One of the great things about advertising on the Internet is the ability to track your results. With any marketing plan, it’s important to be able to see if the marketing plan is working. If your law firm has a website it is important to have a web analytics program installed on your website. Web analytics basically measures visitor behavior on a website. Having a “counter” on your website is not even close to enough to track results. With a good web analytics program installed on your website, you can track:

Why is all this important? Let me break it down for you.

Number of visitors: This is important to know to see how many visitors are coming to your website. Is it 20 a month? 200? 1000? You need to know how much traffic your site is getting. If you aren’t picking up any new cases from the Internet it may be because you’re not getting very much traffic to your site.

Number of UNIQUE (new) visitors: This is one of the most important stats. How many new visitors are finding your site each month? Repeat visitors are great, but for law firms that are looking to generate business on a regular basis from the Internet, new visits are especially important.

What keywords are people using to find your website?: These stats will tell you if people are finding your site for targeted search terms that are bringing you the type of visitors that are actually looking for a lawyer.Additionally, these statistics can give you ideas for other ways to improve traffic. For example, not every searching for a personal injury lawyer is going to type in (ex.) “Miami personal injury lawyer”. Many type in “auto accident lawyer” or “dog bite attorney”, meaning often time people type in a specific term related to their problem. This is important to know if you want to grow your business.

What search engine were you found on? You want to know what search engine you’re being found on right? You’ll notice that for the most part, you will only see referrals from 3 different search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN. If not, your site has a problem since these 3 search engines provide roughly 90% of website traffic. If you’re not getting traffic from Google, you really are missing out.

What other websites sent you traffic? If you pay to list in certain web directories such as Findlaw, Yellowpages.com or Lawyers.com, you should know if these websites are sending you traffic. Especially if your paying big bucks to be in those directories. Knowing these stats will help you in determining whether or not you want to renew your directory listings.

How many pages per visit your visitors are averaging: This can be a very telling statistic. If your stats show your visitors are averaging 1.5 pages per visit, that typically means that your website design is poor and is not compelling enough to keep visitors on your site. It could also mean that a visitor can’t find the information they’re looking for on the page they visited. You really want to see at least 2-3 pages per visit which shows that people are interested in reading other pages of your site.

How long the average visit to your site is: Again, a very telling statistic. If people are leaving in less than a minute, their not staying to read your content. This is typically due to a poor or outdated web design or a lack of high quality content on your site.

What pages in your site are the most visited?: Finding out which pages of your site are the most visited can help you improve different things on those pages to help you improve conversions. Getting a visitor is great but if they don’t call or email you as a result of that visit, then it means nothing to your bottom line. Your most visited pages should be the strongest pages in terms of their ability to convert your web visitors into a potential client.

There’s even more that web analytics can do, but these are some of my favorite things that a web analytics program can do. If you don’t have a web stats program on your website, GET ONE!