Online Marketing & Metrics That Matter

Search engines are becoming increasingly sophisticated, but their goal continues to be delivering the best search results for each individual searcher. To deliver that best answer, search results are becoming more and more personalized, based on hundreds of factors, including the searcher’s location, search history, other sites they’ve visited, and social media activity.

Having access to that data and using it to analyze your site’s traffic is powerful. Knowing how many and what type of visitors your website is attracting, where they’ve come from, and evaluating their engagement once they’re on your site enables you to improve your online marketing strategy.  Here are the most important metrics you should be tracking for your online marketing activities:

AUDIENCE METRICS

• Demographics: Where are most of your visitors located?  Are they in your local area or do they live thousands of miles away?  Consumers are more likely to engage a local attorney, so if the majority of your traffic isn’t from your target market, you should reevaluate your local search strategy.  You can also elect to track data on gender and age.
• Engagement: The number of pageviews and the length of time a visitor stays on your website are important signals as to how engaging your site is.  Low numbers may mean that your law firm’s website is attracting the wrong type visitor.  It could also mean that your site is not laid out correctly or that the content isn’t appealing enough to inspire visitors to want to learn more. If a majority of website visitors leave within the first 10 seconds of reaching your site, one or more of these issues need to be addressed.
• Bounce Rate: This metric denotes the percentage of visitors who only visit one page on your site then leave. A high bounce rate means the site is failing to entice visitors to stay and learn more about your practice and the services you offer.

ACQUISITION METRICS

• Traffic: All traffic to your website will come from one of four sources:
  • Organic – resulting from search results
  • Paid –from Adwords, Facebook ads, etc.
  • Direct – email marketing, offline marketing
  • Referral – from other websites

Tracking and analyzing how visitors arrive at your website will give you valuable insight into which of your marketing activities is most successful – and which campaigns need to be improved.

• Social: Social media activity is becoming increasingly important as a marketing channel. Sharing your content on social media has the potential to drive traffic to your website and that traffic has the potential to generate conversions and revenue. So it’s important to measure the impact and analyze what effect your social media activity has on your website engagement.

BEHAVIORAL METRICS

• Landing Pages: This metric tracks which pages your visitors first landed on when visiting your site.
• Content Drilldown: What content on your site is most popular? What was the bounce rate, page views, and conversion rate for those pages?
• Behavior Flow: This report enables you to trace the path visitors take to navigate your website, from the first page they land on to each successive page.

Tracking behavioral metrics is an excellent way to determine what specific content keeps your visitors engaged and what content causes them to exit your site.

CONVERSION

• Conversion Rate: In simplest terms, conversion rate is the percentage of total visitors to your firm’s website who took a particular action or completed a specific goal. Such goals can include opting in to your newsletters, subscribing to your blog, registering for a seminar, or filling out the “Contact Us” form on your website.  You can set up individual conversion tracking for each action.  In general, a conversion rate of 1% – 3% is deemed acceptable, but this number will vary by type of conversion.
• Goal Completions – By analyzing goal completion data, you’ll discover which locations were best for conversions and which sources of traffic resulted in the highest conversion rate, thus giving you insight into which marketing channels are most successful and which require additional work.

The most commonly used tool for measuring these metrics is Google Analytics. The tool is free to use and is incredibly robust – so robust, that it’s easy to be overwhelmed.  But don’t let that stop you.  At the very least, everyone who has a website should have an Analytics account set up and the code installed on their website to track basic metrics.

Understanding where your web traffic is coming from and what people are doing on your site is essential for improving your visitors’ experience and developing a more successful online marketing strategy.

Rita Chaires

Director, Web and Online Marketing Services
American Academy of Estate Planning Attorneys, Inc.
9444 Balboa Avenue, Suite 300
San Diego, California 92123
Phone: (858) 453-2128
www.aaepa.com