How To Automatically Get Source Information Into Clio Grow From Form Submissions (WordPress)

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Law firms that use Clio Grow as their intake management system may not be aware that it is possible to automatically get source information from form submissions into Clio Grow if you’re using WordPress as your CMS.

The benefit to passing source information into this extremely popular legal intake management software is massive. By doing so, you’re able to accurately understand which of your marketing and advertising channels are driving consultations, and ultimately clients to your firm.

The key here is accuracy. If you’re simply relying on an intake specialist to ask your prospects how they heard about your firm, the response is almost always lackluster. Often, you’ll attribute the lead to “the internet”, “Website” or “Google.”. Sound familiar?

The fact is, The internet is a big place and your website isn’t a true source.

More importantly, your intake specialist doesn’t even get a chance to ask someone who completed a form “How did you hear about us?”

I’ve outlined the technology you’ll need and the steps you’ll have to take to get source information automatically into Clio Grow below.

What Technology You Need To Get Source Information Into Clio Grow

  1. WordPress
  2. Clio Grow (but you knew that already, right?)
  3. Gravity Forms – Elite License required to get the Webhooks add-on
  4. Gravity Form Webhooks Add-On – included in Gravity Forms Elite license
  5. Attributer – Free trial then $49/month

How To Set Up The Technology To Get Source Information Into Clio Grow

  1. Install Gravity Forms on your WordPress Website.
    1. Create a new form with the following visible fields: * Indicates required fields.
      1. First Name*
      2. Last Name*
      3. Email*
      4. Phone*
      5. Tell us about your case
    2. Create the following hidden fields:
      1. Referring URL
      2. Source
      3. Source Drilldown 1
      4. Source Drilldown 2
      5. Source Drilldown 3
      6. Landing Page
      7. Landing Page Group
      8. Inbox Token
    3. I highly recommend enabling and configuring Google’s reCaptcha on your form to cut down on SPAM.
  2. Grab your unique inbox token from Clio Grow
    1. Log in to Clio Grow → Settings → Integrations → Clio Grow Inbox → Copy button next to the Inbox Token
    2. Paste this token in the hidden field you named Inbox Token in 1.b.viii
  3. Sign up for an account with Attributer
    1. Copy and paste the Attributer code on your website. This should ideally be placed in the website <Head> tag.
    2. Add the following default values to the following hidden fields:
      1. Referring URL: {embed_url}
      2. Source: [channel]
      3. Source Drilldown 1: [channeldrilldown1]
      4. Source Drilldown 2: [channeldrilldown2]
      5. Source Drilldown 3: [channeldrilldown3]
      6. Landing Page: [landingpage]
      7. Landing Page Group: [landingpagegroup]
  4. Add New Webhook (gravity forms settings → Webhook → add new)
    1. Name it whatever you’d like. I name mine Webhooks Feed 1
    2. Request URL: https://grow.clio.com/inbox_leads
    3. Request Method: POST
    4. Request Format: JSON
    5. Skip Request Headers
    6. Configure the Request Body section to the following:
      1. Check the Select Fields radio button
      2. Key Value
        from_first Name (First)
        from_last Name (Last)
        from_email Email
        from_phone Phone
        from_message Client Message: “{Tell me about your case::8}” | Referring URL: {Referring URL:11} | Source: {Source:12}: | Source Drilldown 1: {Source Drilldown 1:13} | Source Drilldown 2: {Source Drilldown 2:14} | Source Drilldown 3: {Source Drilldown 3:15} | Landing Page: {Landing Page:16} | Landing Page Group: {Landing Page Group:17}
        referring_url Source
        from_source Referring URL
        inbox_lead_token inbox token
  5. Verify everything is landing in the Clio Grow Inbox it should look like this:
    1. clio grow inbox with source information screenshot

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Process To Create A Contact In Clio Grow From The Inbox

Since Clio Grow does not have an open API, what we did above was pass information from your website form into the Clio Grow’s Inbox. To add a contact you’ll simply navigate to your inbox, click the Add button and then Add Contact. You can also decide to do a Quick Intake if you’d like.

Before we can do this, however, you need to add custom lead sources to your account. Here’s how to do that directly from Clio. The sources you should make are:

  1. Organic Search
  2. Organic Social
  3. Referral
  4. Direct
  5. Paid Search
  6. Display
  7. Email
  8. Paid Social*

I recommend aligning these to what you have set up in Google Analytics. We set up custom channels in our GA accounts which is noted by the *.

Once you have these sources added, you will need to select the correct source from the source drop down field when you add a contact from the Clio Grow inbox. This should match to the source noted at the bottom of the lead in the inbox.

