More Traffic. Web Traffic Analytics for Law Firm

Everything About Web Traffic Analytics

Up to 95 percent of visitors to your law firm website may not comment, inquire, or do anything else as a result of their visit—they just click on your website, then disappear. How can you find out more about this silent majority of customers? Using web page analytics can help you figure out where your traffic is coming from and how to convert more page views into paying clients. Web traffic analytics doesn't have to be tedious: with the right attitude and the right web analytics dashboard, you may be surprised at how easy it is to understand the traffic for your firm's website.

Start With Your Goals for Web Page Analytics

While it can certainly be interesting to tinker with a web analytics dashboard in order to get a better idea of what's going on with your website, the best web traffic analytics depend on having strong goals before you start. Obviously your end goal is to get new clients with your web page analytics, but what do you actually want to analyze?

Your goals should depend on what kind of advertising you already use to drive traffic to your website. For example, let's say that the majority of clients who contact you from your website arrive because of a pay per click ad campaign. You'll want to use web traffic analytics to determine which of your ad groups and keywords are generating the best client leads.

Web page analytics for websites that primarily have a search engine optimization strategy will usually have different goals. Your web analytics dashboard may reveal that one of your pages sees significantly more traffic than another, due to a high page rank for a term that is in demand with your target market. Web traffic analytics will make it easier for you to identify the best SEO terms for your firm's marketing to focus on.

Your Web Analytics Dashboard

When you first get started with any new web page analytics tool, it's a good idea to familiarize yourself with the dashboard. A web analytics dashboard is how you'll interact with a web traffic analysis tool, and while every dashboard is different, they share some key information.

This dashboard is showing web page analytics for a full year. Let's start by looking at some of the key terms involved in these web traffic analytics and what they mean. Visits just means how many unique people (or computers) have visited your website in a certain amount of time.

You'll notice that this web analytics dashboard shows over 62,000 pageviews and only 16,000 visits. Dividing these two numbers gets you your average pages per visit—about 3.9. What we can see from the top several numbers in the web analytics dashboard is that the average potential client who sees this website visits for about 3 and a half minutes, and looks at four web pages in that time.

Every web page analytics service offers a different dashboard with different information. The best way to familiarize yourself with the specifics of your service's web analytics dashboard is to just play around with its various reporting features. Try to find out where your web traffic is coming from, and what search engines seem to be generating the most clients for your firm.

Web Page Analytics Services

Deciding which web traffic analytics service to use depends on your needs and—to put it simply—your comfort level. Think very carefully about whether you consider yourself to be a beginner to web page analytics or a more advanced user. If you're just starting out, you may want to use one of the more basic web traffic analytics tools, with a great deal of information online about these tools in case you get stuck or aren't sure what to do with the data you find on your web analytics dashboard.

If you're an advanced user, choosing a web page analytics service will depend on your goals. Some web traffic analytics tools focus very strongly on maximizing page views through your advertising, while others emphasize conversions. You may want to use a basic web analytics dashboard to figure out where your greatest strengths and weaknesses are, then pick another web page analytics tool that will help you arrive at your goals.

On-Site and Off-Site Web Page Analytics

There are two different types of web traffic analytics you may have heard a lot about—on-site and off-site. But what's really the difference, and which is more useful? Off-site web page analytics try to help you get information about potential clients and how people online are interacting with similar websites. On-site web traffic analytics look at how visitors behave once they're on your website.

While you may want to know more about what potential clients are doing before they arrive at your website, the truth is that on-site web page analytics are usually much more robust and can drive traffic better than off-site analytics. It's important to look at your own website before analyzing your close competitors and looking at the demographic information that off-site web traffic analytics usually includes.

How To Learn More About Web Traffic Analytics

It's not always easy to understand the tools you can use to analyze your website. If you're new to web page analytics, you may want to look for online seminars that can teach you how to use the tools you have. If you are using a leading web analytics dashboard like Google or Yahoo, there are many online tutorials that can guide you through the numbers you see and explain what they mean.

You may also want to sign up for classes. Classes with an experienced instructor are one of the best ways to ensure that you understand how to get the most out of your web analytics dashboard. If you've been having problems understanding web tutorials, classes are a great way to interact with an instructor and ask the questions you've needed to ask.