How to Know if Your Law Firm’s Marketing Campaigns Are Working

Are you unsure if your law firm’s marketing campaigns are working? If so, you’re not alone. A lot of attorneys and business owners feel overwhelmed when it comes to marketing and don’t know where to start. It’s one thing to get your ads up and running, it’s another thing to know if your ads are actually working. Understanding which metrics to track a.k.a. KPIs (key performance indicators) are crucial in measuring the success of your marketing campaigns. By tracking these metrics, you’ll be able to make data-driven decisions about the most beneficial way to spend your law firm’s marketing budget.

What are KPIs and Why Do They Matter?

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are simply a way of measuring how well your law firm ads are performing. By understanding which KPIs to track, you can better understand what’s working and what’s not working in your marketing campaigns. This allows you to make adjustments to your campaigns and lets you know which ads aren’t worth keeping. Whether you are running campaigns on social media or Google ads, it’s important to know which KPIs to track. You are given many metrics, but there are really only a few you need to be aware of to track the success of each campaign.

KPIs You Should Be Tracking for Social Media Ads

Let’s start with social media ads. When it comes to social media advertising, there are a few different KPIs that you should be tracking. These include:

• Reach: this is the number of people who have seen your ad at least once. Social media advertising is really a numbers game. The more eyes you can get in front of, the more likely you will be able to attract leads.

• Frequency: The amount of times a single person has seen the same ad. This is a metric that can be easily overlooked. You don’t want one person seeing the same ad too many times. When you have a high frequency (3.5+) this means on average one individual person is seeing your ad multiple times and not taking the action to engage with the ad in some way. Your marketing dollars are not being well spent at this point. If your frequency is high it could be due to a couple reasons, which is why you need to use all of the bulleted KPIs to make a strategic marketing decision. Your frequency could be high, because your audience is small or the ad creative/copy isn’t resonating with your audience. However, sometimes your frequency could be high, but all of the other metrics are performing well. When this happens it is usually because you’re reaching creative fatigue (Facebook will let you know), this means you need a new image for your ad. Although Facebook may be telling you it’s time for a new graphic, if everything else looks good you can hold off on making creative updates until you start seeing your other KPIs decline. It still doesn’t hurt to have a few creatives in the queue just in case.

• Results (conversions): this is the amount of people who take the desired action after seeing your ad (e.g., click through to your website, request a consultation or case evaluation, opt-in to a piece of content, etc.). Take the results tab on Facebook with a grain of salt. Even if you have your pixel setup to track correctly, Facebook tends to skew this metric. We’d recommend having an additional way to track incoming leads, whether it is through Lawmatics, Clio Grow, on landing pages, or any other platform your firm may be using.
• Cost per link click (CPC): this is how much you spend every time someone clicks on the link associated with the ad. You want to keep the cost as low as possible (under $1.50).  However, keep in mind that just because someone clicked on the link associated with the ad, doesn’t mean they followed through with loading the page or completing the desired action.

• Click through rate (CTR):  this is the percentage of people who saw your ad and clicked on it. A good CTR for law firms is anything above 0.90%, but this number can vary based on your interest-based targeting and audience size. 

When you track KPIs on social media, it’s important to look at all of the metrics above, before making any decisions regarding your ads. Although Facebook will try their best to convince you it’s time to make an update if one metric is slightly off, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is the best course of action. Your time as an attorney is valuable and shouldn’t be spent updating ads if you don’t need to.

KPIs You Should Be Tracking for Google Ads

Google Ads is a different animal all together. The main KPIs you want to be tracking for Google Ads are:

• Goal Conversions: There are two categories when it comes to goal conversions, 1) soft goal conversions and 2) hard goal conversions. You really only need to focus on the hard goal conversions, such as phone calls, form submissions, etc. While it’s important to monitor your soft goal conversions (time on site, average page view per session, etc.), this isn’t helpful information for determining if your marketing campaigns are actually working. Monitoring these data points allows you to be able to hold your marketing accountable for performance. You also have the ability to create unique goals within Google Ads or Analytics for precise lead attribution by channel. 
• Search Impression Share: This metric breaks out into three categories, 1) search impression share 2) search impression share with lost due to rank and 3) search impression share with lost due to budget. Monitoring these three data points within Google Ads will allow you to see your results and competitor positioning compared to yours. Once you understand how all three of these metrics work together, it makes it easier to optimize your campaigns for a better score and gives you more visibility within the auction. 
• CTR (click-through-rate): Monitoring your CTR is important for User engagement and monitoring the success of your ad copy.  If you have high CTR and low sales, you can pinpoint the area to optimize your landing page and or correct any misleading messaging that could be causing that issue. 

Just like tracking KPIs on social media, you need to look at all of the metrics above to know how well your Google Ads campaigns are performing.

Key Takeaways

If you take away anything from this blog, takeaway this – the only way to know a campaign is successful is by looking at specific data points. Both Facebook and Google give you countless metrics to track, but the reality is only a few of those metrics will actually let you know just how well your ad is performing. It’s easy for these platforms to make certain data points look really nice, but at the end of the day that doesn’t help anyone. Knowing what KPIs to track and understanding why you should be tracking them will help you better understand your audience and what type of content resonates with them. It will also help your law firm save money by avoiding spending your marketing budget on ads that are underperforming.

This can be overwhelming at first, but once you understand the data you’ll feel more comfortable making marketing decisions, because there is a strategy behind those decisions. If you need help launching successful social media and Google Ads campaigns, contact us and we’d be happy to help get those setup as well as provide you with a reporting dashboard with all the information above included.