, you will still be in a decent position to assess your site’s ROI.
Visitors In
Understanding this data is simple enough. How many people visited your site in a given timeframe? If the number increases over time, that’s a good sign. If it stays flat or decreases, then your site may need some adjustments. If your site experiences a high volume of visitors, we recommend monitoring this data daily; with a lower volume of visitors, weekly or monthly may be all that’s necessary.
Also analyze the number of new visitors to your site compared to returning visitors. New visitors indicate that your search engine optimization and marketing tactics (your emails, brochures, etc.) are working at raising awareness and driving people to your site to learn more. Returning visitors indicate that the content on your site is “sticky” — visitors find it valuable.
If returning visitors increase to the detriment of new visitors, that means the number of potential new clients is decreasing, so you need to take more steps to drive traffic to your site.
Visitors Out
Google defines conversion as “the completion of an activity on your site, such as a registration or download that is important to the success of your business.” For many law firms, a conversion equates to putting the firm in direct contact with a prospective client through the visitor’s completion of an email contact form or a call to the phone number on the website. Clearly, the more conversions you have, the greater number of conversations you’ll have. In turn, this increases your opportunities to land new clients.
Your website’s conversion rate is easy to calculate: it’s the number of unique visitors to your site divided by the number of conversions that took place. Remember that phone calls count as conversions too, so be sure you ask and track the answer to “How did you find us?”
If your website’s goal focuses more on branding the firm than driving leads, you should simply monitor your conversion rate to make sure it remains steady. If your goal is to drive leads, then you should strive for a high conversion rate. An average conversion rate for a professional services firm is around 10 percent. A lower, or declining, rate may indicate any number of issues, including:
- A weak call to action
- Website content that doesn’t convince visitors you can solve their legal issue, or
- You are attracting the wrong kind of visitor to your site.
If you’re experiencing a drop in conversions, troubleshoot and test until you determine where the issue lies.
Tools and Reports
Your website host should be able to provide you with basic site reporting, including these two data points. Our customers access this data through the Client Service Center, but any website host should give you access to reports containing this information or a portal through which you can track it.
You also may want to consider using Google Analytics. Basic functionality is free, and it’s easy to implement for nontechnical people. Don’t be intimidated by the plethora of data Google provides. Each data point can help you more fully understand your site’s performance (in my next post, we’ll dig into a few more key metrics).
In the meantime, make it a point to measure the visitors coming to your site and those who leave your site to come to your office door. Only then will you be able to fully understand your return on investment.
