Through my work as Head of Marketing Services at Contra Agency, I’ve spoken with many legal marketing leaders about law firm KPIs and marketing ROI reporting. And nearly all of them tell me one thing…
…it’s complicated.
Unlike other B2C businesses, legal clients don’t simply make a purchase that can be clearly attributed to a particular marketing channel.
Legal cases can be ongoing for years before the firm confirms the revenue from it. This makes it hard to keep track of ROI from a marketing perspective.
With that in mind, we’ve put together this step-by-step guide for legal marketing professionals on how to develop law firm KPIs and unlock visibility into ROI.
So, let’s dive in.
Step 1: Integrate Google Analytics 4 with your website and set up key events.
Properly integrating Google Analytics 4 (GA4) with a focus on key events (conversion events) is an absolute must for any law firm aiming to foster growth.
Unfortunately, this isn’t always carried out effectively.
As a legal marketing agency, we do a GA4 audit with new law firm clients. We discover, all too often, that they have been tracking conversion events incorrectly in GA4 (sometimes for years).
As a result, the law firm’s KPIs and key decisions were based on inaccurate data.
With so much relying on the proper integration of GA4, consider using a specialist web integrations agency.
There will be an up-front cost, but relying on inaccurate data for crucial business decisions could be much more expensive in the long run.
Step 2: Set up keyword rank monitoring in your SEO tool(s).
An effective law firm SEO strategy must be thorough, requiring significant time, effort, and resources. That being said, it’s vital for optimising your ROI.
If you’ve conducted keyword research, you should have identified several terms around your services before using them to optimise your website content using topic clusters.
But the job isn’t done there.
It’s important to monitor the performance of specific keywords, allowing you to make informed decisions with the aim of further improving visibility on search engines.
Using an SEO tool(s) like Semrush, you can analyse patterns and trends around terms you’re currently targeting, and terms you could target in the future.
Based on the data, you can update existing content or produce entirely new content to generate more traffic, potentially leading to more high-value conversions.
Step 3: Integrate GA4 and SEO tool(s) with Google Looker Studio.
So, GA4 has been configured precisely for your needs, you have an SEO-optimised website, and you’ve crafted a clear content strategy.
The next step is combining all the key metrics into a single, easy-to-use dashboard. Make it as simple as possible for partners to understand the data.
We recommend Google Looker Studio, formerly Google Data Studio.
Not only can it be seamlessly integrated with GA4 and your SEO tool(s), it can also be used to create highly visual, informative dashboards for presenting key metrics.
Some law firm KPIs covering the website and SEO might include:
- YoY Summary and Previous Period Summary: Reporting on both 'all users' and 'organic users.'
- Active Users
- New Users
- Total Conversions
- Conversion Event Breakdown
- User Conversion Rate
- Percentage of Engaged Users
- Average Engagement Time
- Service Rankings (e.g., Personal Injury)
- Subservice Rankings (e.g., Accidents at Work)
- Rankings Distribution
- Benchmark Rankings vs. Current Rankings
- Sources and Engagement
- Best and Worst
- Rankers
- Climbers
- Performing Pages (traffic, conversions, engagement time)
If partners clearly see the benefits of your marketing, they're more likely to invest in other areas, helping you further grow the firm’s revenue.
Real-world example
After we designed Hudgell Solicitors' website, the firm required a simple, visual dashboard in which they could demonstrate key law firm KPIs, including website and SEO metrics. We integrated Google Looker Studio with Semrush and GA4 to create visual reports that their senior stakeholders could understand at a glance.
Step 4: Implement a CRM and marketing automation.
A good CRM is crucial, but it can be challenging to persuade key stakeholders to invest, especially after significant spending on other marketing activities.
However, the benefits for both the marketing team and fee earners make implementing a CRM financially worthwhile. A good CRM will enable you to:
- automatically create new contacts based on form submissions
- quickly respond to queries via automation or directly from the CRM
- automatically log all correspondence for firm-wide visibility
- route intakes to the right team members
- call directly from the CRM
- create meeting links for fee earners to send to intakes
- map out your matter pipeline stages
- send and receive important documents
- enable you to qualify and set tasks and reminders to follow up with your intakes
- smoothly manage matters and cases with automated workflows
- measure team performance and success through customisable reports
Step 5: Integrate your systems.
