Running a Social Media Report through Google Analytics can tell you a lot about the impact your social efforts are having on your site.

Social media marketing has become one of the most popular and cost-effective ways for law firms to promote their services and attract new clients. While social media sites offer powerful marketing potential, measuring the impact of these sites on client conversion can be difficult. Firm leaders who are struggling with these metrics can use Google Analytic’s Social Media Report, which offers powerful tools to understand the strengths and weaknesses of social media marketing programs.

Social Media Report basics

Running a social media campaign requires spending a great deal of time interacting with potential clients online. A felony defense lawyer serving Denver might spend upwards of 20 hours per week interacting with other attorneys and the general public via Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles. The Social Media Report will help to gauge whether or not spending so much time on social media marketing is worthwhile by reporting on visits, social actions, goal completions, goal conversion rates and goal values. Most firm leaders should pay particular attention to the overall value of social media-driven conversions.

Using the Social Media Report to drive change

Law firm leaders can use the results of the Social Media Report to make needed adjustment to marketing campaigns. For instance, the report might reveal that the majority of individuals navigating to the firm’s website from a networking site quickly navigate away from the site. This might mean that links to the website need to be refined so that social media followers can find the information that they need quickly. Adjusting marketing based on social flow is a sure-fire way to ensure the relevancy of a social marketing campaign.

The final blog post in this series will explore the browser report, which can help firm leaders pinpoint some of the most basic problems with their marketing programs.

The PPC keywords report can help you learn a lot about the effectiveness of your PPC campaign.

Reaching potential clients with cost-effective marketing strategies can be a struggle for even the most experienced law firm leaders. Many firm executives have turned to online marketing strategies in an effort to attract new clients. Among the most popular Internet-based marketing techniques is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Google Analytics provides special tools so that firm leaders can understand whether or not PPC campaigns offer a high return on investment.

Analyzing PPC campaign success

Law firms often choose to conduct PPC marketing campaigns because they involve a relatively low cost burden. If a group of Dayton bankruptcy attorneys decides to adopt a PPC strategy, they will only be charged for running their ads on a given website when someone actually clicks on the in-text or banner ad and navigates to their firm’s website.

While the advantages of such campaigns may seem obvious, it’s still important to run a PPC Keyword Report on a regular basis to decide if this type of advertising is truly worth the investment. Spending money on ad clicks that rarely result in conversions may not be terribly expensive but is still a waste of marketing dollars.

Understand Google’s PPC analysis tools

The Google Analytics PPC Keywords Report is designed to help business leaders determine whether or not PPC campaigns are resulting in high-quality website traffic. The PPC Keywords Report measures page visits, conversions per click, cost per conversion and goal completion.

After analyzing the PPC Keywords Report, firm leaders can decide whether PPC advertising is worth the investment and whether their chosen keywords are effective in attracting new clients. Minor tweaks or complete campaign overhauls can be made by evaluating this data.

The next blog in this series will cover Google’s Social Media Report. This report will help firm leaders evaluate the socially driven aspects of their marketing plans and integrate these strategies with link building, PPC advertising and content marketing.

The Link Analysis Report can teach you a lot about the effectiveness of your website’s links.

Law firm leaders who are eager to use the latest technologies to attract new clients have by and large turned to Internet-based marketing. In order to understand whether or not their online efforts are producing real results, leaders use a variety of Google Analytics tools. Among the most powerful of these tools is the Link Analysis Report, which evaluates whether link-building strategies are helping a firm meet its marketing goals.

Understanding the basics of link analysis

The Link Analysis Report is designed to help marketers understand whether or not their link-building efforts are effective in drawing new traffic to a website. An immigration attorney in St Petersburg might team up with other immigrant-centric websites to build a link network. To decide whether or not such efforts are worthwhile, the attorney can create a custom Link Analysis Report. This report will provide information about whether given sites are driving a high number of referrals to the attorney’s individual website.

