This post is part of The Legal Marketing Malpractice Files, a series about the things that can derail legal marketing and some of the things marketing providers sometimes do that quietly hurt the law firms paying them.
When I ask a managing partner how the firm’s marketing is going what I often get is an opinion.
“Pretty well, I think.” “We get calls.” “Our numbers are up.” “Our agency says our rankings have improved.”
But when I ask a different question instead — what did the marketing produce last month? How many qualified consultations? How many signed cases? At what cost per case?
That is usually where the conversation falters.
In years of auditing law firm marketing systems, a common problem I find is unmeasured marketing — especially in the terms that matter the most for law firms and their growth.
All of this while firms are spending real money with no concrete insights about what it produces. Often because nobody ever defined what to track or set up the tools to track it before jumping into “doing marketing”.
So the marketing might be working. Or it might not be. But nobody actually knows, including the people running it.
However, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. And you can’t track what you don’t define.
Often law firms are trained to focus on the wrong metrics (rankings, impressions, traffic, etc.). All those are good but they should be seen as the means to the end that those firms actually want, and not the end in themselves.
So, let me walk through what law firms are usually shown instead of measurement, what the numbers that actually matter look like, and how to check your own measurement in a few minutes.
The Metrics That Look Good in a Report
I speak with lots of attorneys who have agency relationships or are on the big legal marketing platforms, and they keep telling me the same thing: they get a report every month, and they still can’t tell if any of it produced a single case.
Open a typical monthly marketing report sent to a law firm and you will find the same cast of characters. Traffic. Impressions. Rankings. You rank for more keywords than last month. Your visibility score improved. There may be a chart with an arrow pointing high into the sky.
To be clear, none of those metrics is irrelevant. They are real measurements of real things. The problem is what they measure.
Every one of them describes activity somewhere upstream of your business, but none of them tells you whether the marketing produced what you actually pay for — clients and cases.
A firm can rank for hundreds of keywords and still struggle to sign quality cases. Traffic can double while consultations stay flat, because the traffic is made up of students, job seekers, and people three states away. Impressions can climb forever, because an impression only means Google displayed your page somewhere, to someone, for some query.
These metrics dominate marketing reports for a simple reason. They are easy to produce, they almost always go up if you spend enough, and they look impressive during a review call. They let a provider demonstrate activity without ever answering the harder question: how many of these numbers became signed cases?
Upstream metrics have their place. Rankings and traffic are useful diagnostics, the way blood pressure is a useful diagnostic. But nobody confuses good blood pressure with the reason you went to the doctor. When the diagnostic numbers become the whole report, something has gone wrong with what is being measured, or with what someone would prefer you didn’t measure.
The Place for Rankings and Impressions
Now, to be fair, there is a legitimate place for rankings, impressions, and the rest of the activity metrics. That place is usually the beginning.
At the outset of a marketing endeavor, especially for a new firm or one that has been performing terribly, the outcomes cannot show up first. A firm that is invisible in search will not sign cases from search this month. Before the consultations can arrive, the machine has to start turning.
Pages get indexed, rankings climb, traffic builds, and then the phone starts to ring. In those early months, activity metrics are the evidence that the work is taking hold. Watching a ranking climb from position 20 to number 1 is meaningful, because number 1 is where the clients are
In that stage, a report that leads with visibility numbers is fine. Expected, even. Those are the leading indicators, and leading indicators are how you steer before the outcomes exist.
But leading indicators come with an expiration date. Their whole job is to predict outcomes. Rankings matter because they are supposed to become traffic. Traffic matters because it is supposed to become consultations. And consultations matter because they are supposed to become signed cases. If the outcomes never show up, the prediction failed, and continuing to celebrate the predictor is just noise.
So the question is not whether rankings and impressions belong in a report. It is whether the report grows up.
Six months in, the conversation should be shifting from “look how the visibility is climbing” to “here is what it produced.” A year or more into a campaign, if the report still leads with impressions and the cases are not coming in, something is wrong.
Either the marketing is not working, or nobody ever connected it to outcomes. Both are problems.
