Why Lawyers Should Care About Web Analytics

Most midsize and large firms with dedicated marketing staff embrace analytics to understand how prospective clients and recruits use the firm’s website. But that information doesn’t always filter through the rest of the firm. As a result, many attorneys do not understand how much information is already available to them, and how they might use it to shape their business development practices.

Google Analytics provides tools that can track and report on a website’s traffic and its user behavior, including:

• Where visitors live
• Which links they click
• Which pages they visit most
• How long they stay on each page
• Which page they land on
• The “bounce rate”: how often a visitor exits your site from the same page they land on without clicking around.
• Which channels — social media, direct visits, search engines or referrals — are sending the most traffic to your site.

What might this data tell you?

• If you have a high bounce rate, it may mean that users are visiting your site but not finding what they are looking for, or that your site is attracting irrelevant traffic or just isn’t nice to look at. It may be time to advocate for a redesign.
• You might learn that attorney bios — and not the firm’s list of recent wins — get the most attention (hint: we know this to be true!). Does your bio need to be stronger or rewritten with your target audience in mind?
• Your infographics and videos are shared much more often than, say, your written blog posts. In that case you may want to ditch the posts and focus your efforts on the collateral people are connecting with. 

Website analytics is a key tool in answering a central question: Are we reaching the people we want to reach?