A closer look at the Link Analysis Report

Law firm leaders who run a Link Analysis Report will be provided with seven separate columns of information. This report includes information regarding the link source, landing page, total number of visits, goal completions, bounces, number of pages visited and the number of new visits. When evaluating the information on this report, remember to pay careful attention to linking patterns.

It’s essential to understand both if a given site is driving traffic and the particular content on that site that is driving traffic. For instance, firm leaders might find that video and audio content are driving more traffic than written content. They should then prioritize building links with sites that offer rich audio and visual content to visitors. The next blog in this series will explore the Pay Per Click (PPC) Keywords Report, which can often shed light on the effectiveness of broader linking strategies.

Keyword Analysis Reports can reveal a great deal about a law firm’s website

Google Analytics reports are powerful tools when it comes to analyzing the success of online marketing campaigns. For many executives, content analysis is the first step in evaluating marketing success. The next logical step in the content analysis process is the Keyword Analysis Report. This report can help firm leaders determine if search engine optimization efforts are working as planned.

Understanding Keyword Analysis Report basics

When using the Keyword Analysis Report, it’s important to carefully evaluate the information included under all three report tabs. The first tab contains bare-bones information about unique visitors, goal conversion rate, goal completion and average page load time. These basic statistics can be used to understand a page’s general viewership. Most firm leaders will be able to decide if a marketing campaign must be adjusted by reviewing this first page.

The second report tab, called the Engagement tab, helps firm leaders understand the effectiveness of each separate web page. Information about unique page views, page visits, the average amount of time spent on a page, bounce rates, exit rates and goal conversion rates is listed under this tab. A personal injury firm could use these statistics to decide if a page on Pradaxa lawsuits effectively holds the attention of potential clients, or if that page would be better used discussing another subject.

Evaluating client conversion rates

The third tab in the Keyword Analysis Report provides firm leaders with information about whether or not a marketing campaign is effective in turning website visitors into clients. Called the Revenue tab, this tab provides information about three essential keyword measures: revenue, per-visit value and e-commerce conversion rate. Carefully analyzing these statistics allows firm leaders to understand whether a given campaign offers a high return on investment.

Interested in what else you can learn through Google Analytics? The Link Analysis Report is our next topic up for discussion in this series! This report provides valuable information about whether a firm’s link-building strategies are effective in attracting new clients.

Setting up an RSS feed on your blog can help you gain loyal followers.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is one of the most overlooked elements of online marketing. The purpose of RSS feeds is to deliver fresh and updated content directly to subscribers; in this sense, they are similar to email newsletters with the added advantage that they are not as obtrusive. RSS feeds are neat and convenient, for they save subscribers precious time by alerting them about what’s new in terms of what they are interested in.

Cultivating a strong RSS following is in the best interest of legal professionals. RSS subscribers are loyal acolytes, and in many cases they are easier to attract than social media followers. Here are some ways for attorneys and law firms to attract RSS followers.

Understanding RSS

RSS technology has been around since the days of the Netscape browser, but not everyone has caught on to the concept. In fact, lawyers who are not familiar with the concept should subscribe to other feeds by looking for the orange RSS icon and observing how it integrates with their browser or email program.

Placing an attractive RSS button on the header of a blog along with a description of its benefits can go a long way in getting readers to subscribe. The description must be written in simple terms and can be accompanied by a friendly text hyperlink inviting users to subscribe via email.

Selling RSS on blogs and social media

Legal practitioners should take advantage of every opportunity to remind followers about their RSS feed. A family attorney answering questions about legal separation in Media, for example, can write a clarifying blog post on that topic and remind readers that they can stay up-to-date on such issues with RSS. Sharing that blog post on different social networks will extend its reach.

Once the RSS option has been added to website, lawyers should stick to an editorial calendar and step up their publishing efforts as RSS followers enjoy being notified about new content.

Content marketing strategies are designed to increase a law firm’s profile and to drive new business to the firm. In order to understand the success of their marketing campaigns, most firm leaders pay close attention to content marketing metrics. It can be easy to get caught up in looking at how often content is consumed or shared, but it’s important to keep a focus on the business end of content marketing too.

