Data. It’s how companies develop smart marketing strategies. At LawLytics, we have repeatedly highlighted the importance of using data to generate leads. But we aren’t the only one. According to Forbes, being data-driven is likely your best path to success, and it cites statistics where data-driven companies are:
- Twenty-three times (23x) more likely to top their competitors in customer acquisition
- Nineteen times (19x) more likely to stay profitable; and
- Seven times (7x) more likely to retain customers.
McKinsey & Company, a growth, marketing, and sales research company, concurs that data is critical. McKinsey & Company states that the:
“Use of customer analytics appears to have an immense impact on corporate performance…”
Their research suggests that those who use customer analytics:
- Double their profits and marketing earnings
- Generate 50% more sales than their competitors
- Increase their return on investment (ROI) by 25%
- Outperform the market, generally
As a law business, these statistics apply to you as well. So, if you haven’t been tracking data, now is the time to start. Data allows you to understand who your visitors are. Data allows you to discover how users find your website. Data allows you to monitor user behavior on your website. Data creates opportunities to develop marketing strategies and engage potential clients.
But here is the catch: You must have data – the right data – to analyze and use it strategically.
Fortunately for solo attorneys and small law firms with tight budgets, you can obtain data simply by creating a Google Analytics account, which gives you access to Google’s most powerful data collection tool to date: Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
But there is a caveat: GA4 is much more comprehensive and equipped with a lot more capabilities than its predecessor Universal Analytics, which was completely sunsetted July 1, 2024. GA4 is an integrated approach to data tracking, and – unlike Universal Analytics – it uses “events” to track every user interaction, and it does so across platforms (e.g., websites and apps) and devices (e.g., desktops, tablets, iPads, and smartphones). The sheer magnitude of it is as intimidating and overwhelming as it is informative and requires more technical acumen to understand and use it. The trick is knowing what you need versus what’s merely noise.
In this blog, we share with you the right type of data to track:
- User acquisition
- User attributes
- Demographic details
- User engagement
- User devices
As a bonus, we also provide checklists to help you understand how this data can be used to upgrade your law firm marketing plan and grow your law business. We also provide a smart solution to solo attorneys and small law firms who lack the time or technical capabilities to set up all the many reports in Google Analytics, which can be a daunting and confusing task for anyone without specialized training.
User Acquisition: How Visitors Find Your Law Firm Website
User acquisition generally refers to the way new visitors, like prospective clients, find your law firm’s website. In other words, user acquisition means where users originated.
The important GA4 metric here is sessions by source, which reveals whether new visitors originated from:
- Organic searches
- Paid advertising, like PPC campaigns or Google Ads
- Social media referrals, like YouTube, Facebook or LinkedIn
- Email Marketing
- Other sources
To note, if you want to know where both new and returning users come from, you also want to consider traffic acquisition data. For solo or small law firm marketing purposes, however, traffic acquisition can be more “noise” than anything else unless you have more advanced marketing skills and use the traffic acquisition data as part of your marketing funnel.
How to generate the user acquisition report
Once you have created a Google Analytics account, there are three basic steps to view the user acquisition report from a computer:
| 1. Sign in to Google Analytics.
2. From the left menu, select Reports. 3. On the left, select either:
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How to use data from the user acquisition report
When reviewing this data, you should identify how visitors arrived at your website. Notice, too, how they did not find you. Understanding how users find you can provide insight into what’s working, what’s not, and how to maximize the former and improve the latter.
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Organic Searches |
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| Most visitors to your law firm website will find their way there via an organic search. As such, the health of your organic searches is a good measure of how well you or your website is performing. The higher your organic searches, the better you are performing in search engine result pages (SERPs) – meaning Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo, and other search engines are generating your law firm website on the first page of search engine results.
