Measuring Conversion for Law Firms

Finding and Understanding the Results from Your Adwords Campaign



Conversion: Getting people on your website to hire you. : Getting people on your website to hire you.

If you have ever pursued marketing through Adwords (or PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, or Search Engine Marketing, etc) you very likely have had an account rep talking about conversion. Conversion, or the process of turning clicks on your website into actual business for your law firm, is the main goal of most marketing efforts. However, there is a big difference between getting a client from your website and how conversion is measured by your marketing company.

The Glowing Report from Your Marketing Company (after a dry month)

The problem may seem obvious to anyone who has not gotten a new client for 30 days and then had a report emailed to them from their marketing company detailing all the calls and emails their website generated in that same 30-day period. If you pay FindLaw to handle your PPC, you’re probably pretty used to them lying to you at this point and so you delete the report and hope for better next month. You know that the large volume of calls and emails that they recorded are a combination of spam, people asking for directions, existing clients and sales reps, but hey, what’s the harm, right? It’s just the typical nature of a marketing company, to over-inflate the results they are generating…but it can actually be much more dangerous than that. Sorry for doing like a “teaser” here but I have to explain two other things before I can explain why it’s dangerous.

Your Marketing Person Can’t Tell You if You’re Successful

The whole model of the marketing company telling the lawyer how great their website is doing has always bothered me. I have access to some reports that tell me how many people came to the site… Want to know if there were more people there on Monday and Tuesday then on Wednesday and Thursday? Great. I got that. But daily traffic numbers, and almost every other measure I can pull out of an automated system, are only useful if we know what happened offline. Conversion happens offline. So unless you’re supplementing the information from your website with what’s happening in real life, it’s just a lot of charts and graphs.

We are Not selling T-shirts here (this is NOT e-commerce)

I use this sentence a lot, not because lawyers think they are selling t-shirts, but because most of the systems we use online were designed for e-commerce. E-commerce creates great data, because conversion happens online. Legal websites create horrible data because conversion happens offline.

T-shirt sellers don't deal with crappy leads like:

“the guy is hurt, but he didn’t get medical treatment, so he doesn’t really have a case” or



“hey, they certainly want to get divorced, but do not have any money to pay me” or



“yes, this guy got a DWI and would really love to have a lawyer, but he’s asking about what’s available ‘pro bono’.

When conversion happens online (like if you sell t-shirts, or other e-commerce), there are only two groups of people: those bought a shirt, and those who did not. From a data, standpoint, that’s an incredible thing, because we can learn about what drives the group of people who bought shirts and do more of that.

Unfortunately, we will never have clear data like that in the legal world. Someone that types “criminal defense lawyer” is reasonably just as likely to hire you than someone who types “criminal defense attorney”. But, just for the sake of argument, let’s say you found out, the search with the word "lawyer" WAS slightly more likely to convert than the search with the word "attorney", what would you realistically do with that information? Would you stop marketing to the "attorney" search, as if your next good prospective client might not be typing in either one right now?

If we were selling t-shirts, we might learn that people who google “cotton poly blend” are way more likely to buy than people who simply search “t-shirt” and THAT is information a marketing company could act on. But for law firms we will never have that type of data.

This isn’t just a little white lie – Optimizing for Conversion (the “Problem” I was alluding to earlier)

So beyond the basic problem of your marketing company giving you conversion statistics in a month that you didn’t actually convert anyone, this could be affecting the way that your Ads are positioned and the keywords you bid on. There is a setting in Adwords called “Optimize for Conversion” and almost every agent I’ve ever spoken to from Google has suggested I turn it on. I always explain to them that I do not want decisions being made based on what the system considers a conversion, because it might just be a spam email or a sales call.

This is really the biggest issue I see with lazy and thoughtless marketing companies running Adwords. It’s just too easy to leave things on default and then congratulate yourself when the tracking system says you got a bunch of calls and emails. But again, what’s even worse is that the system might be “learning” from those conversions to try to make them happen more often. But the system doesn’t know anything about who really is and who is not converting, so it’s very likely just making changes to your Adwords randomly. This is not a good approach.

FindLaw’s PPC Reports

I have only seen two different client’s FindLaw reports, but both have been cause for major concern. They do not have keywords, or bids, or really any info. They are a graph that shows visitors. I also remember seeing several things mislabeled, which lead me to believe these were hand-made reports as opposed to something the system generated…more than a little fishy. If your reports say that your monthly spend is your DAILY spend, please email me or call me. I have seen that “mistake” twice now and I think there might be something a little dishonest happening with their reports.

How SHOULD I Be Tracking my PPC Campaign?

The most meaningful tracking you can do is probably CallRail, which is a system that allows you to track each time your website generates a call. It will attribute that call to a source, so you can see if it’s Google Paid, Google Organic, a referral from a directory or some other source. You can also go back into the system after you speak to someone and mark the call as a lead. It’s not perfect, but it is infinitely better than counting raw sales calls and spam emails as conversions.

Questions about Adwords or Conversion? Ready to Move Away from FindLaw’s Adwords Program?

I can help you understand your options for moving forward and can even try to translate the data that you are receiving for your current campaign. I typically set up Adwords as a three-month program, we talk about my fees, and a budget for your ads. I build and monitor and communicate with you for the three months at which time we re-evaluate if it’s working and what it takes to keep on working. There are situations where we can set the budget and leave it alone. There are also cases where weekly monitoring is needed. I try to make a program that works for your unique marketing goals. Contact me to learn more.