Bonus Points For Connecting Clio Grow To Clio Manage

In Wednesday’s webinar, I’ll explain how to connect Clio Grow to Clio Manage. I’ll also touch on how to pass this source information through to the new Matter in Clio Manage. From there, you can start to understand which sources/channels are driving revenue to your firm. Dare I say ROI?

Helpful Resources:

Tools We Love: CallRail

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Call tracking has become a standard for anyone who’s focused on measuring the success of their website. There are plenty of tools out there that offer call tracking, but we’ve fallen in love with CallRail, and have stayed in love for many years now.

Over time, CallRail has added features and improved how effectively it tracks an individual’s call history.

What does it do?

Instead of showing your real business phone number, you can use a tracking number in places that a potential customer or client will see. If you choose to add tracking numbers to your website, CallRail will dynamically swap your real number with your chosen tracking number(s).

How does it work?

Within CallRail, you can either port (move) numbers you already own or create new numbers to use as your tracking numbers. These numbers can be displayed on your website, within ad copy, on billboards, or anywhere else you might want your number displayed.

When someone calls one of these tracking numbers, the information from that call is stored in your CallRail dashboard. The caller won’t notice that they’ve called a tracking number, and neither will the person answering your main line.

Implementation

For number swapping on your site, you’ll want to install CallRail’s script directly onto your website (we suggest using Google Tag Manager to do this).

You’ll also want to connect Google Analytics and Google Ads to CallRail in order to link your data together.

CallRail Integrations

Setting up Tracking Numbers

If you’re running Google Ads, you should have at least two tracking numbers, one for mobile, the other for desktop. You’ll use both of these as extensions for your ads.

A good rule of thumb is to place a tracking number on any marketing or advertising you’re paying for. If you have a TV commercial, make a tracking number specific to that. If you still advertise in a phonebook, have a tracking number for that as well.

This is the best way to figure out which campaigns are driving leads, and from those, clients.

Keyword Pools are the best way to track calls that happen on your website. A keyword pool is essentially a bunch of numbers that are available to show on your website at any given time. If you have 5 people viewing your site at the same time, each will see a different number and their visit will be tracked individually. It doesn’t matter where the user came from (Organic, Direct, etc.); each person will be tracked accordingly in your CallRail dashboard. This eliminates the need for individual tracking numbers by channel source.

CallRail Tracking

Form Captures

CallRail can also track the form submissions on your site. This is great for calculating ROI on forms, all in one easy place. You can easily search for a signed clients name, see their form submission, and see how they got to the site in that visit.

Call Recording

CallRail has an opt in feature to record calls on the tracking number level. If you wanted to only record calls from one of your numbers, you can do that. You can also customize the message that plays to the caller that alerts them they are being recorded.

If you suspect there’s an issue with your intake process, call recording is the best way to pinpoint the problem. It’s also a great way to track the quality of your leads. You might find that one of your advertising channels is only bringing in callers who can’t afford your services, who are outside of your service area, or the wrong kind of practice type.

Call Log

In the call log, you’ll be able to see all of the calls that have happened on all of your tracking numbers. You can switch to specific time periods, look at only specific tracking number, sources, and a number of other things.

You can also mark-up calls with notes about the call, or whether it was a good lead or a bad lead.

Callrail Call Log

Call Attribution

The call attribution tab has the best breakdown of how many calls you had by channel for a given time period, as well as how many were first-time calls. It’s important to know how many first-time calls you’ve had in comparison to your total call volume. At Mockingbird, we only report on first-time calls because we’re trying to track new business, not current clients or people who have contacted you previously.

CallRail Call Attribution

 

CallRail has a ton of amazing features that haven’t been covered here, and they’re constantly improving the tools they offer. As an official CallRail partner, feel free to contact Mockingbird if you have any questions. We’d love to help get you started with CallRail and improve your current tracking setup.

Screwing Lawyers: Calculate The True Cost of Your Agency’s Long Term Contract

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I hear this story about once a day from a frustrated lawyer… “Our marketing isn’t working.” “My agency doesn’t tell me what they are doing.” “Our rankings haven’t improved.” “The vendor won’t let us into Google Analytics.” And so on and so on.

Being frustrated with your marketing isn’t uncommon or even unfair.  Sometimes best efforts belly flop (even at my own agency.)  But the lemon juice poured in the fresh cut is recognizing that you are contractually stuck with the ineffective, lazy, useless, opaque “efforts” of your marketing agency for the foreseeable future.

