Law Firm Marketing Agency
Conversions are a key indicator of marketing effectiveness. A “conversion” happens online when an individual you’re selling to or marketing to converts into a lead or client by performing a certain action, such as signing up for a free consultation via your website. But conversions must be carefully defined to really understand them—focus on the wrong area and you’ll be led astray.
Here’s a basic guide to conversions on a website, including what a marketing conversion is, what a conversion rate means, and how to track conversions for a lawyer website.
What is a conversion?
A conversion can be any “event” where you convert someone out of a pool of people and convince them to take a desired action.
A conversion rate calculates the percentage of site visitors who performed the desired action to evaluate which marketing, advertising, or sales tactics were the most effective in influencing that action. To find the conversion rate for a specific scenario, you divide the number of successes by the total number of interactions.
As an example, let’s say you’re selling lemonade. If 100 people walk by your booth and 10 people make a purchase, then your sales conversion rate is 10% (10/100). The same would be true on a website selling lemonade. If your website gets 100 online visitors and 10 of those 100 visitors make a purchase, your sales conversion rate is 10%.
Conversion can be related to a lot of things, so it’s critical for you to clearly define both the container and the action.
The container is a limited variable in which you’ll be tracking actions. It could be a specific page on your website like your Contact page or even a window of time, like weekends. The action is the specific action you are interested in observing and affecting, like the number of submissions to your Contact Us form or how many visits your page receives on weekends.
In the lemonade example, we were measuring conversions related to sales. But there are multiple angles through which we can understand conversions.
What if the action stays the same (making a lemonade sale) but the container changes?
We could measure your sales conversion rate by the day, by the week, or by the month. We could measure the sales conversion rates for new customers versus old customers. We could measure sales conversion rates based on how long a person spent on your website, or which source led them to your website.
What if the action changes but the container stays the same? For instance, we could measure conversion by email sign-ups instead of sales. If only one person out of 100 visitors signs up for your lemonade newsletter, then your conversion rate is 1%. We could slightly alter the text on a call to action—or run a split test with A/B testing—and see which earns a higher conversion rate.
Conversion rates matter because they tell you whether the right people are getting to your website at the right moment (when they need legal counsel) and whether your website copy and visuals are compelling enough to take action.
Expert tip: There are two basic ways to improve conversion: external traffic and on-site user experience.
Conversions that matter for legal websites
The truth is that some conversions matter more—but you may not know which conversions are the most important yet. (Remember, a conversion is made up of an action and a container.)
While every law firm is unique, here are some important actions that you can track:
- Web form submissions
- Phone calls to your law office
- Interaction with an on-site calculator tool
- Download of a file
The first step is to figure out what’s most important to your business. For instance, if you invested in creating a nifty resource for potential clients to download, then you should track those downloads and conversion rates carefully.
Remember, to calculate the conversion rate, you need to know the number of desired actions taken and the total number of visitors in the session. So if you wanted to measure phone calls to your law office, you also need to know the total number of online visitors.
You also need to set a clear limit on the time axis (i.e., weekly call volume, afternoon calls) and the source axis. Otherwise, a conversion rate may not deliver much insight.
Sophisticated conversion tracking tools can tell you exactly how many calls came from someone tapping the phone number on your website. But it’s important to get expert help with tracking conversions across a variety of marketing touchpoints. Your office phone number could be published elsewhere, like an online directory, and a skilled marketer can help you decipher this data with attribution modeling.
In your business, web form submissions might correlate with higher retention rates than phone calls.
Ultimately, the most important conversion rates for a lawyer website are unique to your business, but they should be closely correlated to your goals. For most attorneys, these goals are retention and visibility.
There are some benchmarks for conversion rates to help you understand how you compare with your competitors, although these numbers vary by industry. For example, the average conversion rate for Facebook Ads for legal services is 4.64%.
How do we track conversions?
Google Analytics (GA) is a leading tool for setting goals and tracking website conversions. You can set up “Goals” inside GA. Once properly configured, GA can generate reports on your target conversions.
Conversion goal configuration is a process that requires careful time and testing.
Make sure you are confident with the way the goals are configured before you move forward with any improvement plans. If you inherited a GA setup, tread carefully!
Conversion tracking is so much easier when your tech stack is set up to support tracking. It sounds simple, but it is way more straightforward to track your metrics when your website was built from scratch with tracking in mind. Get help from a developer now and your marketing team will thank you later.
Review and next steps
Your ability to convert visitors into clients will make or break your business.
Determine the metrics that matter most to your business. It could be web form submissions, phone calls, email signups, or something else. Then, choose an action and a container to track and examine for insights.
Work with a developer and a skilled marketer to track conversions and improve your rates. Omnizant is the design partner of choice for growth-oriented law firms across the country. Our team can help you understand and improve conversion rates for your law firm, with the support of a world-class website and expert content strategists.