The biggest web question for small-firm lawyers today isn't whether to have a homepage - just about every lawyer who wants a place online has one by now - but rather how to evaluate whether that website is effective.
Forget about counters that track the number of "hits" your site has - this is the most primitive form of traffic analysis and really doesn't tell you much about whether the website is really bringing in business. These days, tracking software can provide a treasure trove of information you can use to monitor exactly how people are interacting with your site. In addition to the number of visits, this software can tell you:
Where visitors come from on the Internet and how they find you.
How many return visitors you have and how often they come to your site.
What types of people visit your site.
Which pages the visitors like best. Which pages on your site visitors return to and where they stay longest.
Where they exit your site.
How many unique visitors come compared to return visitors
time of day people tend to visit your site.
The good news is, it's easy (not to mention kind of fun) to track this sort of activity. And if you're not doing it yet, experts say you'd better start.
"You can invest huge amounts of money and time promoting your website, but you need to know where your traffic is coming from to make it effective," said Curtis Stevens, an Internet marketing consultant and president of Simple Solutions, a web hosting service based in Groesbeck, Texas.
"Many webmasters just place a counter on their site, but all this does is tell you how many people have seen your site," Stevens explained. "It doesn't tell you where they came from, what browsers they were using, what keywords they searched for at a search engine, etc. To be able to effectively market your website, you must track your visitors."
Where do you start? First check to see if your site already has tracking software built into it.
"Any website program worth its salt provides you with traffic reports," said Micah Buchdahl, a lawyer and the president of HTMLawyers, Inc., an Internet marketing firm in Moorestown, N.J.
But if yours doesn't - or if it's rudimentary and you're looking for better tracking features - there are several good off-the-shelf packages available.
Some of the more popular ones are:
Website Reporter ($100 and up)
http://www.cgiadmin.com/scripts/wr/
Faststats ($100 and up)
http://www.mach5.com/products/analyzer/
Linktrakker ($250 and up)
http://www.radiation.com/trakker/
Webtrends ($450 and up)
http://www.netiq.com/products/was/standard.asp
You'll want to shop around a bit; pricing can vary hugely depending on the seller.
Another option is to use an online tracking service. Avoid the free services, however; most make their money by throwing annoying pop-up ads at your visitors as they enter your site. According to Stevens, one of the best private online tracking services is Extreme Tracking (http://www.extreme-dm.com/tracking/), which charges $5 per month, and places only a small, discrete tracking button on your site rather than a large banner ad that might make the site look cheesy.
If you don't have your own server - that is, if you purchase your homepage space from one of the thousands of commercial host sites operating on the web - chances are they provide basic traffic reports as part
of your service package.
In many cases, and especially if you're willing to pony up a few extra dollars to upgrade your homepage package, these reports can be astonishingly sophisticated and thorough. Plus, most commercial host sites offer online support and chat groups that can help you interpret the data you're getting.
With The Old
Before you can intelligently assess the information tracking software delivers, you must first become familiar with the terminology involved (see box).
Probably the most widely known (and poorly understood) tracking term is "hits," as in "Check it out, my website's getting thousands of hits!"
But actually, a hit is registered for every file requested from your server - and in these days of script- and graphics-heavy sites, that can be a very unreliable measure of activity (see below).
"The reality is, you get a hit every time a visitor comes to the same page, and you also get one for every image and script that is executed, too," noted Fawad Ahmed, professional webmaster and marketing consultant for the Goldvisions Online Success Community websites. "People think, 'Maybe I'll stuff my first page with 100 images, and soon I'll be up there with Yahoo!' Not quite."
It's also time to discard another standby of the early web boom - the "counter," dutifully ticking off a number for every hit received by a site. Like the hits it tracks, experts say the counter is now misleading and imprecise to the point of uselessness.
Buchdahl called the counter "worthless and hokey" in today's web environment and Ahmed labeled it "the most useless form of traffic analysis."
That's why experts say online lawyers need to learn how to use the new wealth of information that today's tracking software provides.
"In essence, visitors are no longer measured by quantity, but by quality," said Michel Fortin, an Ottawa-based consultant and speaker who has authored a book on electronic marketing techniques (http://successdoctor.com/). "Today's Internet marketer must focus more on the percentage of curious browsers that turn into serious, long-term clients."
In With The New
The new technology is more concerned with observing the habits of "unique users" than with the people who simply happen upon your site and then leave. It's interested in the way traffic flows to and away from your site. It's interested in what people do while they're there, and how long they stick around.
