At Soulpepper Legal Marketing, we always ask ourselves, “what else can we do to maximize our client’s online marketing strategy?”

Every firm operates differently. Some of our clients have a sophisticated strategy which may include search engine optimization (SEO), Google Adwords, email marketing and/or social media marketing. Once these legal marketing strategies have been established and ads have gone live, it’s important for us to be able to share with our clients exactly how their strategy is performing 

This is where key performance indicators (KPIs) come in. Key performance indicators can let you know how your campaigns are performing, and what adjustments and revisions need to be made, in order to improve the strategy. Without them, even though the emails and calls might come in, they may not be the quality leads that you’re looking for.

What are Key Performance Indicators (KPI)?

Key performance indicators are measurable data that demonstrates how well a law firm is achieving their key business goals. Many law firms use KPIs on multiple fronts to evaluate their overall business development goals. 

You can think of a KPI as a measurable value that reports progress against a desired result. One of the most important aspects of KPIs is that they’re a form of communication and they abide by the same rules and best practices as other forms of communication. A KPI should be clear, concise and relevant information that should benefit your digital marketing strategy. 

Before you can determine what your key performance indicators are, it’s important to establish your marketing strategy by following these steps:

  • Pick what goals you want to achieve and when you’d like to accomplish them
  • Develop a marketing strategy that will help you reach that goal
  • Choose key performance indicators that can help with measuring the success of that goal

For a more comprehensive step by step guide on how to build and implement a digital marketing strategy, read our article: 7 Steps to Grow Your Law Firm

Effective Digital Marketing KPIs for Law Firms

It’s important to understand that every law firm’s KPIs will differ depending on how they establish their marketing strategy and how they operate as a firm. More isn’t always better when it comes to measuring legal marketing statistics and metrics. If you are tracking too many variables, it can be difficult to put them all together and can be overwhelming. 

Although there is no perfect set of KPIs, there are a few common sets of KPIs that will give you a very good understanding and picture of how well your marketing efforts are paying off.

Performance Metrics

Digital Marketing has a key advantage over traditional marketing and that is the ability to accurately track performance back to the source. In days gone by, you were likely in the dark over whether your billboard or your magazine ad contributed to an increase in clients walking through the door. But, with digital channels we can often track leads back to their original exposure to your firm. This helps you make decisions on which advertising platforms to invest in for maximum impact. 

The wealth of data available on your campaigns can be overwhelming, so it’s important to break it down to what you really want to know. When tracking your performance, the metrics you track should help answer these questions:

  • How many potential leads find your site through each channel?
  • What type of content, ad copy or posts are grabbing the most attention?
  • What platforms are converting the most?
  • Which platforms are worth investing in financially?

To do this we need to look at reach, engagement and conversions. 

Reach metrics include:

  • Reach
  • Impressions
  • Sessions
  • Views

These metrics will show you how many eyeballs you’re getting on your content. If these numbers are too low, you might want to consider cross-posting with other accounts to gain more exposure to your profiles, or investing in advertising to increase how many people see your content. 

Engagement metrics include:

  • Likes
  • Comments
  • Shares
  • Link Clicks 

These metrics will show you how popular or effective your content is. If you’re posting multiple times a week but getting low engagement numbers, you may want to re-address your content strategy. Testing different topics, styles of voice or imagery could all help increase how much your audience engages with you. 

It can be hard, especially when starting out, to set benchmarks for these metrics, so relative metrics are helpful. 

Click-through rate % (CTR) = Number of clicks / Number of impressions

This is helpful as it gives you an engagement metric that is proportionate to your reach so you can confidently compare this number against other campaigns and track progress over time.

When you are paying for advertising, it is especially important to track your conversion metrics. 

Conversion metrics are generally customized to your business and some may need to be tracked on your website or offline. These are based on what action you want your audience to complete so might include:

  • Form fills
  • Phone calls
  • Newsletter sign-ups
  • Webinar/event registrations

These metrics will tell you how many leads you’ve generated from the marketing iniative via different mediums.  

Once again, relative metrics will help you in establishing benchmarks for this performance. 

Conversion rate % = Number of Conversions / Number of Clicks

This is helpful as it gives you a conversion metric that is proportionate to your engagement, for comparative and ongoing tracking. 