It also means this number should be above and beyond other ways users find your website. If organic searches are not producing many more hits, you need to identify why not. Much of it may come down to the quality of the content and user experience on your website. Review your content for:
Improve the quality of your content, and users will organically find your law firm website. |
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Lawyer Review Sites |
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Lawyer review sites are a popular way for prospective clients to find lawyers. The most popular lawyer review sites are:
Make sure, if you have profiles on any of these sites, that the information is accurate. If you do not have a profile, consider creating at least one. |
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Social Media |
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Social media platforms are another great means for visitors to find your law firm website. Popular social media platforms include
Do you maintain a presence on any of these? If so, are you active, and how well are you doing? If not performing well, you might want to review why. Are you not interacting enough? Are you not posting links to your law firm blogs? Make sure you have at least one social media account and engage with it. After all, what’s the purpose of having a Facebook account for your law firm if you don’t do anything with it? Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams said it right: Build it, and they will come. It’s not enough to have the field; you have to bring the game. Likewise, it’s not enough simply to have a social media account – you must engage and put effort into it. You do that, and clients will follow. Tip: LinkedIn and Facebook, according to the American Bar Association 2023 TechReport, offer the best return on investment, so make sure, in the least, you are active on one of these two sites. Tip: With a quick click, LawLytics facilitates blog publication to social media platforms, so Members never have to worry about missing out on the opportunities that could have been but for failure to link a blog. |
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Forum Sites |
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Forum sites are virtual spaces where lawyers can answer simple legal questions without giving specific legal advice. These sites are a great source, especially:
What’s great about forum sites like the above two is this: Lawyers can market their services directly to their targeted audience. So, if you participate in these Q&A forums, are you getting any visitors from those efforts? If not, then review the answers you have provided. Are your responses sufficient and informative or too general and formulaic? Do your responses provide links back to your website? |
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Referring Domains (Other Websites) |
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| You might be receiving visitors who click on a link from another website. If so, what are those websites? Was it a news agency? Someone else’s blog?
Try to understand why a link to your website or webpage was provided. Next, consider how you can replicate that process by providing other content suitable for backlinks. Backlinks have historically – though that’s changing – been an important factor for SERPs. Having them can help diversify the ways visitors find your website. One caveat: Don’t fall prey to marketing agencies that promise to get you backlinks. Many pay for backlinks to other third parties ill-suited for your legal content. |
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User Attributes: Who and Where Your Visitors Are
User attributes refer to the location (country, state, or city) from where user activity originated. It also refers to a user’s age, gender, language, and interests. As such, important metrics here are:
- Users by country
- Users by state
- Users by city
- Users by gender
- Users by age
- Users by language
- Users by interests
To note, location and language are automatically populated, but visitors must consent to sharing other types of demographic details. If you wanted these other details, you would need to activate Google signals. For most solos and small law firms, you really only need to know visitors’ locations.
How to generate the user attributes report.
To view the user attributes report from a computer, there are three basic steps:
| 1. Sign in to Google Analytics.
2. From the left menu, select Reports. 3. On the left, select User attributes > Overview in the “User” collection. |
How to use data from the user attributes overview report
Knowing the locations (city or state) and the number of active users for each of those respective locations can help you understand whether you are reaching an audience within your jurisdiction.
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States |
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| Which state(s) are you targeting? Does the report indicate that you are reaching your target(s)? If not, are you strategically implementing SEO keywords in your law firm content?
Review the content on your website and make sure you:
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Counties/Cities |
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| Which locations are you targeting? Does the report indicate you are reaching your target(s)? Consider the counties and/or cities generated in the report and the number of visitors associated with each. If you are not reaching your targets effectively – in other words, users from all over the place are visiting your site – consider whether you are strategically implementing local SEO in your law firm content (see above).
You can also consider writing blogs that add unique details about the city. For example, if you are a personal injury lawyer focusing on car accidents, write a blog identifying the most crash-prone intersection in your targeted city. |
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Language |
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| Are you targeting non-English speaking clients? Common languages other than English include Spanish, Mandarin, and Arabic. Do you have content with translations or relevant information to attract the appropriate audience? Local SEO could be used strategically here if targeting a specific community within a specific state or city. | ||
Other user attributes may be important depending on your goals, but the above three are the most critical, especially for increasing online presence.
