It’s rare to find a law firm that truly understands the importance of tracking its advertising. In the legal world, the most successful firms are often times the ones that are meticulous trackers. Law firms that know where their cases come from and what type of case makes them the most money are the ones that can make the best business decisions.

While tracking helps the overall business of law firms, tracking can also help their advertising agencies as well. We’re biased, but we would love to see more law firms track so we can create better advertising campaigns for our clients. Here’s some ways tracking helps law firms.

Where Do We Stand?

Tracking helps agencies understand just how well their advertising strategies and tactics are performing. Ad agencies can make more informed decisions and know when a change in the creative or media mix is necessary to move the needle.

Without tracking, knowing when a change is necessary is all guesswork. Guesswork can lead to making decisions that are not wise and can set back both the firm and the advertising agency as well.

Which Ad Makes “The Needle” Move?

In order to understand what is truly effective in your advertising plan, your firm should be evaluating, testing and recording results. For example, you could test different creative on different stations or select specific day parts to see what works most effectively for your firm. Many firms do this sort of experimentation, but determine the success of these experiments based on their gut instincts rather than on what the numbers tell them.

While your gut is important in making decisions, ignoring the numbers when adjusting your advertising campaign is shortsighted and can lead to missed opportunities. Furthermore, failing to track will make it difficult to conduct these sorts of experiments in the first place and can lead to a stale campaign.

Advertising is an Investment

At the end of the day, your advertising is a significant investment in your law firm. Do you track your 401K or do you just let it run on autopilot? Do you check your bank statements or do you just guess how much money you have in the bank? If you track the success of other areas of your life or firm, then why would you not track your advertising?

Having a polished, well thought out advertising campaign can have a significant impact on your law firm’s success. Failing to track your advertising investment is myopic and doesn’t allow your ad agency to do its job to the best of its abilities.

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.