Sales metrics offers a key way to measure whether or not a content marketing campaign has increased a firm’s overall business. This metric is intrinsically tied to lead generation metrics, which measures how many content viewers become clients. Keeping good track of lead generation is a great way to understand the overall value of sales related to a content marketing campaign.

Leading businesses in every industry use sales metrics to track marketing success. One of the easiest ways to do so is simply to look at online sales driven by a given piece of content. A divorce attorney in Tucson, for example, might use an infographic to sell an e-book about the divorce process. The sales of the e-book will provide a partial measure of the success of the infographic.

For most attorneys, tracking direct online sales will be only a small piece of the sales metrics puzzle. It’s essential to track how many new clients spent money with the firm after viewing a given piece of content. This can be accomplished by asking clients how they found the firm or engaging them in casual conversation about a firm’s online presence. Remember that client retention is also a key measure of content marketing success. Keep comprehensive sales metrics for all clients so that it’s possible to understand if those who are also social networking followers spend more money than those clients who are not connected to the firm’s online profiles.

Business leaders who employ content marketing strategies use a variety of metrics to measure the success of each content campaign. One of the most important metrics used by executives is sharing metrics, which is the measure of how many times a given piece of content was shared by others within their social or professional networks. Tracking this metric is a good way to understand the type of content that consumers will share. As such, this measure can help firm leaders shape their content marketing strategies to allow for optimal success.

Measuring sharing metrics is a matter of looking at shares on social networking sites and setting up analytic tools to track how many times a given piece of content has been shared, liked, given a +1, retweeted, pinned or otherwise reposted. Using measurement tools for key content platforms is the first step in gathering useful sharing metrics.

Of course, it’s also important to track types of sharing that don’t occur on social networking sites. Imagine that a group of commercial litigation attorneys in Pittsburgh send out a weekly newsletter about changes in commercial law. The attorneys will need to track how many times their emails are forwarded in order to understand whether or not the newsletter is valuable in terms of sharing metrics. This is a particularly important measure for firms that want to craft a strong reputation within the legal community. One lawyers forwarding another legal professional an email or newsletter can be a sign that the content is seen as valuable and reliable.

Remember that content should drive action. It’s important to analyze sharing metrics in light of lead generation metrics. Many firm leaders get caught up in how many followers they have on social networking sites. While the overall number of followers can be important, remember to focus on how those followers are using content and whether or not content is driving followers to become clients.

As you develop your law firm’s website, the first thing you begin to notice is that you’re getting hits, or visits. Visits to your website are a sign that your SEO practices are working; however, unless those hits turn into leads, they are not effective. The next step in your web marketing efforts is to transform bounces, or hits that don’t generate new client connections, into leads.

Why do visitors bounce?

Visitors might decide to look elsewhere for services offered on your site for any one of a number of reasons: They may not be able to connect their needs with your services, they may be confused by your layout, they may be put off by an unprofessional presentation or they may simply not appreciate your aesthetic.

As an Arkansas debt collection lawyer or other legal professional, you may not have a background in marketing. You don’t need one: Simply try using these tools and you’ll improve your site’s lead generation potential in no time.

How to reduce bounce rates

Utilize these tips to get and keep customers interested in your services:

• Use quantifiable claims: By headlining numerical data supporting your business, you can convince people that your services are necessary. Common claims used by law firms include statements such as, “90 percent of cases ended in court wins or settlements” or “98 percent client satisfaction rate.”
• Employ A/B and multivariate testing: There are certain analytic tools like Google Analytics that allow you to compare different versions of your landing pages to determine which ones generate more click-throughs and leads. These tools can also help you analyze click patterns to determine where to place important buttons that will help customers connect with you.
• Incorporate benefits into the copy and aesthetic: Visitors want to know why they’re at your website. They clicked through because you were at the top of the list, but once they’re there, they want a clear sense of who you are and what you have to offer.

While getting hits is an important part of a successful website, it is only the beginning. By using these methods, you can improve your lead generation and client retention and reduce bounce rates, making your firm’s website the best tool it can be.