I received this email today from a frustrated firm:

“Just a quick update: we unfortunately found some fine print yesterday that we had previously missed. It looks like we are stuck with FindLaw until November of 2020.”

The true cost of your long term marketing contract isn’t the value of the contract to the agency ($8,200 a month for the next 36 months…) but actually the opportunity cost of all of that lost business your firm could be generating if your agency was actually effective. Using extremely rough math…that $8,200 monthly cost equates to roughly $300K over the life of the contract, but it really should be measured as three years of your firm struggling to find clients while your bottom line bleeds…drip drip drip…into your agency’s top line.

Using basic business metrics, if that investment returned just a pathetic 4x (i.e. cost of client at 25% of the value of the matter) that $300K expense is really $1.2 million dollars in revenue your firm isn’t capturing. And, your underperforming agency has NO incentive to turn this around – because their profitability is inversely related to how hard they work for you.

So let’s be clear: entering into a long term contract with a marketing vendor benefits them, not you. As soon as you are locked in, as this is a service industry, your agency’s profitability skyrockets by doing as little as possible for you. This is compounded by the deliberate obfuscation of performance data. Ask yourself why your long term agency contract precludes you from access to your site’s Google Analytics or Google Ad campaigns. What do they not want you to see? What are they not doing for you?

You are supposed to be sophisticated savvy lawyers. Imagine how you would act if you could be hired under the same terms that you hire agencies: long term, guaranteed retainers with no requirements to share what you are allegedly doing for your clients? Would you do client work or instead hire hordes of cold callers to assail the front desks of your next prospective victim?

Oh, and before you sign…read the fine print.

Immigration Attorneys: We Want You!

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So…. Since starting Mockingbird, we’ve never proactively sought business.  For the most part it has come to us.  BUT…. I’m now proactively looking for more immigration attorneys to add to our client list.  Over the past two years, we have locked down online marketing for a handful of immigration attorneys.  And at the risk of making this sound like I’m selling a set of steak knives or a used Ford Taurus – its an easy, repeatable, fool-proof system that has delivered stupendous results.

I’m writing this this morning after coming out of a conversation with one of our immigration clients that sounded something like this:

“Please turn down the efforts – we’re turning away business – I don’t even bother to reply to half of the voicemails.”

Here’s the inbound traffic growth this client has experienced since we took over his account (from a big box Legal Marketing “Expert”) – he’s now driving 9 times the traffic than prior to our engagement:

Here’s another situation – where we’re driving close to 10 calls per day to a small immigration firm.

Why Immigration? The answer is twofold threefold:

  1. We’ve spent a large amount of time (and money) learning what works and what doesn’t in Immigration.
  2. Much of our effort and experience and learnings are generated from the hypercompetitive markets of Personal Injury, Mass Torts and Criminal Defense.  Simply applying the best practices from those aggressive and overcrowded markets to the less competitive and frequently more distributed immigration market is all it takes to make a huge impact.
  3. (And yes, some of this is undeniably due to the xenophobic politics of the day.)

 

 

Google Analytics is Lying to You!

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Do not trust the data in Google Analytics. It is lying to you!

Even if you installed the tracking code correctly, all the data you see is incorrect. It’s tainted, false, misleading, and wrong. It’s a huge mistake to make any decisions based on the data in Google Analytics… unless you make some essential adjustments.

Where Does the Misleading Data Come From?

Google Analytics is a very popular target for spammers and hackers. Just recently, sites across the world were hit by spam that looked like referral traffic from Lifehacker and Reddit. Semalt is another popular source that has been spamming Google Analytics accounts for years. Other spammers are more subtle and use “ghost” hosts to infiltrate your website data. Spammers are relentless, and they’re developing new techniques every week.

While spam is the primary destroyer of good data, your website traffic may be skewed for another reason. If you’re looking at traffic reports and think all the sessions are potential customers, you’re wrong. Your own office may be inflating traffic numbers without realizing it. While this is not fake traffic, it’s not valuable traffic either.

Other sources of bad data include bots, spiders, crawlers and other digital marketing tools. Call tracking and chat software often impact the quality of your Google Analytics data, and poorly coded robots can appear as human visitors. All these sources must be wiped out before you can begin to even remotely trust Google Analytics.

How To Fix Your Google Analytics Data

If you plan on using Google Analytics in any way, you must prepare your account to block all the bad data. Here at Mockingbird, this is the first thing we do before working on any website.

Step 1 – Create Multiple Views

It is very important to create multiple property views because once you start messing with Google Analytics data, there is a chance you may irreversibly break something. We suggest creating at least 3 views – Raw Data (the untouched backup), Master View (the one you use), and Test View (the one you test with, obviously). Once you have these views set up, you’re ready for step 2.

