Increase Law Firm ROI with Ad Tracking | Martindale-Avvo

Increasing Law Firm Marketing ROI with Ad Tracking

legal advertising roi

When you invest in law firm marketing, you want to ensure you see a return on your investment (ROI). The right law firm marketing effectively manages your advertising but also tracks the success of its efforts. Tracking essential metrics like clicks, chat engagement, and even call-tracking helps you better understand and streamline your marketing efforts.

With ad tracking, you can increase your ROI, build your law firm’s exposure, and convert more contacts into clients. This can make a major difference in the success of your firm and your bottom line.

Building Exposure With Targeted Ads

To maximize your law firm marketing, you want to use targeted ads. Two primary types of targeted ads commonly used by online legal directory sites get you the types of exposure you want:

Display Advertising

Display advertising uses customizable ads that can be in static or animated formats. They appear throughout a website in placements meant to attract a potential client’s interest in your firm.

Sponsored Advertising

Sponsored advertising puts your firm at the top of search results when a potential client looks for an attorney with your practice area and location. It may also place your ad in the Q&A and legal guide sections of the directory, depending on the services available. These ads encourage visitors to connect with your site by displaying key information they are looking for.

Using Ad Tracking to Optimize Performance

To maximize the success of your legal marketing, you need a company that can track your ads. Ad tracking allows you to customize your ads to various geographic areas or multiple practice areas (e.g. family law, divorce, etc.) to target your potential clients. These potential clients can see the phone number or contact information specific to their particular area.

You can test ad messages and see what is most effective in getting more calls from prospective clients. This type of ad tracking can show where you are successful and what can be improved. Now you can see the return on investment your advertising and marketing wins for your law firm.

There are many different types of advertising tracking. Each is tailored to your marketing campaign type, but each is meant to increase your return on investment. By adding this simple tracking to your advertising methods, you can make a substantial difference in the success of your marketing efforts.

Call Tracking

Call tracking is a way to evaluate the success of your phone campaigns and other advertisements that lead to phone calls. Call tracking provides key details of incoming business phone calls. This data can track items such as:

  • Who called
  • What time they called
  • Where the call came from
  • Call duration
  • The specific campaign the call came from

This gives you hard data on phone calls to help build your existing data and improve your firm’s marketing campaign. 

Benefits of Call Tracking for Your Law Firm

There are several benefits to call tracking that can increase your marketing ROI:

  • Track Sources: Source tracking lets you see what audience your marketing reaches. You will see who notices your ads and whether these are the types of clients you want to bring in. This is especially useful if you use multiple ad campaigns over several geographic areas.
  • Creative Testing: Testing uses unique phone numbers to classify and identify different creative versions of ads. This way, you can see which ad is more successful and more likely to reach your intended audience.
  • Practice area and geographic testing: Testing various practice areas allows you to possibly lower your cost per client since the ad provider may offer these at different prices. Competing attorneys may be less prevalent in “child custody” advertising than “family law” for example, Plus, you may find your performance is different as well. .

Chat Engagement Tracking

Live chat is an excellent way to handle real-time conversations with clients. It helps to deliver high levels of client satisfaction and drive new contact leads. A potential client can receive a prompt to speak with a representative via a chat link, where some basic questions about how to contact your firm can be answered. This makes the experience more personalized for potential clients and makes them valued.

According to Forrester, 30% of customers expect a live chat feature on websites. This can be an effective tool to answer questions and increase client engagement. However, the best return on investment occurs when you track the success of your chat engagement with prospective clients.

Measuring Chat Metrics and Key Performance Indicators

There are several metrics that you can measure to see the success of your chat engagement:

  • First Response Time (FRT): First response time refers to how long customers have to wait to get an answer to their question. The faster the reply, the more likely the client will be satisfied with the experience, and h\igher satisfaction tends to generate more leads and a better ROI.
    Did you know? Our chat platform, Ngage, has trained operators available 24/7/365 so this is never a problem.
  • Number of Chats: The total number of chats is a vital lead generation metric. The more chats there are, the more you know your marketing led to an engaging conversation. This metric can analyze the number of chats and those chats that led to a successful lead.
    Did you know? Ngage has monthly reports that your firm can download.
  • Chat-to-Conversion Rate: The chat-to-conversion rate shows how many potential clients became actual clients after a chat. This can demonstrate the success of your marketing and the real dollar value of using chat engagement on your website.
    Did you know? Ngage is historically the highest converting live chat provider.

A successful chat engagement analysis can use these and several other features to analyze the success of your chat feature.

Ad Campaign Tracking

Ad campaign tracking is the process of gathering user insights and data on the success of online advertising campaigns. Effective tracking of your advertisements continues to show what is working and lets you make adjustments. With this information, you can focus your marketing funds where they work best. This saves you money and increases your ROI at the same time.

Tracking Tools for Ad Campaigns

Several different ad campaign tracking methods can help measure key performance indicators and demonstrate your campaign’s success. These are used for general online advertising, not our legal profile directory advertising.

  • Tracking URLs: Tracking clicks on URLs demonstrates how often a page has garnered attention and web traffic. 
  • Tracking Pixels: A tracking pixel is a 1px by 1px transparent image placed within a particular ad. When the page loads, a signal is sent to the tracking tool to show it was viewed.
  • Cookies: Cookies help track campaign success and can be used to customize a user’s experience. Cookies are the primary force behind retargeting campaigns, where ads focus on users based on their interests.

Using Ad Tracking with Customer Relationship Management Software

Many law firms use some form of customer relationship management (CRM) software to help drive their business. CRM software is often an essential part of sales or marketing campaigns. It provides insights into your audience, target clients, and much more. It is designed to increase sales and optimize conversions into real client relationships.

CRM marketing should not only show you where to focus your attention, but it should also be able to show you whether your ad campaign was successful. Using these tools within your CRM or along with it can ensure your marketing investment sees a high return.

Most firms use CRM to track their sales, but you can leverage the data of a CRM platform to tell you much more. Ad tracking and CRM can work together to:

  • Show how best to reach the clients you want
  • Review customer behavior online
  • Analyze previous ad campaigns
  • Map the client journey through your ads to conversion
  • Demonstrate prospective client usage and repeat usage of your ads or website
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