Offline Conversion Imports for Law Firms

People who click on your ads don't always hire you directly. Instead, many legal services consumers begin a client journey that ultimately leads to an offline client retainer, such as at your office or over the phone. By importing offline conversions, you can measure what happens in the offline world after your ad results in a click or call to your law firm. Here's a helpful video from Google:

Importing your law firm's offline conversion events provides a much more comprehensive and meaningful look at which keywords and targeting criteria (for example, geography or time of day) drive the most valuable clients. This data can help you target and optimize your campaigns for increased efficiency.

If you attract potential client leads online, you might want to record a conversion in the following cases:

• When you sign a new client offline (for example, over the phone or in-person) and track this sale in your client relationship management (CRM) tool.
• Distinguish between whether it is a new or a former client.
• When you sign a new client online but are unable to use standard JavaScript-based conversion tracking solutions.

As you probably experience at your own firm, not every client journey is a linear click, call, client. In fact, my hunch is that most of your clients don't follow that direct path. Further, if you believe that they do, it's more likely that you've got holes in your conversion tracking data.

If you're in the process of evaluating law firm CRM solutions and practice management tools, be sure to ask whether you are able to implement offline conversion imports for Google Ads (at the time of writing, I understand that Lawmatics does).

Many law firms rely on the Google Ads traditional conversion tracking tool. Unfortunately, without importing offline conversions, they're only getting part of the picture with respect to how their advertising dollars are performing. In fact, many law firm Google Ads accounts we review don't have conversion tracking set up or have it misconfigured. This can create a serious misinformation and attribution issue with respect to what media dollars are actually turning into new fees for the firm.

I would encourage you to discuss the possibility of implementing offline conversion imports with your law firm's legal marketing team or digital marketing agency. I can't stress enough the value that this more comprehensive picture of your advertising performance delivers in terms of meeting key business metrics like target cost per client and return on ad spend.