You cannot be crowing about rankings, traffic, and impressions years after launching a campaign if the cases are not arriving with them. At that point, the activity metrics have stopped being leading indicators and started being the product.
The Long-Term Cost of Chasing Vanity Metrics
It would be one thing if focusing on the wrong metrics were merely unhelpful. It can be worse than that. It has costs, and they grow the longer it goes on. Some of them show up on a credit card statement. The more dangerous ones don’t.
The Direct Financial Cost
Start with advertising, because that is where the waste is most visible once you look.
A campaign optimized for clicks and impressions will happily spend your budget on people who will never hire you. Job seekers. Students researching a paper. People looking for free legal help. People outside your jurisdiction.
In legal markets where a click can cost hundreds of dollars, a handful of irrelevant clicks a day is a serious leak, and it recurs every month the campaign runs.
It gets worse with automation. Modern ad platforms optimize toward whatever you tell them counts as success.
Tell them a page view is a conversion, and the algorithm will get very good at finding people who view pages and leave. You are not just wasting this month’s budget. You are training the machine, with your own money, to fetch more of the wrong audience next month.
That is the financial cost, and it is the fixable one. Money measured is money recoverable. The accumulating costs are harder to claw back.
The Costs That Build Quietly Over Time
Optimize for rankings and traffic long enough, and you don’t just measure the wrong things. You build the wrong things.
You grow the wrong audience. Content aimed at whatever ranks easily attracts researchers, students, and the mildly curious. Your traffic charts climb, your retargeting lists fill, maybe your email list grows, and little of it is made of people who will ever hire a lawyer. Years of “audience building” can produce an audience with no buyers in it.
You rank for terms that don’t influence hiring decisions. There is a difference between the searches people run when writing a paper and the searches people run when they need a lawyer this week. A firm can hold the number 1 position for a dozen informational terms and never see a case from any of them, while the handful of hiring-intent searches that actually produce clients belong to a competitor.
And real problems stay invisible for years. This may be the most expensive one. If consultations are not measured, a broken intake process never looks broken. If conversions are not tracked, a trust deficit — an outdated site, thin reviews, no proof of results — never shows up in any report.
Traffic can look healthy while would-be clients arrive, hesitate, and quietly hire someone else. Every month that goes undiagnosed is a month of cases lost for good, because those clients don’t come back once they have signed elsewhere.
Add it all up and the real price of vanity metrics is time. The years spent building the wrong asset don’t refund. Meanwhile, a competitor who measured spent those same years finding what signs cases and doing more of it. That gap doesn’t close on its own, and it gets more expensive to close the longer it is ignored.
The Numbers That Actually Run a Law Firm
Here is what measurement looks like when it is built around the business instead of the dashboard.
How many qualified consultations did marketing produce last month?
Consultations with people who have the kinds of cases you take, in the places you practice, with the ability to hire you.
A hundred calls that produce four consultations is a very different result than forty calls that produce twelve.
How many of those consultations became signed cases?
This is the number the whole system exists to produce, and it is the number most reports never mention.
It also exposes problems the upstream metrics hide. If consultations are plentiful and signings are rare, your marketing may be fine and your intake broken, and no amount of additional traffic will fix that.
What did each signed case cost, by channel?
When you know that search produced cases at one cost, ads at another, and directories at a third, budget decisions stop being guesswork. You move money toward what signs cases and away from what merely produces clicks.
Without cost per case, a budget conversation is just two people trading feelings.
Is the pipeline consistent?
One great month proves little. What matters is whether qualified consultations arrive predictably, month after month, so the firm can staff, plan, and grow against something dependable rather than lurching between feast and famine.
You’ll notice what these numbers have in common. Every one of them connects marketing spend to business outcomes. And every one of them requires actual measurement infrastructure to know, which is exactly why only the best-run firms have ever seen them.
You Can’t Track What You Don’t Define
Before any tool can measure your marketing, someone has to decide what counts. This is the step most firms skip, and skipping it quietly breaks everything downstream.
What should your firm be growing visibility for? Which practice areas, which locations, and above all, which kinds of cases?
