By Jamie K. Mulholland

This article was originally published on Law.com.

This time of year is all about the numbers: eight nights of Hanukkah, the feast of the seven fishes, three wise men, eight tiny reindeer, etc. Numbers hold great significance in holiday traditions, and those traditions are cherished rituals for people and their families.

My gift to you this year is one you will give yourself: starting a tradition from which you can benefit all year round (I would suggest monthly), and, unlike other things you will unwrap this holiday season, I am pretty sure it is something you do not already have: statistical reports on visitors to your website.

This is, unfortunately, something I see many firms not employing. Some are not even aware it is a tool available to them, while others may not have fully considered the value of the data. However, these figures can provide some incredible insight into your loyal fans (returning visitors), emerging friends (new visitors), and how you can better present the capabilities of the firm (content) to all. Best of all, this priceless tool is more than affordable. Meaning, free.

Now, to be clear, you can certainly pay for programs with advanced features, integrations and real time support, but Google offers an analytics tool that is absolutely satisfactory for providing useful data that suits your basic web analytical needs without you having to spend anything other than a modest investment of your time.

So, without further ado, I present – in holiday vernacular - my favorites of the almost endless interesting data sets you can pull from Google Analytics.

12 Visitors Visiting

Do you have any idea how many people visit your site each month? Each year? Is it in the hundreds, or possibly thousands? How many are returning visitors, and how many are finding your site for the first time? In the Google “Engagement” report section, you can find this, and other useful related data. You can also customize the report by specifying any date range you would like, so you can compare current data with previous time frames.

In the “User Attributes” section, Google also gives lots of intel on your visitors: geographical location, gender, age, even interests, such as “Sports & Fitness,” “Travel Buff,” “Avid Investor,” even “Shutterbug.”

11 Devices Deploying

The “Tech” section of Google Analytics calculates how many of your visitors are on desktops versus mobile devices or tablets. While you always want to test and view your web pages from all perspectives, I find it interesting to see the breakdown of the technology devices through which people regularly take in your content. This section will also show the browser from which visitors originated, such as Chrome or Firefox.

10 Channels Conveying

The “Acquisition” section of Google Analytics displays the percentage of visitors that found you through search engines versus social media channels or paid campaigns, such as pay-per-click ads.

9 Referrers Relaying

Also in the Acquisition section is source data drilled down even further. The “User Acquisition” reports will share specific sites that propelled visitors your way: Google versus Yahoo versus DuckDuckGo; LinkedIn versus Facebook versus Instagram; national association websites of which you are a member and maintain a profile on their website, and even those paid lawyer ranking sites that claim thousands of click throughs. You now have the power to see – on your own site’s end – who is truly responsible for sending referrals your way.

8 Pages Perusing

The “Engagement” section of Google Analytics has a wealth of offerings, starting with “Pages and Screens.” This details the specific pages people visited during the dates you selected. You can see the number of overall hits, the average engagement time per user, the number of views per user, and even all of the active viewers on the site at the very moment you are taking in the report.

7 Links-a-Landing

Also in the Engagement section, “Landing Pages” means just that: the first page on which a visitor landed, whether it was from a Google search, or perhaps they were directly given a url that was then clicked upon to arrive on a specific page of your website.

Once, in setting up a firm’s promotional efforts at a large industry conference, I secured a fun url (web address) unique to the firm and the industry (think “BelovedBankingBarristers.com,” that sort of thing) and we printed it on a giveaway for the firm’s booth. Pulling their web reports the following month, I was delighted to see the firm’s visits spiked by several thousand hits, with that very url topping the landing page report. It’s always nice to see a direct return on marketing efforts, isn’t it?

6 Questions-a-Quizzing

In the section known as “Search Console,” you will find the “Queries” report. This will display the specific phrase or keywords people typed into a search engine that then resulted in your site showing up as a clickable option, meaning it is a reflection of effective phrasing or a combination of text on your site.

Perhaps you wrote a blog on a change in the law, or an article on a current hot topic in your practice area. I often see web posts like these draw visitors for months after the fact.

5 Documents Downloading

Have you shared details with your social media followers on an upcoming CLE or firm event? Have you offered a whitepaper on a certain topic? This figure will tell you how many people visited the site and completed an action to download that form or paper.

4 Bouncers Bouncing

You can customize the Pages and Screens report above to add detail on your “Bounce Rate.” This tells you how many users left the site quickly (as in less than 10 seconds) without clicking through to any other pages or completing a conversion like the one mentioned above.

A low bounce rate shows you that, once on your site, users are indeed finding the content engaging enough to stay there. A high bounce rate may indicate that the landing page or initial experience did not meet your visitor’s expectations or simply was just not what they were looking for.

3 Sitelinks-a-Severed

A “404” error means that a url that previously had a corresponding page on your website is no longer working. Some people have fun customizing the error page: instead of that dreaded ‘PAGE NOT FOUND’ standard text, some people will instead post something creative, like “Uh oh!” or a broken mirror or other creative photo or gif. Once, a web developer suggested to me that, for a certain law firm, we create a 404 page that had a gavel and, in large letters, “Objection!”

Rather than be creative with your broken page error, why not be proactive and pull this report monthly through Google Analytics? Then, you can fix the errors immediately.

2 Paths Pursuing

The “Paths” report, in the Advertising section, will show you the actual sequence of pages a user follows, helping you identify patterns and see how people navigate your site, so that you can optimize the visitor experience.

For example, they may have Googled a specific phrase that landed them on a blog post. You can see that they then clicked on the author’s name to view a biography. In the biography, a practice area was clicked. Finally, at the call to action (because you have one on every page, right?), they clicked on ‘contact.’ Pretty cool, huh?

1 Joyful Journey

No clicks needed for this report! Just stop and take a moment and reflect on what you have just done. You have empowered yourself and your business development efforts by taking a proactive step in measuring and evaluating a key element of your marketing suite. Go, you!

I wish you and your firm nothing but success, conversions, and a low bounce rate in 2025.

Happy holidays!

Jamie Mulholland has coached attorneys and assisted law firms of all sizes across the country with marketing and business development for twenty-five years. Learn more at mulhollandmarketing.com.

12 Days of…Web Analytics