If you want to track the performance of your marketing and advertising campaigns, you should track phone calls to your firm by source. This doesn't mean asking potential clients, "How did you find us," during an intake. While that still may be a useful practice, it simply doesn't provide reliable, granular data on how potential clients are finding you.

Here are some things to consider in implementing a system that tracks phone calls to your firm by source.

Tracking Calls from Your Law Firm's Website

To me, the best option for tracking calls from your firm's website is something like the following implementation:

• Primary Top-of-Page Call-to-Action: Dynamic Number Insertion
• Footer: Name, Address, Local Phone Number (ported into call tracking software) with JSON-LD.
• Dedicated High-Visibility Tracking Numbers (i.e. homepage meta descriptions, some campaign landing pages, etc).

Ideally, you want to drive attention to your primary call-to-action. For example, maybe you offer "Free Consultations." This offer should appear prominently at the top of every page. The tracking number should be generated dynamically. Put simply, this will help you understand the caller's source (i.e. where they came from) and conversion page (where they were on your site when they called). Most quality call tracking services offer dynamic number insertion. At the risk of turning this post into an ad for CallRail, for many of you, it will be the best option for this type of implementation.

If you've been following the local SEO space, you're undoubtedly familiar with the concept of NAP consistency. For the uninitiated, this means that your firm's Name, Address, and local Phone (NAP) information are consistent across the web. This plays "some role" in how search engines will show your firm in search results. It's also important for people, you don't want folks calling the wrong number or traveling to the wrong address.

In my experience, it's sufficient to include NAP information in the footer of every page of your website. I also recommend that you include JSON-LD for "Legal Service."

If you're paying attention, you probably recognize that this implementation presents at least some risk relating to search engines getting confused by the primary tracking numbers, as well as, leakage via calls to the footer number. You would be right. However, in my experience, these risks are minimal. Furthermore, on balance, the benefit of the data you get from this implementation far-exceeds the potential risks. Obviously, you need to make a choice that works for your firm.

Finally, you should also consider dedicated tracking numbers in key spots on your site. For example, we've been testing using dedicated tracking numbers in certain pages' meta descriptions.

This allows you to see whether your audience is calling your firm from the description in search results. The reason that this becomes important relates to call attribution. Put simply, if people are calling before they click, those inquiries won't be tracked in Google Analytics, AdWords, and Search Console data. This becomes particularly important in tracking Google My Business performance.

Speaking of Google My Business, at the time of writing, I'm suggesting that you use a dedicated call-tracking number in the primary phone number field and your local phone number (ideally ported into call tracking system) in the alternative number field. This will allow you to more reliably track calls placed via your Google My Business listing (i.e. local pack listing).

If you use CallRail and follow the implementation I've suggested, you get pretty charts like this:

Now you can measure calls to your law firm by source! If you connect these calls to clients and fees, and you can measure things like return on marketing investment by channel and return on ad spend by campaign! In other words, you can measure the value of the time and money you spend on client development in, you know, actual dollars.

If you have questions or issues about call tracking, hit us up in the comments.