General Practice, Solo, and Small Firm Division
Solo
Spring 2003 vol. 9 Number 3
Tracking Your Traffic
You have a Web site. You love the look and consider the
content outstanding. But what do your visitors think? According
to Flying Solo, published by the ABA's Law Practice Management
Section, you need to play traffic cop. Deborah McMurray, author
of the chapter on marketing on the Internet, offers the following
advice:
To ensure that your site is doing what you intended (generating
new business, offering legal and business reference information),
you must track your visitors. Ignore the wild graphics that
tracking companies offer. According to Chicago consultant Nancy
Roberts Linder, there are only three critical pieces of
information you need on a monthly basis.
Number of actual visitors. The number of visitors is different
from "hits." A hit is the number of total accesses to a Web
site's pages measured over a period of time. This means that if
someone visits your home page, goes to lawyer bios, heads back to
the home page, checks out another section, and goes back home, it
would count as five hits. Hits don't accurately measure the
activity on your site. You must track visitors by their
domains.
Who's looking? Tracking domains tells you if the visitor is from
a commercial entity (.com or .net), an academic entity (.edu), a
government body (.gov), or from a non-profit (.org.) Organize
your report by domain name so that all .com addresses are
together, all .org addresses are together, etc.
What are your visitors visiting? Tracking where your visitors go
helps you to analyze the usefulness of material you have posted.
Y2K pages were likely very popular the first six months of 1999,
but won't garner much attention now. You should eliminate
material that, over several months, doesn't hold your visitors'
interest.
What tracking devices are best? WebCom is a California-based Web
site hosting company. View a sample report at
www.webcom.com/help/reports/sample_report.shtml. (You can also
plug the words "Web site tracking" into a search engine such as
Google and see what you get. Or check out what colleagues think
on the SOLOSEZ listserv.)
For a copy of Flying Solo, A Survival Guide for the Solo
Lawyer (3rd ed.), edited by Jeffrey R. Simmons with a forward by
Jay G. Foonberg, go to www.abanet.org/abapubs/lawoffice.html and
scroll down to the title under the subhead "Management and
Administration." The price is $89.95. Or call the ABA Service
Center to order at (800) 285-2221 and ask for product code
511-0463.
