When it comes to law firm marketing, your website analytics is crucial. Yet, most law firms don’t ever consider it.
Whilst at Practice Proof we often can inherit law firms who come to us with a high website bounce rate, before diagnosis, the metric needs to be fully considered amid a myriad of others.
What are bounce rates?
It is the percentage of single-page visits (or web sessions) or in other words, it is the percentage of visits in which a person leaves your law firm’s website from the landing page without browsing any further.
Is a High Bounce Rate a Bad Thing?
Not necessarily. For example, if you’re a personal injury law firm and your marketing is predicated on Adwords, then your agency may be funneling inquiries from the ad to your contact page. In this case, it’s likely that potential clients are pulling your phone number promptly from your website, leaving it, then calling your firm. So, in this example, it may not be such a bad thing. That said, there are better ways of funneling Adwords traffic so your data from organic search isn’t being influenced or corrupted by these visits.
Is a Low Bounce Rate a Good Thing?
At Practice Proof, we like to see a bounce rate between 40 – 55%. That’s our objective, but in some cases, we have worked with law firms that are recording a bounce rate of less than 10%. At first blush, you can form the impression that this website has incredible engagement, but invariably we find that it’s the case of inaccurate data caused by a misconfiguration of Google Analytics within the website. More specifically, it’s usually that the meta script supplied by Google has been entered into the website either incorrectly and not across all pages, or conversely, the script has been duplicated.
How Does Your Law Firm Improve Bounce Rates
Bounce rate can be rubbery and shouldn’t be considered in isolation as a metric of success of your law firm marketing. Instead, consider it as an opportunity of drilling down on specific pages and blogs or pages that hold dynamic media like podcasts and videos and ascertain in more detail what’s user engagement like on the relevant page. For example, if your law firm is an estate planning practice, and the heavy arsenal that you want to convert potential clients into clients is your content relating to testamentary trusts, then it’s likely that you may not want to see a high bounce rate on these pages, unless of course, you have a strong call to action early in the content flow that triggers them to call or be diverted to an appointment setting page.
Conversely, a low bounce rate and little conversion may mean that your content is informative, but doesn’t map out the next step for the potential client.
In closing, in considering bounce rate there are of course other metrics you can apply alongside it that will provide a more rounded view. But essentially, aiming at a bounce rate throughout your website of between 40 – 55% is a great start, followed by consideration of your conversion pages.
Need help better understanding what’s happening in your law firm’s data, contact Practice Proof.
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Dan Toombs
Lawyer & Founder, Practice Proof
Dan Toombs is a lawyer, law reformer and founder of Practice Proof. Admitted in 1997, he built his first career inside the legal profession — practising law, leading legal organisations and driving law reform — before building the marketing, technology and AI practice he has now run exclusively for law firms for 20 years.
In that time, Dan and his team have helped law firms grow from single offices into multi-office and national practices, ASX-listed brands and acquisition targets. That experience gives Practice Proof an unusually deep understanding of both sides of law firm growth: what happens inside a legal practice, and what it takes commercially to make one grow.
Thomson Reuters featured his law-firm marketing advice as early as 2014, on positioning firms to win business online, websites and social media. He is also the founder of FirmRanker, which researches how AI systems discover and recommend law firms. Dan is a Winston Churchill Fellow and Australia Leadership Award recipient, with national recognition for his work in law and human rights.
If you want to know what 20 years of growing law firms could bring to yours, talk to Dan and the Practice Proof team.