Step 2 – Create Filters

Filters block data from ever hitting your Google Analytics account. If you filter all traffic from Russia, you may still get traffic from Russia, but you won’t see it in your Google Analytics account. It is important to understand Filters apply to future data and cannot be retroactively applied. If you want to remove spam from historic data, you’ll need to apply Segments (more on that later).

Here are some examples of Filters you should create:

  • Exclude spam referral sources (we have a list of 80 that we block)
  • Exclude internal IP addresses
  • Exclude partner agencies’ IP addresses
  • Include only your Hostnames

Again, once these are applied, the filtered data is gone forever. Make sure to test each filter to make sure it works correctly.

Step 3 – Select “Bot Filtering”

This one’s easy. Google Analytics has an option under View Settings that is called Bot Filtering. It “excludes all hits from known bots and spiders.” Check the box and hit save!

Step 4 – Utilize Segments

While Filters will help keep your data clean in the future, there is still a way to save your historic spam-filled data. Create a Segment that matches your filters so it excludes the bad data. You’ll need to apply this segment every time you look at your data, but it is a great way to accurately analyze past performance.

Does This Really Fix Everything?

I wish this were the end of the story. However, spam sources continue to evolve and you’ll need to update your filters and segments regularly. Furthermore, UTM codes (used for tracking digital marketing campaigns) may wreck havoc on your account if not implemented correctly. Check your account monthly, if not weekly, to make sure your data stays clean. Create custom channel groupings if you need to.

If you or your marketing agency aren’t proactively monitoring the Google Analytics, you may be making misinformed decisions based on misleading data. Stay on top of it, and Google Analytics can be an invaluable gold mine!

Legal Connect with Google Workshop – Two October Events

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We’re happy to announce not one, but two Legal Connect with Google events for October.

This is a free, day-long, hands-on Workshop specifically designed to assist lawyers in evaluating their online marketing effectiveness.  Classes are focused on local, natural and paid search and are taught by Google employees and Mockingbird founder, Conrad Saam.

So if you wanted to attend the pilot event this week at Google HQ in Mountainview, but were unable to, there’s now a second and third chance.

Victoria Fabiano, Google Strategic Partner Manager
Victoria Fabiano, Google Strategic Partner Manager

Dates and Venues

October 7 and 8 in New Orleans.   Details and Sign Up

October 17th in Google’s New York City Office.  Details and Sign Up

Workshop Description

During this intensive Workshop, experts from Google and Mockingbird guide attendees through a 12 page worksheet to evaluate the efficacy of their current online marketing efforts, with an eye towards identifying specific weaknesses or missed tactics. This is NOT a conference with talking heads delivering thinly veiled sales pitches from sponsored powerpoints, but instead a hands-on, interactive education, empowering attendees with actionable tools & tactics.

This is a HANDS ON workshop, you will need a laptop and access to your Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools and AdWords accounts, as well as your firm’s website CMS.

Elizabeth Olinger, Google Account Manager
Elizabeth Olinger, Google Account Manager

The Agenda

  • 8:30am-9:00am | Registration & Continental Breakfast
  • 9:00am-9:15am | Kick off & Welcome
  • 9:15am-10:00am | The Online Legal Marketplace
  • 10:00am-11:00am | Google Analytics & Business Metrics
  • 11:00am-11:15am | Break
  • 11:15am-12:15pm | Search – Organic
  • 12:15pm-1:15pm | Networking Lunch
  • 1:15pm-2:15pm | Search Local + Advanced Linkbuilding
  • 2:15pm-3:15pm | Search Paid

 

Are Your Partners Sending Fake Traffic?

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At the risk of stating the mind-numbingly obvious: accurate reporting infrastructure is of primary importance in evaluating the efficacy of marketing channels.  We’ve recently uncovered two vendors deep in the conversion cycle, whose reporting infrastructure is double and even triple counting website traffic. (This artificially made our own reporting to the client  look much better than it actually was.)

The Issue

The issue at hand is the way conversions are reporting back to Google Analytics data. A good reporting infrastructure is built not only on traffic – but also the frequency of that traffic doing what we want – in the law firm sense, this means (for the most part) filling out an online form or calling the firm.  We’ve looked at two different cases in which both online and offline conversions are being counted as a second or even third session, which means over reporting traffic.