Landing Pages Conversion Rates

A landing page is a standalone web page, which is created specifically for marketing or advertising campaigns. This landing page is where visitors visit after they click on a link from an email, or an advertisement from Google, Bing, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or similar pages on other websites. 

Unlike web pages, landing pages are designed with a focus or goal in mind, known as a call to action (CTA). This focus or goal makes landing pages the best option in increasing the conversion rates of a marketing campaign and to lower the cost of acquiring a lead or potential client.

While you can direct your potential prospects to your website’s homepage (which may include potential distractions to detract from the goal), a landing page is super focused in meeting the goal. Having fewer links on your landing page will increase conversion and there’s fewer ‘clickables’ that’ll take your visitors away from the call to action. Because of this, it’s why expert marketing agencies will always use a dedicated landing page as the destination to draw traffic. 

When tracking your landing page conversion rates, the metrics you track should help answer these questions:

  • Are the visitors that visit your landing page doing what you want them to do?
  • Are the visitors that visit your landing page interacting with your call to action?
  • Is the message on your landing page clear and concise
  • Is the landing page meeting your goals from your marketing campaign?

Conversion rate = Number of visitors to your page / Number of visitors who completed the call to action (eg. filled out a form, called your office) 

Reviewing the Conversion Rate of your landing page allows you to track performance of your page over time. It also allows you to compare different versions of your pages when A/B testing to see which performs better. 

Other Metrics to Tie into Your Law Firm’s KPIs

It’s important to focus on metrics that directly improve your key performance indicators. Here are a few tips on how you can tie metrics to your law firm’s KPIs. 

Metrics for Converting Leads

Once you have generated a large amount of leads, you need a good strategy in order to convert them into clients. When it comes to measuring clients as one of your law firms KPIs, you need to consider conversion rates, cost of client acquisition and revenue that’s ‘won’. 

Sales conversion rate is an indicator of how well your firm signs a new client from interested leads. By following these conversions through your sales process, it allows you to see which marketing practices and campaigns are most effective in turning visitors into leads and then leads into clients. 

It can also provide insight into where your marketing efforts are coming from and which are coming up short. 

Customer Acquisition Cost

In legal marketing, there are potential clients and actual paying clients. The Customer Acquisition Cost tells you how much you’re spending in order to gain an actual customer. The customer acquisition cost will tell you everything that you spent to attract a target client.

There’s always a risk to under-budget by not measuring your data well. You will need to know how much you will need to spend in order to generate the most conversions. It’s ideal to evaluate your customer acquisition cost after every digital marketing campaign and adjust them accordingly. 

To calculate your customer acquisition cost, you need to know how many clients you converted from each channel and how much you spent on that channel.

Customer acquisition cost (CPA) = Spend / Converted Clients

Average Time of Conversion

This KPI should tell you how long it takes for your lead to convert into an actual paying client. Although it may seem trivial, tracking the time will show how effective or ineffective your sales process is. Time is money after all. If it’s taking too long for you to convert your leads, it means you’re losing valuable time that you could be spending on investing in more quality leads or even running your law firm. As well, if the process takes too long, you may lose your engagement with the potential client and they end up moving to another competitor as a result. 

In order to manage your time and track the leads that are coming in, it’s important to create a legal client acquisition strategy for your law firm. You can reach more here: Lead Management Best Practices

When tracking your average time of conversion, the metrics you track should help answer these questions:

  • Are you being time efficient?
  • Are you catching and holding your target audience’s attention and engagement?
  • Are your follow-ups timely and effective?
  • How effective is your legal lead management strategy?

Like some help with tracking your Law Firm’s KPIs?

Tracking your KPIs will give you a clear, actionable insight that’ll help you build an effective digital marketing strategy that will give you a leading edge over your competitors.

At Soulpepper Legal Marketing, we offer a wide array of digital marketing services catered and tailored towards lawyers and law firms. If you’d like to see how we can help your law firm grow online, give us a call or get in touch via our contact form.

As Premier Google Partners, we are boosted by our access to a wealth of resources, tools and insights from our legal firm network. Our digital agency offers everything from web design to analytics and reporting services to everything discussed in this article. We are all that your brand needs to stand out online and increase your triple bottom line.