Google Analytics can be one of the most beneficial online applications an attorney can use to measure a website's success. You do don’t need to be an analytics expert to get a better understanding of your website with Google Analytics. A good place to start is by viewing the channels from which your traffic came to your site.
What are channels?
A channel is the path a user took to find your site. You can access your channels by going to Acquisition→All Traffic→Channels. There are 5 primary channels that you should be interested:
1. Paid Search—This will include all of your PPC or PPV ads.
2. Organic Search—These are visitors who found your site naturally by entering the right keywords into Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
3. Direct—A form of organic search, direct traffic are users who came to your site directly, without using a search engine. Direct traffic means that the user entered the URL of your website into your browser bar.
4. Referral—A very important segment, this channel represents everyone who found your site from another site, such as clicking on a link to your firm from a blog. If you have a lot of referral traffic, you know that many other sites out there think you’re a valuable resource and have chosen to link to your firm!
5. Social—These are all of your users coming from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Why are channels important?
With channels, you can evaluate which of your marketing strategies are successful or not. For example, if you segment all of your traffic by just paid search, you can see how many paid visitors chose to contact your firm. If you’re spending money to get traffic to your site, you’ll want to know if it’s leading to more signed cases!
Organic search is another great channel to monitor. If you do SEO for your law firm, you can get high numbers of visitors to your website for free. Take a look at our example of what a year of SEO can do for organic visitors:
Slow and steady growth is ideal for organic traffic.
Finally, your social channel can give you some great insight. You can see just how many people are driven to your site from social media. Within the Social channel, you can see which websites are giving you the most visitors, tend to lead to the most visitors contacting your firm, and more.
Many attorneys are successful with social media, whether it’s by publishing insightful blog posts about legal matters, or sharing funny stories from the legal space. Once you know how your social is doing is total traffic, you can work on ways to either improve what you’re doing, or keep up the solid work.