The Correlation Between Traffic & Leads

You might want to stop reading this right now because the conclusion of this post is (at least to me) forehead-smackingly self evident:

More law firm website traffic generates more law firm business.

I frankly wouldn’t even bother to write this post; other than a testy exchange last month between myself and LexBlog founder, Kevin O’Keefe debating if lawyers should focus on traffic when evaluating the efficacy of their marketing efforts.  In his post entitled Law Firm Publishers Screwing Up by Chasing Traffic, Kevin writes:

When publishing, you don’t have to follow all the other law firms off the traffic cliff.

I wouldn’t look at traffic and scaling up as measures of success.

As I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, I couldn’t disagree more – especially for firms interested in generating business. Ever since I ran marketing at Avvo – I’ve used traffic as a measure of success – and that holds true with my law firm clients today.  Last year, the study we conducted for the ABA showed a very high correlation between increased traffic and increased inquiries to law firms.

So now we have a great visual demonstrating the point.  One of my Account Executives shared the graph below on our internal #humblebrag Slack channel.  And the reason I love this graph is that we’ve had a drastic increase in traffic and a corresponding exceptional increase in inbound inquiries. The lines essentially move together. Note that the graph for this specific client doesn’t look at just phone calls (as our ABA study did), but also includes both form fills and chat.

So, if you’ve ever wondered if you should consider traffic an important goal in evaluating the efficacy of your marketing efforts? This picture is worth a thousand words (or prospects):

So should you follow those other law firms off the traffic cliff?  Only if you don’t want them earning the business that used to be yours.