Demographic Details: Which Visitors Interact with Your Law Firm Website
Once visitors from targeted jurisdictions find your website, how are they interacting or engaging with it? User demographics can give considerable insight into their activities. As above noted, user demographics refer to users by:
- Country
- State
- City
- Gender
- Age
- Language
- Interests
The demographic details report uses the following metrics to display data per each of the above demographics.
- Average engagement time: Average time your website was in focus in a user’s browser
- Key events: Number of times users completed a key event, formerly known as a conversion
- Engaged sessions: (1) Number of sessions lasting 10 seconds or longer; (2) Session with one or more key events; or (3) Session with two or more page views
- Engaged sessions per user: The average number of engaged sessions per user
- Engagement rate: Percentage of sessions that were engaged sessions
- Event count: Number of times users caused an event
- New users: Number of new unique users
- Users: Number of distinct users
These metrics all populate automatically in the report except for the key event, which requires an additional step: Marking an event as a key event.
This report provides insight into how users (by specific demographic) interact on your site. The metric we care most about here is the engagement rate, which is similar but not the same as another important metric: bounce rate. These rates let us know which visitors are engaged (or not) and which web pages interest them (or not).
How to generate the demographic details report
To view the demographic details report from a computer, there are three basic steps:
| 1. Sign in to Google Analytics.
2. From the left menu, select Reports. 3. On the left, select either:
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To note, GA4 automatically populates engagement rates but not bounce rates. You can add the bounce rate by customizing the report. To do so, from the report’s page, click on the pen icon in the upper right-hand corner and, from the Metrics menu: (1) select Add metric; (2) type to search for the Bounce rate label (which is listed under Session collection); and (3) click the Apply button.
How to use data from the demographic details report
Understanding user experience and engagement will shed light on what captures the interest of your visitors, but you need to know which of those visitors are interacting with your website – if at all. Applying that insight to a marketing plan is the definition of smart strategizing. But this report renders a lot of data, making it easy for anyone to go down a rabbit hole and get lost in it.
Tip: So that you don’t become one of those people who are worried about missing out if you don’t review and use all available data, remember that GA4 is designed for all types of businesses, particularly for those that sell products as opposed to services. The breadth of data is meant to ensure all businesses can find some useful data, but all data is not meant for each business.
That’s why in the opening of this blog we said the trick is knowing what data you as a lawyer need in order to design a smart marketing plan that renders results.
What you want to know here is twofold: (1) The rate at which visitors are engaging or bouncing; and (2) who are engaging or bouncing.
GA4 prefers engagement rates, thus, this rate automatically populates in the demographic details report. An engagement rate is defined as the percentage of sessions with multiple engagement, meaning the percentage of users who visit more than one web page on your website.
Good or average engagement rates are between 1% and 3.5% while excellent engagement rates are between 3.5% and 6% or better. On the other hand, poor engagement rates are those less than 1%.
A bounce rate tracks the percentage of sessions with a single engagement event, meaning the percentage of visitors who only look at a single web page of your website. For example, a visitor may have clicked on a link from a Facebook post leading to a blog you posted on your law firm website, but within seconds they decided against reading the blog and exited your website.
Low bounce rates indicate users find the website relevant, informative, and/or engaging and so they continue to explore the landing page as well as other web pages on your website. Generally, websites want to keep their bounce rate between 20-40% but anything below 55% is generally good.
Though both rates view data from different perspectives, the meaning is the same: Users are either interested or not. Low engagement rates or high bounce rates indicate one of two things:
- Users cannot find what they want on your website; or
- Website content is not engaging enough to keep users’ attention.
The above two indicators are problematic because it means you could be losing out on prospective clients. It also means you are losing trust and credibility, which will be hard to build back and can negatively impact the performance of your website.