Apex Chat (Online Conversions)

In the case of Apex Chat, we found that when sending chat completion data (as a conversion event) back into Google Analytics, Apex actually sends a new session to GA when chat is engaged and another new session if the chat moderator marks the chat as a prospect.  These are marked as events in Google Analytics as:

  • ApexChat Chat
  • ApexChat Lead

This means, a session generating a lead is erroneously reported as three different website visits. If you dig deeper into those sessions – you see (in the graphic below) them applied to Direct traffic and that they see zero pages and zero time on site.   You’ll also notice – in this case they inflate direct traffic volume by 6%.  Not huge numbers, but not insignificant if you are watching things as closely you should.

Apex

This is simply a very sloppy integration with Google’s API – Apex told us they are aware of the issue and have a resolution; although they didn’t roll it out to us when we requested.

CallRail (Offline Conversions)

The CallRail issue is more difficult, because frankly tracking an offline conversion back into an online reporting system is tactically much more difficult.  Essentially, the phone number identifies the channel that generated the session; however, tying the call back to the specific session is much more difficult. (The work around is to utilize CallRail’s per session based phone tracking, a significantly more expensive alternative.)  But you can see, given the sheer volume of calls generated by a website, that there’s a large inflation of sessions – in this case, they are accurately allocated to the appropriate marketing channel – so traffic for all channels gets artificially inflated.  In our example, this was a sitewide artificial increase of 9%.  In the graphic below, look at the dramatic difference in patterns between the inaccurate (first column of graphs) and accurate (with the duplicated traffic removed) second column of graphs.

CallRail

For now, I’ll reject my internal cynic and reject the hypothesis that some especially crappy agencies are deliberately implementing tools to artificially boost their numbers….. or, hmmmm, maybe I’ve just enabled them with the information to do so.

Mobile Penalty Study: Traffic up 9% on Day 1

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Yesterday marked the beginning of Google’s mobile algorithm change – and while it is scheduled to take a full week to completly roll out, we’re monitoring the results carefully at Mockingbird headquarters.

Mobile Penalty Study Methodology

We looked at data across 54 different law firm sites – 42 mobile optimized and 12 that weren’t – compared average daily mobile search traffic from the previous 8 weeks to the traffic on April 21st.  In aggregate the volume of traffic to the non mobile sites was up by 1% compared to the mobile friendly sites’ 9% lift.

The Graph

In the graph below – the blue bars are mobile friendly sites and the red bars are non mobile friendly sites.  I’ve graphed the top half (as measured in traffic) of sites in our study, because the data sets below were so low that small changes had a large impact in the % change numbers.
Mobile Day 1

 

Limitations of the Data

  • The roll-out is far from complete and we’re expecting more dramatic changes over the week.
  • Law firm traffic tends to dip over the weekends and we compared a weekday against an average that included weekends – so there may be an artificially high change that won’t get worked out until we have a full week’s worth of data.
  • A more accurate comparison will be a week’s worth of traffic once the roll-out has, well, rolled out.
  • Many law firm sites have a low volume of traffic – specifically mobile natural search traffic – so small differences can have a large impact on % changes.  This is why I aggregated all of the data to come up with the 9% number (instead of the average percentage change.)

The conclusion?  Stay tuned… this is just the beginning of what we expect to be a very bumpy ride.

Why YOU Must Control Access to Google Analytics

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Got this email today from a law firm who has asked us for help because they think their marketing investment might not be worth the spend:

Conrad,
Thank you for taking time to speak with me yesterday.  I requested Google Analytics access from our marketing company and received this response.  Any thoughts?
“The analytic platforms we use are through our private accounts and house all our marketing/seo clients on it. Thus, we are unable to provide individual access for clients to view.”  

AHHHHHHHHH!  This makes me so mad.

Yesterday in reviewing her site we looked into the code and yes, GA was installed (albeit poorly – it was missing on some pages). The only possible conclusions are:

  1. The agency in question is stupid – has inherited the site, doesn’t know GA was already installed, never considered installing it and has genuinely chosen a proprietary reporting system that lumps access across multiple sites into a single log in.
  2. The agency in question is smart – is doing 4/5 of nothing to work on the site and is deliberately hiding data so they can keep cashing their checks.  Oh – and they’d be lying about not being able to grant access to Google Analytics.

Unfortunately, lawyers asking for access (especially admin access) to Google Analytics is often the first step tipping off an incumbent agency that they may be on the chopping block.  Sadly, some immediately turtle up – withdrawing as much as possible and trying to control their own clients information, passwords and access.  That’s what we have here.

Remember attorneys, this is your site, it is your data, it is your performance, it is your prerogative to hold your agency’s feet to the fire.  Google Analytics data (and access to it) is yours to control.  Biggest red flag for any agency is the refusal to share data, let alone putting clients in control of it.