“What gets measured, gets done.”

This quote is usually attributed to management guru Peter Drucker, and reminds us of the importance of measuring the efficacy of our law firm marketing efforts in order to capitalize on what works and not to waste time on what doesn’t work.

One of the most compelling tools for measuring the effectiveness of what you’re doing online is a tool called Google Analytics. You embed a snippet of code into your law firm website or blog and it provides you with a mountain of great data – for free! Google gives you all the guidance you need to get started using this tool here.

To get the most out of Google Analytics for your law firm marketing efforts, you need to pay close attention to three important areas:

Visits – by examining visits to your sites, you can see how many people are coming to your site, where they are coming from and if they are new or returning visitors. This is a basic metric to tell you if your efforts to drive people to your site are working. It can also tell you if a good number of your visits are coming from tablets or mobile devices, so you can be sure your sites are optimized for those devices.

Activity – here you want to examine Pages per Visit, which tells you how many pages visitors access when they come to your site; Average Time on Site, which tells you how long your visitors stay; and Bounce Rate, which tells you who looked at just one page and left. These metrics will let you know how engaging your site is and if you are holding your visitors’ attention. If you have a low Average Time on Site and a high Bounce Rate, you need to rethink your online strategies because you are attracting low quality web traffic.

Goals – Google Analytics allows you to input your goals for your site for tracking, so if your goal is to get visitors to download a free report, watch a video or sign up for an e-newsletter, you can track exactly how many people did what you wanted them to do.