Inquiries > Traffic

Gyi Tsakalakis
April 24, 2018

Here's a recent issue that came up in a private Facebook community of agency owners:

Analytics Question:

We recently lost a client (more accurately, they were 6 months behind in payment, so I took their site down - they subsequently hired a big box firm to rebuild their site and relaunched.) Stupidly, their big box provider didn't remove us from analytics access and I've been cruising results:

We've seen a 44% decline in their traffic since relaunch (see image below.) BUT.... their reported SEO traffic has jumped significantly. Some digging shows that this was, what we believe, a reallocation of "Direct" to "SEO". Some traffic previously showing up as direct was clearly not direct - i.e. no one would directly load specific pages on car accidents. We've seen this pattern with other clients - i.e. believing SEO traffic is incorrectly being allocated as direct. Our new hypothesis is that taking down the site and then having a new agency relaunch it - reset the GA code somehow and therefore its now accurately recognizing traffic and we are considering removing GA from all our sites for 24 hours and then reinstalling.

Any better suggestions/explanation? Anyone seen anything like this before? Here's the before/after GA report. (adding the screenshot that shows an increase in SEO traffic....)

There are a variety of possible explanations for this. My guess is intentional referral spam (call me cynical). Put plainly, some SEO shops will "fake traffic data" to make it look like they're doing a better job than they actually are. While there are ways to combat this tactic, at the end of the day, this is why you can't measure performance solely by traffic. Instead, you have measure inquiries, and ultimately, fees to their sources.

Inquiries from potential clients and fees simply can't be faked (well, I suppose they could be, but they're much easier to sniff-out).

If you suspect that your legal marketing agency is pulling this crap, don't hesitate to reach out, we'd be happy to take a look.

It is critically important to define the web marketing metrics that matter to your firm at the beginning of any engagement with a vendor or consultant. The easiest way to tell if someone is "legit" is to get them talking about how they will measure the success of their activities. If they're reluctant to have this conversation, move on. If they define success solely in quantitative terms (i.e. number of posts, links, likes, etc), move on.

If they're talking business metrics, including:

  • Fees by source
  • Clients by source
  • Return on ad spend

They're moving in the right direction.

Ultimately, they should be asking a lot of questions about who your target client is and how your practice "works" (i.e. how you do intake, follow-up, etc).

If you're solely receiving ranking reports, top-level traffic reports, or twitter follower counts, it's time to reevaluate your relationship with the people marketing your practice.

Gyi Tsakalakis
Co-Founder of AttorneySync
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Let's Discuss Your Growth

Helping law firms grow profitably with digital marketing and can prove it.

Barry Conybeare

We are so impressed with AttorneySync and their digital marketing services. We started with an audit of our digital presence and hired them thereafter. Fixes to the website and other platforms quickly followed and we have seen a substantial increase in online traffic, new client calls, and new client contracts. Strongly recommend AttorneySync!

Let's Talk

How can we help?

More From Our Blog

June 8, 2023
On Local Law Firm SEO Rank Tracking and Reporting

Over the years, law firm prospects have sent us reports from just about all of our competitors. Unfortunately, even today, some law firm marketing agencies still mislead their clients via "reporting." One particularly egregious example comes in the form of ranking reports. Which prompted this LinkedIn post. To my surprise, I received a lot of […]

Read More
June 7, 2023
On Attribution

John Wanamaker supposedly said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." In an an effort to figure out "what half is working," attribution was born. Coupled with a transition from traditional, offline ads to digital media, attribution became the holy grail for analyzing advertising spends. But […]

Read More
March 22, 2023
I asked ChatGPT to Recommend a Personal Injury Law Firm

I recently asked ChatGPT, "What are some of the top personal injury law firms in Chicago?? Actually, first I ask "who are some of the top personal injury lawyers in Chicago?" ChatGPT couldn't handle that one, so I modified the prompt. ChatGPT listed five very well-known firms downtown. Can you guess the other four? That's […]

Read More
February 17, 2023
My Take on Google Search's Guidance on AI-Generated Content & Law Firm SEO

If you're like me, you have some degree of AI, ChatGBT, Bard, exhaustion. Now don't get me wrong, this is stuff is remarkable and is changing, well, a lot. But before you hook up the ChatGPT API to your WordPress API and crank out 10,000 pages, here are a few things to think about. Let's […]

Read More
February 16, 2023
Google Adds New SEO Best Practices for Links

If you know me, you know my opinions about links and SEO advice from Google. If you don't, here's the TL;DR: Meh, links! Meaning, all things being equal, links still remain a competitive difference maker for ranking. Take Google's SEO advice with several grains of salt. Google has no economic incentive to help your site […]

Read More
February 1, 2023
Authenticity & Engagement

The best marketing advice I can give you is to be authentic. Of course, you don't find that very helpful in terms of meeting your growth goals. So, you might decide to game the system. As I'm writing this, one of the more popular ways to gain the system is to pay for engagement. This […]

Read More
January 19, 2023
ChatGPT for Legal Marketing

The following post was written by ChatGPT. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a state-of-the-art language model that can generate human-like text based on a given prompt or context. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way that businesses, including law firms, market themselves to potential clients. One way that a law firm could use […]

Read More
May 26, 2022
SEO Expectations for Law Firms

How long does SEO take? When can I expect to see results? What results should I expect to see? These are all reasonable questions that we field from lawyers every day. And, like many legal answers, the answer is: It depends. Yes, I know that's not the answer you wanted. But it's the most honest […]

Read More
May 6, 2022
Who Should Do Marketing?

And how much time should they spend doing it? I recently had the privilege of chatting with Tyson, Jim, and Conrad for an upcoming episode of The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. If you're not familiar with The Maximum Lawyer community, you should definitely check it out. Jim asked a really great question about who should do […]

Read More

Let's Discuss

Questions or comments? Let's discuss on social!
envelope
linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram