Do you monitor your 401K? How about your checkbook? Of course, you track money that goes in and out of your life. Then why wouldn’t you track advertising spend—one of your law firm’s most significant investments?
As an ad agency, we are only as effective as our advertising campaigns. And if you don’t have mechanisms in place to track who calls your firm and from where—and whether they become a client or remain a lead—you’ll never know whether what you’re spending is really worth it.
If you don’t know what ad tactics are moving the needle, you’ll never be able to make a truly informed decision about how to adjust your media mix, when to try something new or whether to ditch an unproductive effort altogether.
Here are some simple examples of how we encourage our clients to track leads:
Call tracking: This can be as manual as instituting a policy to document every call that comes into your office, or as automated as installing software to record the source of each call and measure the revenue generated from each lead.
Unique tracking number: Keep track of which calls are coming from what yellow page ads by placing a unique reference number next to each ad.
Traffic analytics: Install Google Analytics or another digital tracking program to monitor how visitors found your website—organic search, online referral source, PPC ad—as well as what keyword they used to search for you, how long they stayed and what pages they hit.
Microsite or PPC campaign: Generate stronger leads by building an exclusive landing page or mini website for a specific mass tort, for example, or another area of your practice you want to grow. Online campaigns are highly trackable often yield near-instant ROI.
Ultimately, advertising translates to paid leads. To see what you’re really spending per lead, simply divide your advertising budget by the number of leads you’ve tracked—in a week, month or year. Compare your expenditures on advertising campaigns and you’ll quickly see what’s working and what needs tweaking.