What is a Conversion?

What is a conversion? Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen. So what actually is a conversion? If you spent any time poking around the world of legal marketing or just the world of marketing generally, you've probably run into this term and in fact, if you've listened to pretty much any episode of Legal Marketing 101, you've probably heard about conversions and you probably have a basic idea of what conversions are, whether it's someone submitting a form or calling your office or doing something else to engage with your business. And that is basically a conversion, that action of providing us with information or completing an action that's valuable for us. Usually that's what we're talking about when we talk about conversions. But obviously there is a reason that we're talking about conversions today, because if that was all that conversion is, then I could wrap up the episode right here, but unfortunately you're going to have to stick with me for a little bit. So that explanation that a conversion is one of these actions that a user is going to complete that provides value for us, the business that explanation is sort of halfway right In its essence.

At its core, a conversion is really just moving a user from one column in our sales pipeline to another. You probably interact with leads in your sales pipeline once you've already collected some information from them. But we can expand that pipeline concept. In principle, your sales pipeline actually includes all the potential people in the world that might engage your firm. This could be thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions of people. It's your entire potential market and all of these people are potential clients for you and your firm. But we need to do something so that they'll notice us. We also need to do something so that, once these people do notice us, we convert them from just people who have noticed us and know that we exist to people that are interested in what it is we're doing, or interested in us or what it is we're selling. All of these people in our potential market are in our pipeline. It's just a matter of converting the interest and doing so in a way that is going to further our goals.

Okay, so before I get too much more theoretical, let's step back for a second and talk about the big issue here when it comes to conversions and legal marketing agencies. By and large, legal marketers and lawyers understand that we are really trying to generate two types of conversions in marketing. First, that's the conversion from a potential client to a lead and the conversion from a lead then to a sale and you may think about the terminology differently and there are a few legal CRMs that use PNC or potential client for those earlier stages of the process. But regardless of what your system is using or the terminology used to think about, these are the stages we want to focus on this conversion of a person from someone who doesn't know anything about you to becoming someone who is interested in your services and engaged with your content, and then the conversion of that interested person into a person who will actually take out their wallet and then become a client. Where lawyers really get bogged down is in the first part of that converting a person who knows nothing about you into a person who is interested in you If your firm does a good job, you're personable and you're actually delivering all the bits you say you're delivering. Then the second part converting those leads into clients is usually going to be a lot easier.

But that first part is really the game that I'm a part of and have been a part of for more than a decade. I've talked about a lot of those strategies here on the podcast too, from things like using lead magnets like ebooks and quizzes to convince users to divulge to us some of their information, to tracking and following up with these leads and a little bit of everything in between. So I'm not going to go back into the whole how do I generate conversions thing today, because I want to talk about something else and that's the big mistake I see in lawyers' Google Ads accounts, in Google Analytics accounts, in Facebook Ads accounts, you name it. I see this everywhere and that mistake is basically just that I see chaos, but particularly I see chaos in the conversions. And before I go too far with this, I want to say that if any of my clients are listening, I know I have definitely not always been the poster child of conversion organization in my Google Ads accounts.

It's really hard to keep all this nice and neat and it is a struggle, but it is a big mistake to have everything in that conversion section of your account really unorganized. And there are a few common ways that this sort of plays out. Number one is that your conversion labels are bland. They don't give detail, they don't explain what's really happening with the conversion other than what the action to generate the conversion is like click to call, and this is a huge mistake because it's going to cause confusion for you and for your managers. So, instead, label or name your conversions with more information than you think you might need. Make sure you have things like the action that it takes to generate the conversion, the page where the conversion is actually happening, the offer you're giving out with the conversion. All of that can be added to the label so that you or someone else in your account is immediately able to understand exactly what that conversion is doing and what value it is driving for your business, because that's really what's key.

Number two, though, is that you have too many conversions that don't really generate value, and this is a huge area of disorganization. I see this a lot, and it's it's not always the most damaging, but when it does cause damage, it's probably the most severe. Of these issues, I really, really frequently see conversions for things like website clicks or requests for Google Maps directions, and these are a huge waste of time for most firms. First, that's because we have this data elsewhere, and if we're capitalizing on this data, it's usually through a more complex strategy. So if you're doing that, this isn't for you. But the second reason to not use these types of conversions in your account is because these data points are usually not representative of a significant conversion from one stage of the sales pipeline to another. They certainly do represent, you know, some kind of change, and for some organizations it can represent a card in hand attitude from a particular customer. But unless, like I said, this is part of a more complex strategy, the nine times out of 10, tracking these small actions is only going to lead to confusion and disorganization, and it won't be a representation of what value your ads or your SEO is actually generating.

The third biggest issue, though, with account organization when it comes to conversions that I see is that people end up double counting conversions, and this happens a lot of the time when we're tracking small actions, like in the previous mistake, and this could be even more damaging than that. So this happens. These double counting issues happen when we're tracking something like an ebook download, but let's say we're also tracking the clicks to that page as a conversion, or the clicks to the thank you page as a separate conversion. Somehow and really there are a few ways that can be set up that can cause a problem. There are a bunch of different variations and permutations of this double counting setup. That is going to cause problems for you, and I'm always running into more and more creative ways that agencies can screw things up.

But the problem here is really clear. If we're tracking multiple conversions against a user's click, what we're really doing is clouding the actual price that it costs for us to generate a client, and that makes it more difficult to appropriately attribute revenue to marketing sources. So you're going to have a really tough time knowing where to spend money and what's actually working. Now, effective tracking it is the first step to all this marketing goodness we want to do for our firms.

So don't let me make you afraid to go out and set up conversions and start tracking things, but just keep things organized, labeled, free of chaos, and make sure you're focusing on a real conversion of value when that value is going to be moved from one place to another, or the state of a client is going to be moved from one place to another, or the state of a client is going to be moved from one significant level to another significant level. That's what we're talking about when we're talking about conversion and, at the end, organizing all of this and keeping yourself free of this kind of chaos what this is going to do is help you generate more, better conversions and, ultimately, generate more revenue for your firm. Until next time, that's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out rosanadvertisingcom for more atacvicgov.