Google Analytics (GA) is Google’s free analytics platform that allows website owners to the volume and sources of online traffic. Equipped with many helpful tools, like User Demographics, Goal Tracking, and Time on Page, GA provides insight into how your website is performing.
This is particularly beneficial for law firms that relay on digital marketing and search engines (namely, Google) to drive traffic and leads. When it comes to measuring your marketing performance, knowledge is power, and GA provides the wealth of information needed to determine whether your marketing efforts are paying off!
Discover the many benefits of Google Analytics for your law firm, and how to leverage the platform to improve your marketing.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a data analytics platform that tracks the source, location, and quantity of traffic (“users”) visiting your website. Owned by Google, GA allows website owners to analyze their website traffic, identify trends in user behavior, track goals (like form completions), and generate reports that capture website performance.
GA is industry agnostic, meaning any time of business owner, website owner, or blogger can use it. There can be some learning curve to understanding GA, but once you do, you’ll appreciate the wealth of data and tools to analyze how your marketing is (or is not) working for your brand.
Google Analytics has gone through several iterations, but the latest version, GA4, includes updated dashboards, metrics, and tools. Starting in July of 2024, legacy Universal Analytics (UA; the old version) users) were transitioned to GA4.
How Google Analytics (GA4 Version) Works
GA4 as an analytics platform is focused on privacy, user journeys, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) -driven insights. It takes a more “event-based” (in terms of conversion tracking) approach compared to the session-based approach of UA, offering a more detailed view of user behavior.
Here’s how it works:
- 1 – Tracking: GA4 tracks interactions on and visitors to your website. Each interaction a user has with your website is tagged as an “event”.
- 2 – Events: Events can be automatic (like first visit), enhanced (like scroll tracking), recommended (like ad clicks), or custom (user-defined for specific interactions). Events might also include page views, button clicks, purchases, etc.
- 3 – User Journeys: GA4 organizes data by “users” (individual website visitors and how they navigate your site). It creates a “user journey” timeline that shows each event logged during a visitor’s time on your site, from the first visit to the most recent interaction.
- 4 – Predictive Metrics: By using machine/AI learning models, GA4 can generate predictive metrics, such as the likelihood of a user making a purchase or returning within the next seven days. This can help you anticipate how future visitors might act on your site, what action they will take, etc.
- 5 – Analysis Hub: Data flows in real time into GA4’s Analysis Hub. This is where you can set up custom reports. Unlike preset reports, you can build “explorations” that capture specifics, like user behavior paths, sales funnels, etc.
If this seems complicated, don’t worry; you don’t have to understand all the technical ins and outs of how GA works. Where GA really benefits law firms is in understanding where your traffic is coming from and whether they end up contacting you to inquire about legal services!
Benefits of Google Analytics for Law Firms
Individual legal professionals and law firms can all benefit from using Google Analytics. Basically, if you are doing any type of marketing and/or have a website, you should be reviewing your traffic and using this data to inform your marketing strategy.
Understand Visitor Behavior and Interests
GA shows how visitors navigate your site, which pages they visit most, how long they stay, and where they drop off. For a legal practice, this can can highlight which services users are most interested in and what content they enjoy most. You can also track blog posts or resource pages attract the most visits. This can help you adjust your content/blogging strategy to cover more topics that your prospective clients are interested in.
Track Traffic Sources (What’s Working Well?)
Google Analytics tracks the success of your different marketing channels (e.g., paid search, social media, email, etc.). Knowing which channels generate the most traffic, leads, or inquiries allows you to focus on the highest-performing platforms!
Measure Client Conversions
In GA, you can set up conversion tracking, i.e. “goals”. Set up conversion goals (like form submissions or phone calls) to measure how well each campaign converts visitors into leads. This will help you assess the return on your marketing efforts!
Assess Mobile vs Desktop Traffic
Many prospective clients search for legal services on their mobile devices. Google Analytics shows what percentage of traffic comes from mobile vs desktop. Knowing this, you can make sure your website is optimized for a seamless mobile experience.
Improve Client Acquisition
With GA, law firms can track where their visitors are coming from (e.g., Google search, direct visits, social media) and which channels result in new leads. This helps legal professionals assess the effectiveness of each source in bringing in potential clients.
Get Started with Google Analytics
If you have a website, you NEED Google Analytics! Setting your site up with GA is relatively easy. Just follow these steps:
1
Create a new Google account (if you don’t have one) or go to analytics.google.com and sign in with an existing Google account.
2
Click "Start measuring" and enter details like your business name and preferred data-sharing settings. (Note: If you’re managing multiple sites, keep account and property names specific to each for easy identification.)
3
After creating your account, you’ll need to set up a property, which is the specific website or app you want to track. Enter your website’s name, URL, industry category, and time zone.
4
Select GA4: Google Analytics now defaults to GA4, which provides advanced features like event tracking and cross-platform analytics.
5
Choose the platform for your data stream: Web, iOS, or Android.
6
For websites, enter the URL and stream name, then click Create stream.
7
GA4 will generate a unique Measurement ID for your stream.
8
Copy the Global Site Tag (gtag.js) code that GA4 provides. This code will allow GA to collect data from your site.
9
Add this code snippet to the header of every page you want to track. If you’re using a website builder (like WordPress), check if it has a built-in field to add GA code or use a plugin. For custom sites, paste the code directly into the
section of your HTML. (You might decide to work with a Developer to help you with this!)10
Once the code is installed, go back to your Google Analytics dashboard and navigate to Real-Time Reports.
11
Browse your site and check that your actions are appearing in real-time reports. This confirms that the data is flowing correctly!
Setting up Google Analytics can be a little tricky, and the success of your GA tracking depends on you getting actual traffic! At Hennessey Digital, we help legal professionals and law firms get more traffic (and measure it!) with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Website Development services.
Managing a legal practice is a full time job. Let us take the responsibilities of marketing off of your plate with effective, professional law firm marketing services. And if you need GA set up, we can help with that!
