In the realm of online marketing, you hear the term “conversion” a lot. A conversion is when a visitor to your website completes some action that you wanted them to complete. This is the best way to determine if you are getting the return on investment (ROI) that is worth what you put in the budget. This is important if your law firm is in the market for an SEO agency.
Depending on your intentions, an actual conversion can be many things. It could be someone adding their email address to your law firm’s mailing list. It could be someone scheduling an appointment for a consultation. It might be someone registering for a webinar that you are participating in.
The point is that you wanted them to do something, and they did it. You converted a visitor into a lead that you can nurture on a journey to becoming a client.
When you hear the term “conversion,” it’s often part of the phrase “conversion rate.” This is the rate at which visitors convert into something more.
Total Conversion Rate
Your starting point is going to be the most general statistic, the overall conversion rate that your law firm is seeing. Conversion rate is the number of visitors who have completed a goal on your website. The higher the conversion rate, the more successful your marketing campaigns.
This is easy to calculate. Simply define a time period and divide the total number of websites or specific landing page visitors by the total number of conversions during that time period. The result will be your conversion rate expressed as a percentage.
Conversion rate is often tied to conversion rate optimization (CRO) which is marketing tactics like A/B testing to optimize a web page.
Campaign-Level Conversions
Taking it a step further, campaign-level conversions look at the conversion rate for specific marketing campaigns and goals. For example, your law firm might run one campaign designed to get email list subscribers, and another geared toward registering for a webinar.
It’s important to set up a tracking mechanism for each campaign separately. This is the only way to know which of your overall conversions are coming from individual campaigns. Depending on how detailed you want to get, you might even want to break down something like email conversions into individual traffic sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Ads, LinkedIn, etc.
In order to track conversions at the source level, legal marketers can add UTM tracking codes at the end of the campaign URLs. With UTM tracking parameters, you’ll be able to see, for example, what social media networks and what posts and campaigns are generating the most conversions.
Click-Through Rates (CTR)
Your click-through rate is the rate at which people are clicking on a link or advertisement. It is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks an ad received by the total number of impressions (displays) for that ad. So, for example, if an ad is shown 1000 times and 20 people click on it, that ad would have a click-through rate of 2%.
You’ll need to keep track of this metric to fine tune your advertising. You should remove or rework ads with the lowest click-through rates while taking advantage of ads that have an exceptionally good CTR.
Cost Per Conversion
This metric is extremely important because it gives perspective to your conversion rates. Even if you have a high conversion rate, you can still end up in a negative ROI situation if the cost for those conversions is too high.
To find your cost per conversion, divide the money spent on a campaign during a certain time frame by the number of conversions that came from that campaign. To maximize your investment, you want to keep this number as low as possible while trying to keep the conversion rate as high as possible.
Leads to Close Ratio
Another important metric that helps bring context to conversion rates is the ratio of leads that turn into new clients for your law firm. High numbers in conversion rates don’t amount to anything if none of the new leads become revenue-generating clients.
To determine your lead to close ratio, simply divide the total number of leads over a given time frame by the total number of clients created.
Cost Per Acquisition
Cost per acquisition (CPA) is the price you pay to gain a new, paying client
A very important statistic to track, and also easy to calculate. Just divide the total spent over a particular period by the total number of new clients gained over that period. The result will be how much it costs your firm to get each new client.
Takeaway
By keeping track of these metrics, law firms will have a better idea of which marketing tactics are the best at converting leads. This should enable firms to maximize what is working and cut out what is not. With a bit of time, and a few adjustments, your law firm’s marketing will become a fine-tuned and efficient lead generation engine.
Law firms with data-driven marketing plans can track and measure their ROI more effectively. Even if your firm attempts to base its strategic marketing decisions upon ROI information, there are still challenges in the calculation of that information.
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