Not all cases are equal, and every firm knows the difference between the cases it takes and the cases it wants more of. Define the cases you want, and measurement gets a purpose — tracking which channels bring those specifically, not just which channels bring phone calls.
A firm that never defines this ends up celebrating rankings for keywords that will never produce a client it wants.
What counts as a conversion? This question sounds technical and is actually the whole game. I have reviewed setups where the “conversions” being reported were page views, time on site, and scroll depth.
Someone reading forty percent of a blog post is not a conversion.
A phone call, a completed contact form, a booked consultation: those are real conversions. If your reports show conversion numbers, ask what specifically is being counted. The answer is sometimes eye-opening.
And what is the target? “More” is not a target. A firm that wants to grow needs a number. Specific consultations per month, cases per quarter, an acceptable cost per signed case.
Targets are what turn a report from a weather forecast into a scoreboard.
Once those definitions exist, the infrastructure to track them is not exotic.
- Analytics configured so conversions mean calls and forms, not scroll depth.
- Call tracking that records which channel made the phone ring.
- An intake process that asks every new client how they found you and writes the answer down, so signed cases can be traced back to their source.
Those are just a few examples and none of this is advanced. It just has to be deliberately set up, and someone has to be accountable for it.
One more thing, and readers of this series will see it coming. This measurement infrastructure should belong to your firm — the analytics, the call tracking account, the intake data, etc. If you have to ask someone’s permission to see your own numbers, you have a different problem first. Verification should never require trust.
How to Check Your Own Measurement in Minutes
You do not need a consultant for this. You need your last marketing report and four questions.
First, read the report and sort every number into two piles: activity or outcome.
Traffic, impressions, rankings, and visibility scores are activity. Consultations, signed cases, and cost per case are outcomes.
If the outcome pile is empty, your marketing is being reported to you in activity only, and nobody currently knows whether it works. That includes whoever is sending the report.
Second, ask what counts as a conversion in your analytics. If the answer includes scroll depth, time on site, or page views, your conversion numbers are decorative.
Third, pick one recent signed case and try to trace it backward. Where did that client actually come from? If the answer is “we’re not sure,” multiply that uncertainty across every case and every dollar of marketing spend.
Fourth, ask what the target is. If nobody can state the number the marketing is supposed to hit, then no report can ever show whether it is succeeding, and every review call is a vibes meeting.
If the answers to those four questions aren’t great, you don’t necessarily have a marketing problem. You have a measurement problem. And that comes first, because until it is fixed, nobody can tell you whether the marketing is working, least of all the people being paid to do it.
What Good Measurement Looks Like
A firm with real measurement in place knows things other firms guess at. It knows how many qualified consultations arrived last month and from where. It knows which channels sign cases and what each case costs. It knows its targets and whether it is hitting them. Its monthly report leads with outcomes, uses activity metrics as supporting diagnostics, and draws from accounts the firm can log into and verify independently.
And something changes in the relationship with whoever does the marketing, whether that is a provider or your own team. Conversations stop being about effort and start being about results. Budget decisions get made on cost per case instead of enthusiasm. Underperforming channels get caught in months instead of years. The marketing gets better, not because anyone works harder, but because for the first time everyone can see what is actually happening.
Data does not flatter anyone, and that is exactly what makes it useful. A firm that measures knows where it is behind, by how much, and against whom. That is a fixable position. The unfixable position is not knowing.
The Question to Ask
If you have followed this series, you can see the thread by now. Own your accounts, so nobody can hold your marketing hostage. Check your index, so you know what Google kept of what you paid for. And measure your results, so you know whether any of it is producing clients. Own it, check it, measure it.
So here is this week’s version of the question: what did your marketing actually produce last month? Not impressions or rankings. Consultations and cases.
If you can answer with a number, you are ahead of most firms. If you can’t, the fix starts with measurement, not with more marketing.
If you want a second set of eyes on what your reports are really telling you, I do this kind of review with law firms regularly. You can book a strategy session here. No pitch. Just a straight conversation about what your marketing is producing, what it isn’t, and what’s possible.