What’s nice about the demographic details report is this: These rates are given for each of the above-listed demographic metrics (though recall most of those metrics are not automatic) – in other words, you can see who by demographic is engaging or bouncing.
Take the demographic metrics “user by state” or “user by city” as an example. A lawyer’s practice is very specific to their location in most cases. If a New York lawyer receives hits from visitors in California and Florida, your bounce rate might be high because these visitors soon find out that your law firm or the website content is not for them. To lower the bounce rate or increase the engagement rate, you might want to assess your local SEO efforts and revise accordingly to target the right jurisdiction.
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Are the right visitors landing on your law firm website? |
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Is your engagement rate high and bounce rate low in relation to the target audience? |
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User Engagement: How Visitors Interact with Your Website Content
So, now that you know (1) how visitors find your website; (2) what the demographics of those visitors are; and (3) which of the latter engage with or bounce from your website, it’s time to know how they engage (or not). This information will confirm what you should keep, start, or stop doing with your website. It’s here we need to take a deeper look at your website’s design and content. It’s also here where your marketing strategy really matters. And it’s the user engagement report that will provide insight.
According to GA4, the metrics to help understand user engagement are:
- Average engagement time: Average time your website was in focus in a user’s browser
- Key events: GA4’s term to indicate conversions
- Event count: Number of times users triggered an event
- Total revenue: Total revenue from purchases
- Views: Number of web pages users see, including repeated views of a single page
- Views per user: Average number of web pages viewed per user
- Users: Number of distinct users who visited your website
For law firm marketing, you don’t need all these metrics. We want to focus on four data points:
- Most trafficked pages. This data will help you identify which pages on your site get the most views, allowing you to know where to concentrate your efforts to maximize conversions. Likewise, it’ll indicate which pages are not performing so that you can review them to understand why. The GA4 views metric will give us this data.
- Page stickiness. This data helps determine how much value certain pages deliver and indicates whether visitors appreciate the content on each specific page. If a page is “sticky”, visitors stay on the web page longer and interact with it more than other pages. The GA4 average engagement time metric will provide this data.
- Page engagement. This data tells us what visitors are interested in, how well the web page is optimized, and what user behavior trends are. The GA4 views per user metric will give us this data.
- Landing pages. This data tells us which web pages on your website brought the most visitors to your website. Indirectly, it indicates which pages brought the least visitors to your website. The GA4 users metric will give insight into this data.
GA4’s pages and screens report outlines user engagement data.
How to generate the pages and screens report
To view the pages and screens report from a computer, there are three basic steps:
| 1. Sign in to Google Analytics.
2. From the left menu, select Reports. 3. On the left, select either:
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What you can do with data from the pages and screens report
Oftentimes, the most trafficked pages on your website are also the stickiest, most engaged, and the reason a visitor first found your website. Other times, they are not. Either way, make a spreadsheet with five columns, one for web page titles and the others for each of the above-mentioned four metrics. Then, you want to review that spreadsheet and take appropriate action. An example is given to demonstrate this process.
Criminal Defense Example
To give you an idea of what this process might entail. Here’s an example, step by step, of a fictional criminal defense law firm website.
Step 1: Create the spreadsheet.
| Page | Most Trafficking (Views) |
Page Stickiness
(Average Engagement Time) |
Page Engagement (Views Per User) |
Landing Pages (Users) |
| /evidence | 1779 | 10m 32s | 1535 | 1650 |
| /felony-crimes | 1135 | 03m 46s | 940 | 1030 |
| /can-i-defend-against-drug-charges? | 657 | 04m 12s | 321 | 474 |
| /drug-crimes | 24 | 00m 22s | 2 | 0 |
Step 2: Review the data against each page.
What pages are doing well? Then, look at those pages to see if you can identify why. Do the same for under- or unperforming pages. You can use the below checklist as a guide as you review web pages specifically and your website generally.
