Nolo's Lawyer Blog

Clicks, hits, visits, uniques, impressions, page views, conversion rates, click-throughs, CPM (cost per thousand impressions), RPM (revenue per thousand impressions) CPC or PPC (cost per click), CPL (cost per lead), CPA (cost per acquisition), ROI (return on investment) -- what does it all mean?

Are you drowning in a stormy sea of unfamiliar terms and conflicting information, trying to quantify and measure the success of your online marketing? Are legal marketing companies making promises based on SEO metrics and page one placement with major search engines like Google and Bing?

Value vs. Volume

The bottom line for attorneys, especially solo practitioners and smaller firms: it's a competitive landscape out there, and at the end of the day, you're just trying to attract more clients who want to hire you. You can have all the "traffic" in the world, lots of clicks and unique visitors, but how do we qualify this traffic, and how many of those qualified visitors end up becoming clients?

Let's take a closer look at overall online marketing and advertising strategies and try to get to the bottom of the great traffic debate.

Online advertising continues to drive the majority of revenues with the big four search engines; Google, Yahoo!, Bing and AOL, leading the pack. According to Price Waterhouse Coopers, "search revenue accounted for 47 percent of 2009 second quarter revenues, up from the 44 percent reported in the second quarter of 2008. Display advertising, the second largest format, accounted for 35 percent, followed by Classifieds (10 percent), and Lead Generation (7 percent) of 2009 second quarter revenues", totaling $5.5 billion.

Different advertisers and marketers are paying for different types of online exposure. But exposure alone doesn't necessarily mean more customers. Paying for clicks, hits or visits on one site might not provide the same ROI as another site, depending on visitor demographics and how qualified the traffic is.

Here at Nolo, for example, we pride ourselves on being a full-service legal resource center where millions of visitors come for help with their legal needs. When a consumer browses our thousands of pages of free legal content, we provide geo-targeted attorney listings related to the information our visitors are seeking. A site visitor who clicks on one of those attorney listings should be a more likely client than one who clicked on a paid Google link through a general key-word search.

Despite the promise of absolutely trackable results and metrics for every dime invested in online marketing, the age-old adage of "there are no guarantees in advertising" still rings true -- buyer beware.

Know Your Visitors & Where They Are Coming From

You've got your website up, maybe even a blog. You've committed part of your overall marketing budget towards online marketing and you're using several social media tools like Linked In, Twitter and Facebook to get noticed in the increasingly vast sea of online attorneys. Perhaps you've even enlisted the help of an attorney directory, maybe even an SEO consultant.

For lawyers doing any online marketing, advertising or Search Engine Optimization, knowing who is visiting your website and where those visitors are coming from are two of the most critical components in measuring the ROI for your online marketing.  There are several tools to help analyze your online traffic including demographics and category or topic specific interests.

Here at Nolo, we use WebTrends, a paid service that combines analytics tools with professional services. There's also Mint, which helps web owners better understand their traffic trends at $30 per site. Yahoo also has a free analytics tool but the best bang for your buck is Google's FREE tool - Google Analytics. Google's free traffic measuring tool helps attorneys track their website traffic: where their visitors are coming from, what pages are being visited, how long they stay on a particular page and the bounce rate - how many visitors simply click their back button and leave the site altogether.

Here's a simple breakdown of how to get started with Google Analytics:

• First, sign up for a free Google Account.
  
• Then, use your Google Account information to sign up for Google Analytics.
• Register your site(s) with Google Analytics.
• Cut and Paste the generated code onto your website - NOTE: If you are NOT the person administering your website, you'll need the help of your webmaster or the company that built your website for you. You may even want to check with them before you star.
• Set up reports for your site within Analytics to help better understand your traffic patterns.
  

Take the Google Analytics tour for a brief video overview of their tool.

"By making this powerful service free, we aim to give all websites - large and small - the tools they need to better serve their customers, make more money, and improve the web experience for everyone," says Paul Muret, Google engineering director.  Google Analytics also ties nicely into other products in the Google ecosystem--including AdWords, AdSense, Website Optimizer, Webmaster Tools and more, giving attorneys powerful resources to aid in making valuable decisions regarding their online marketing.

Finally, Google Analytics can be very confusing or even daunting at first, especially for less-than-savvy web users. Don't let this dissuade you from jumping in feet first.