What do you REALLY need in your marketing mix?

Written by

We’re frequently contacted by clients who already have a clear idea of what they want from their online marketing firm. Sometimes they’re dialed in to the point where they already have a list of items they need help with and a clear roadmap for where they’re heading. However, this is far from the norm.

More often than not our prospective clients come to us either having previously worked with an agency (or multiple agencies) or as a blank slate looking to create an online footprint and start marketing their practice online.

In most cases, the bulk of our initial conversation is spent talking through the client’s goals and identifying which channels and tactics make the most sense in order to get them where they want to go.

For anyone asking, “what do we need to do in order to be successful online?” the response is always the same: how are we defining success?

In our experience, there are a few ways clients typically define success:

Success = Profit
I want to make money. If revenue is climbing I’m going to be happy.

Success = Specific Case Types
I want to target a specific type of case. Inquiries from other practice areas are a distraction or a bonus.

Success = Flexibility
I want to pick and choose which cases I can take. I want a high volume of inquiries and will pick which ones I want.

There’s merit to all three of these approaches, and each one necessitates a different set of tactics. This is one of the few aspects of our client’s practices where we can’t make an effective recommendation or provide any useful guidance. It’s up to each individual attorney to decide how they’re going to measure success and then let us adopt a plan that will help them achieve those results.

Stay Focused on the Big Picture

Once you’ve clearly defined what a successful marketing campaign looks like, it’s important to benchmark against your most relevant metrics (revenue, signed cases, or total inquiries) and make sure the tactics you’re prioritizing will help you achieve your overarching goal.

As an example, if your primary goal is to drive revenue, you shouldn’t get bogged down worrying about whether you’ve published any new content in the past month unless you’ve firmly established that new content is the best way to generate revenue.

Similarly, if you’re making a huge push for DUI cases it’s not worth obsessing over your site’s organic rankings for the more generic term “criminal defense attorney.” You’ll be better served keeping your eye on results directly relevant to the cases you’re trying to generate.

This isn’t to minimize the value of setting intermediate goals or looking at multiple trends, it’s merely a reminder to stay focused on what’s most important instead of getting paralyzed by the massive amount of data available on a monthly, daily, and even hourly basis.

So, what’s the most important thing in your marketing mix? Reliable data.

Measure What Matters

Almost no one comes to us specifically asking for business reporting, yet it’s arguably the most valuable service we provide. With all the data available through Google Analytics, AdWords, CallRail, Search Console, and countless other tools, it’s easy to identify which pieces are contributing to the success of your business and which ones are distractions.

Did you publish 5 blog posts and get zero clients and zero backlinks as a result? That’s probably not something you need to keep doing?

Is one channel driving 75% of your inquiries for car accident cases? You might want to expand your budget there…assuming your goal is either more PI cases or more revenue.

There’s no substitute for knowing what’s actually working. Gut feelings or informally polling your new clients about how they found you is unreliable at best and comically misleading at worst.

If you want to win at search, you should do the things that work and ignore the ones that don’t. That may seem simplistic—because it is—but it’s not possible if you don’t clearly define a goal, configure your infrastructure to accurately track everything you’re doing, and then allow data to guide your marketing efforts.

Google Analytics is Lying to You!

Written by

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!