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Navigation |
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Audience |
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Trustworthy |
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Accessible |
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Site Speed and Responsiveness |
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Calls-to-Action |
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Technical SEO |
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Step 3: Make changes accordingly.
From the data you collect and analyze, devise a plan of action. It could mean writing more of a particular topic (e.g., in this example, you might want to write blog posts on specific details of evidence because the evidence page receives a lot of traffic). It could also mean redrafting web pages that are performing moderately, selecting images that better express what the page is about, or adding alt text to embedded videos.
Whatever it is, make a realistic plan to incorporate it. A little bit here and there has the accumulative potential to produce big results.
One Last Important Data Point: User Devices
Users use their desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones to search for pretty much anything and everything online. To provide the experience users expect, your website must be optimized for all these types of devices.
It may seem hard to believe, but according to ABA’s 2023 TechReport, many solo attorneys and small law firms do not have mobile-friendly websites: 32% of solos and 25% of law firms with two to nine lawyers. Another 20% of respondents involved in the ABA TechReport admitted they don’t know if their website is mobile-friendly or not.
These statistics are striking, especially considering that more than 60% of law firm traffic comes from mobile devices.
The tech details report can tell you how many people visit your website from their mobiles or desktops. This report uses many metrics, but the one we care most about is the Users metric.
How to generate the tech details report
To view the tech details report from a computer, there are three basic steps:
| 1. Sign in to Google Analytics.
2. From the left menu, select Reports. 3. On the left, click Tech > Tech details. |
What to do with data from the tech details report
All websites today should be mobile-friendly. Regardless of this report, you need to make sure your law firm website is accessible by smartphones and tablets. What this report can do is confirm whether you need to take additional steps to optimize mobile-friendliness.
If the numbers on the report suggest not many people are accessing your website via their smartphones, try implementing any of the following mobile optimization techniques:
- Use social media: Because many mobile users visit social media sites solely from their smartphones
- Improve page speed: It’s one thing to wait for a web page to load on a computer, but phone users tend to be more impatient and want immediate satisfaction
- Make content scannable: Phone users want to skim pages for answers to their questions
- Use video or images: Mobile users, as mentioned, want immediate satisfaction, and videos and images provide information faster than the written word
Making small changes to make sure your website is mobile friendly will improve your overall online visibility.
Data: The Problem of Too Much and the LawLytics Solution
As you can see, Google Analytics offers a lot of data, and you get it all for “free” simply by creating an account. That said, to sort through all these reports and find what you need is intimidating even for experienced marketers. GA4 is saturated with potential data points and loaded with customizable options that you could spend days (if not months) figuring out, if ever. As a solo or small law firm, you simply don’t have time to allot to this effort.
That’s where LawLytics becomes an important partner in your law firm marketing endeavor. Not only do you get a website designed and intended exclusively for lawyers, but as a LawLytics member, you have access via your LawLytics dashboard to a “Reports” tab that automatically pulls all the above data for you in real-time. All you need to do is create a Google Analytics account and integrate it with our platform, which is as simple as a click of a button and a few easy-to-follow prompts.
Let me reiterate: With a LawLytics membership, you have access to all of the above data and analytics minus all the hassle, teeth-grinding, and hair-pulling you would endure by setting up, generating, and attempting to analyze all of those GA4 reports.
What’s more, through a LawLytics membership, your law firm website comes enhanced with technical SEO and results-driven tools to optimize content, including access to an ever-growing Content Library.
Become a LawLytics Member Today for Easy-to-Access Data
Your law firm website is critical because – aside from using it to market your law firm – it’s how you will collect important data that you should use to inform a winning law firm marketing plan. Our team at LawLytics is committed to each of our members. We design, build, and launch new law firm websites in as little as two weeks, so in as little as two weeks, you can have data to start growing your law business.
Ready to get started? Schedule an interactive demo with a product expert to learn more. If you are already a LawLytics member and want to learn more about Google Analytics integration, contact our Support team today.