Most programs will give you all the information you need both in the form of raw numbers, and organized into bar graphs, which can provide useful (and easy to read) overviews about your site's effectiveness.
Some of the most important items tracking software surveys include are:
Hourly, daily, monthly, and yearly traffic.
This information is usually provided in terms of unique users per hour (see box).
The hourly traffic tells you what times of the day people are visiting your site: Is it mostly during business hours? Perhaps your main online appeal is to business clients rather than individual consumers; does your site provide the sort of information they're seeking? Night hits mean more private individuals, surfing the web after a day at work. These people are often seeking plain-language legal advice (more below on how to hone in on what they're looking at).
Daily traffic is similarly useful: Weekday hits may mean more people visiting from work; weekend visits suggest a heavier consumer appeal. Are you getting the sorts of visitors you want? Or if you recently gave a CLE seminar, or a public speech (during which you, of course, mentioned your website), did your numbers spike in the days following? If not, why?
Larger patterns can be drawn from the monthly and yearly reports; you can use them to pick up long-term trends. Did activity pick up dramatically after adding a new feature (say a question-and-answer forum) to the site? Or did it remain flat (meaning either that you're wasting your efforts or that they need more promotion)?
Most popular pages.
The usefulness of this feature is pretty obvious: What do people like on your site, and what don't they like?
It also gives you some time-management direction: If you're putting four hours a week into creating a newsletter that few people are looking at, maybe you could put your time to better use - like further developing the Q & A page that for some reason has become your most popular page.
Visitor profile reports.
Who's visiting your site? Where do they come from? What are they looking at? How long do they stay? Some programs offer related features such as "Current Visitors," "Last 100 Visitors," and "Return Visitors," to help you discover the sorts of people you're appealing to.
Buchdahl noted that you can check to see whether competing law firms are looking, and what they're looking at; whether anyone from law schools where you're planning to interview has checked out your site. If a lot of people are coming from an unlikely source, follow the link back and try to find out why. Has someone quoted you in an article? Is a former client boosting you on their site? (Time to send a fruit basket.)
Top referrers.
This is an especially useful feature. Good log analyzer software will give you extensive detail: Say the referring page is the popular Google.com search engine. You'll also get to see what search terms the visitor used to find you: Was it "personal injury" or "bankruptcy" or "tough California lawyer"? The qualities people are looking for when they visit gives an idea of what the emphasis of your site should be.
Some programs provide a "top search engines" and "top keywords" listing separately, so that you can more easily switch your concentration to other sources of traffic. For example, if you advertise, or even contribute to another website that provides a link back to your site, you can see how much business those efforts are bringing you. If an article you wrote for a local bar journal is bringing business to your site - well, keep writing for that bar journal.
Time spent on site.
Combined with some of the above elements, this helps you to further refine your analysis. To go back to the newsletter example: say you were disappointed to learn that only four people looked at your newsletter all week. However, if you now learn that each of those four people spent a half-hour browsing through it, you know that your problem isn't content, but promotion. Perhaps you should link the newsletter from your more popular pages?
Visitor path reports.
These reports give you information such as where people enter your site (due to search terms used, etc.), where they exit it, and where they go in between. Some programs offer breakdowns such as "Top Paths," "Top Exit Pages," and "Top Entry Pages."
You might want to polish up the most popular entry pages - and don't forget to check on those exit pages: If the exit is your address and phone number, then that might be OK. It's a logical stopping point; your visitor has probably read your site, enjoyed it, and noted down your contact info. But if the exit point is a deadly dull essay or a long, self-indulgent biography, you might have a turn-off on your hands that you should consider revising or dumping it altogether.
Technical specifications.
These elements are more for your webmaster; but they can seriously affect the efficiency of your site. For example, tracking software can tell you the most common computer operating systems used by visitors (if they're mostly Macs, is your site Mac-friendly?), their window size; resolution and color depth; not to mention the browser they're using.
"This information can be useful in determining what screen resolution, operating system, and browser version most of your visits are using, so that you can better serve them," Curtis explained.
"For example, if a majority of your traffic is running at 640 x 480 resolution, you wouldn't want to create web pages 800 pixels wide," he said.
Marketing reports.
Some programs will do a lot of this analysis for you, drawing together disparate items tracked into a rudimentary marketing report that can provide a useful jumping off point for "human" discussion at your next firm meeting.
Copyright 2003 Lawyers Weekly USA
This article has been reprinted with the permission of Lawyers Weekly USA, the national newspaper for small law firms. To subscribe, please visit www.lawyersweeklyusa.com or call (800) 451-9998.