Integration capabilities must be a key consideration when choosing a CRM – especially if you aim to effectively measure your law firm’s marketing ROI.
True law firm KPI and ROI reporting requires data sharing between your case/practice management system and CRM.
Naturally, most law firms tend to use their CRM to nurture leads and their case management system to manage cases.
Picture this:
Let’s imagine you ran a Google Ads campaign through your CRM.
The prospective client interacts with the ad, eventually resulting in them instructing your firm to represent them.
Your ad has served its purpose, but it may take years to confirm the case revenue due to the lengthy legal process.
Once you have the revenue, you’d then need to find the client in the CMS and manually associate the case value.
With an integrated approach, data is automatically pulled from the case management system into the CRM, no matter how long it takes to confirm the revenue.
Having already integrated your Google Ads with your CRM, that ‘deal’ can be credited to a particular campaign and channel, even if it ended years prior.
And the same applies for revenue from other channels too, whether it be a Paid Social or Organic.
And there you have it.
You’ve achieved true ROI reporting and attribution.
You know exactly how much you spent on a particular marketing campaign and precisely how much revenue you made from the clients it generated.
You also know how much revenue each channel is generating.
You even know which services have generated the most revenue.
By comparing in-depth data across various marketing activities, you can identify which provides the best ROI and reallocate your budget accordingly.
Of course, integrations require technical experience and know-how.
If this isn't your expertise, it's best to leave the task to a specialist website integrations agency with experience handling similar projects for leading law firms.
Step 6: Build custom dashboards for law firm KPIs & ROI reporting.
Why invest time and money in an end-to-end system for reporting your law firm’s ROI if you don't plan to display the data effectively?
As someone deeply involved in your firm’s marketing, you're aware of which marketing activities are generating revenue…
…but partners and other senior stakeholders might not be.
In fact, according to Passle's Legal Marketing Leadership Survey, only 12 percent of UK managing partners thought that marketing’s value was widely understood.
That’s where custom dashboards come in.
With visual custom dashboards built into your CRM, you can break down a range of law firm KPIs and ROI reporting metrics, including:
- Intake-to-instructed conversion rate
- Monthly intakes vs target
- Lead source and attribution
- Number of prospects in each matter pipeline stage
- Conversion rates between matter pipeline stages
- Matter stage percentage of total
- Intakes by week, month, all-time
- Matters instructed by week, month, all-time
- Closed lost reasons
- Total matters in pipeline by stage and by fee earner
- Stale matters (no activity in X days)
- Average time in matter stages
- ROI by campaign
- ROI by marketing channel
- ROI by service
Imagine unlocking these insights for senior stakeholder meetings:
"Sarah Whitfield has published ten articles this year, resulting in 42 conversions, 7 cases, and a total case revenue of £1,478,300."
"Our ROI on LinkedIn ads is 1.5 times higher than our ROI on Facebook ads. Additionally, Family Law services show the highest ROI via LinkedIn ads. Analysing search patterns and enquiries over the past five years, Family Law enquiries tend to spike in Q3. Therefore, we suggest increasing our LinkedIn ad spend for Family Law in Q3."
Custom dashboards generate data-driven recommendations.
Data-driven decisions build trust.
Building trust increases further investment, allowing you to further optimise ROI later down the line.
Real-world example
IDR Law came to Contra with the need for a powerful CRM and marketing automation to manage and report on two specific pipelines. On top of a standard business development pipeline, IDR Law wanted to utilise automation to deal with partner referrals.
We onboarded them onto HubSpot and configured the system so each pipeline stage was tracked and automated to the right team members. A central reporting dashboard provided a range of marketing intelligence for managing partners and Finance, enabling them to optimise their pipelines, processes and budgetary spending.
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