How can Google analytics help a law firm raise its marketing game?

The good news is that that when it comes to marketing tactics, you don’t have to guess how you are doing. There are several online tools that can help you achieve this and one of them is Google Analytics.

Free to use and offering very comprehensive assessments of performance with lots of supporting data, Google Analytics is a widely used tool that can enable you to identify where you are doing well, where you can do better and areas where there is a major problem.

How can you measure revenues?  

Google Analytics uses a range of indicators to establish where sales revenue is coming from and measure progress against key performance indicators (KPIs).

The system is equipped with a series of conversion goal settings, which means users can choose what kind of customer responses to keep track of. For example, it could show the rate at which site visitors click on a call-to action button, sign up for an e-book, join your mailing list, is buying your services and how much revenue you are bringing in. You can set up as many as 20 of these goals, in four categories - stepping stone, short-term, long-term and lifetime, depending on how each of these will affect your business.

Other examples of data Google Analytics can collect include the following:

• Bounce rate - the proportion of people leaving the site swiftly instead of navigating their way through it.
• Where the data has come from (mobile or laptop) 
• Geographical data on where the engagement has come from
• Demographics
  

Why does bounce rate matter? 

As mentioned above, good example of the kind of data that Google Analytics can provide is the ‘bounce rate’. While a high bounce rate isn’t always bad news (such as where a site consists of a single page), it usually is, because it means very little of the traffic you are attracting to your site is staying around to find out more about what you have to offer, let alone make a purchase.

By identifying which pages have high bounce rates, you can take action to sharpen things up. It may be the content hasn’t been well optimised, or isn’t very relevant. It might also mean you have a technical problem like a slow upload time. People tend not to wait if a page loads slowly, so make sure this is resolved. Otherwise, you could write the best law marketing blog ever but find very few people read it.

 

 

What behaviours are tracked?

Google analytics can also keep track of the behaviours of site visitors. It can show how many people - and which people - are engaging with your content, which can help you build up a picture of who you are targeting successfully with your content marketing efforts, as well as who you are not managing to reach.

How can the data you gather be useful?

Google Analytics is also extremely useful for picking up information about your page visitors.

This can include important data like age, gender and geographical location. If you are still developing your buyer persona - a representation of your target market - you can use this information to fine-tune it, particularly if some new information emerges, such as more information about people’s interests or concerns. 

• If you already have a buyer persona in place, this can tell you how well you are doing in attracting the kind of people you want on your site.
• Over time, your buyer persona may change, as a certain demographic may develop different tastes and habits.
• Google Analytics may also provide data to show when this change is emerging and an update to the persona is needed.
• Other facts you can establish include which social media pages your content is getting the most traffic on, which will help you make decisions about which platforms to use more of and which you might want to abandon.
• You can even establish what kinds of devices they tend to use - such as a general preference for mobile websites over laptops - and tailor your website architecture accordingly.

What make Google Analytics user-friendly?

Google Analytics is also very user-friendly. It can easily be integrated with other software, you can ask for customised reports and the data gathering is automatic, so you don’t have to keep going back to instruct it to keep on capturing it. All you need to do is set the parameters and it will get to work.

How can you use Google Analytics data?

With all this data, it becomes possible to carry out a comprehensive analysis on how people are interacting with your site and your marketing efforts.

The most important thing is not to simply throw your hands up in horror if you discover your current performance isn’t very good. Because of the level of detail provided, it will be possible to establish which elements are performing well even if the overall situation is not so promising. In addition, it will help you pinpoint just where and why something isn’t working.

What legal issues should you consider?

As ever, the use of data collected on people and their activities is subject to some legal constraints, so it is important to make sure you comply with this.

Google’s own terms of use state that you should display a privacy policy on your site to inform visitors that you use cookies to collect data, as well as not just the fact that you use Google Analytics, but also how it gathers and uses information.

It is also important to ensure your site has privacy practices that comply with the laws regarding the use of cookies in the EU, US, Australia and Canada. UK firms have, of course, had to adopt the EU’s GDPR regulations and these will remain part of UK law after Brexit.

How can you best plan ahead?

Of course, Google Analytics is just one of the tools we would use when helping develop a startegy. For example, using SEO analysis tools to find popular keywords can be the best way of establishing how your rivals are doing and how they optimise content.

Nonetheless, by using Google Analytics you can compare how your strategy was doing when you first gathered data with how it is performing once you have made changes.

How BeUniqueness can help

At BeUniqueness, we are all about developing digital marketing tactics and branding strategies, whether from scratch or by taking existing initiatives to the next level. Google Analytics is an important tool we can use to help you gain a much better return on investment in your marketing efforts.

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