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Broken Law Firm Lead Tracking for Paid Search & Fixing Tips - #179

• Jeff Sterling Hughes

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Law firm lead tracking mistakes waste your paid search budget. Here’s the 3-point CRM system to fix that leak.


Most firms can't connect ad spend to signed clients because their tracking system is broken. Capturing all data, even bad leads is important because it teaches your system’s AI what to avoid. This systematic tracking framework cuts wasted spend and optimizes for revenue, not just clicks.


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📄 CHAPTERS  


0:00 - Law Firm Lead Tracking: Stop Burning Money on Ads

2:07 - From Napkins to CRM: How Most Firms Track Leads Wrong

4:42 - Building Structured Data Reporting for Law Firm Marketing

11:32 - CRM Integration with Google Ads Offline Conversions

17:15 - Why Unstructured Data Kills Marketing Attribution Tracking

26:15 - Call Tracking Systems Every Law Firm Needs

29:17 - Capture ALL Lead Data for Paid Media Optimization


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If you don't know where your leads are really coming from, you're leaving money on the table. In this episode, we break down how to track what actually drives revenue. Not just clicks, not just calls. So you can stop wasting ad dollars and scale smarter. My name is tallied off and I am your host. I am also the CEO of our full service digital marketing agency, focused on helping exclusively family law firms thrive online called Rocket Clicks. And today we have the co-founder of our law firm called Sterling Lawyers, which is a 30 attorney family law firm here in Wisconsin. Tony is also the president of the agency that helps run, this business day today. And then we have James Patterson. James is the revenue operations director and the paid media expert on all of our law firm clients here at Rocket Clicks. He is going to break down the importance of gathering, tracking and optimizing data as it relates to your paid media spend. This is a can't miss episode if you are not leveraging a CRM or understand where every lead in your funnel is going and how you're tracking it. Make sure to stay tuned. Gentlemen, we're going to talk about a very important subject today, something that we talk about all the time at the agency, which is tracking success in your marketing. We have lots of clients who come to us and we ask the question, you know, how are you tracking leads? You have a CRM. What happens when someone engages with your brand? And sometimes they're very buttoned up. And other times, you know, they say, well, I got this, you know, napkin that I write the calls on. And, so it's a wide variety of how law firms track their leads. We obviously have a strong opinion on how they should track their leads. So, James, why don't you get us started with kind of the first thing a law firm should do when thinking about, well, what do I do with this data? How do I track this data? What happens there? Yeah. So I would say the biggest thing in terms of how we can better track performance in, in paid media is to create an integration between your CRM and those ad platforms. A lot of people don't realize that, several of these CRM, especially the the bigger ones, connect directly with, platforms like Google Ads, as well as offline conversions and, meta as well. But also if you have, let's say, you know, a la mannix, you know, CRM or something that's, you know, not quite as shiny and large as maybe like a Salesforce or HubSpot. You can still, connect those integrations between, your CRM and, the ads platform by using, symbols that for your pull into a Google sheet. So, it's actually what you're accomplishing here is you're now pulling in data from obviously, as users come in through a web form or a call into your into your law firm, right. Get in there. Instead of optimizing and telling your ad, platforms to go after those types of conversion events. We can now go and optimize and bring back data from folks as they obviously move through the sales journey in your CRM. So, you know, obviously with, family law firms, you know, that that cycle can can be fairly long at times. So certainly having these types of integrations can be really powerful to make sure Google Ads is going after the right type of customers. The, the accounts that, that we like to set up with, with our clients is to make sure we have these integrations, ones that already have these are often already really performing really great, even if there's some things messed up with structure and things like that that we've talked in, in some of our own, our previous, roadmap, meetings here. And the reason for that is like pulling in that data into the platform. Effectively, Google's AI machine learning is able to really, truly understand what's the best type of customer and lead that you're trying to drive and go after folks that look more like that, less like the guys that call in and, you know, want a totally different services, you know, even offer 100%. So, Tony, I know you set up our, our own CRM for selling lawyers way back in the day. And we've seen that evolve over a long period of time. Talk to us about the evolution of the data that you were getting, kind of in the early days and, and why you made some of the pivots you did to get to the point where we have this really functional waterfall of data like we have today. I mean, we started I mean, our original source of truth when we were building our Salesforce instance was, was a Google Sheet. Like, that's kind of where we started, where a lot of people start, you know, coming from a call center background where we had 250 call center agents and, last business I was in, I kind of understood a little more about how to structure the Google Sheet probably than most of our clients do, or most of our listeners do. But it it's a super powerful tool that once you, kind of evolve from tracking what in a Google Sheet is essentially unstructured data, because you can put anything you want in any cell, which can be very hard from reporting perspective. That's one of the most difficult parts, because if you want to put a pivot table together, you want to create graphs or whatever for any of your potential, business activities. You know, if if one column is like source and you put paid media and paid and PPC and the PPC, all lowercase, all of those are different elements and like, they're not the same thing. So now I can't really do good reporting. So like one of the biggest benefits of the CRM is like implementing structured data, implementing, good reporting. So you can actually see what's working. And as you, as you gain more data, essentially what you're doing, our position from an advertising perspective is what we're what we're doing in advertising is actually two things. One, we're creating brand impressions for you. And two, we're actually buying data. We are purchasing data and then optimizing it. So like the way we think about marketing is purchase, analyze, optimize and then purchase some more, analyze more, optimize. And like you're just going to keep doing that cycle over and over and over again. And you're you're essentially buying information and you're going to make your hypothesis hypotheses tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter, until you have basically stasis. And there's not a lot of improvement that you can make, and you're going to go to the next channel and you can do the same thing again. So you're structuring your data right, getting the right events tracked, and getting those things implemented give you a massive advantage. So James was mentioning the, machine learning. So if you think about, if you think about your business waterfall as a law firm, like at Sterling, currently every day we get about 100, 100 leads come in 23 or so of those get scheduled for a consultation. And of those consultations, we get about 18 quotes that we get to deliver to clients. There's a big difference between those 18 that get quotes and the, 82 that do not get quotes. And when you're sending calls and web leads back as your conversion tracking methodology, you're optimizing for all 100, which include those 82 that didn't get a quote versus just the 18 that did. And you're going to have a much better return on ad spend. You're going to have a much better, efficiency in your paid metrics. You're being more platforms. You're not wasting as much ad dollars. So there's a lot of advantages to doing this well and doing it right, like investing in the system, because once you invest in it, it just will essentially become a money printing machine for you that you can just continue to activate over and over and over again. So I want to I want to stay on this subject for a minute, because I think it's so important. And we've seen so many stories, that could just add value to this. And it is if your listeners, for the first time and you're not tracking your data to the level that Tony was just talking about, that what we're talking about is just gathering information about how people find your law firm, whether that's through a paid channel like Google Ads, or whether it's through Google Maps or hearsay or a billboard or whatever. Our point is that you need to be tracking these things independently, and you can't just rely on asking your customers how they found you. We hear this all the time, and I'm here to tell you that just asking them is the wrong way to track your data. James, can you expand on that subject a little bit more to help law firm owners understand the value of of real, concrete data? Yeah, absolutely. So without having the the correct infrastructure in your forms as well as in your call tracking platforms to pull that source medium and G Clin which is your Google click ID from pay traffic. These types of data points into your, time records and they come in as new leads. You get all kinds of issues, right? You don't know what's actually working. We talked a lot about the waterfall already. On this, revenue roadmap and, without those proper, events being captured on the client record, if there are major fluctuations in your waterfall suggesting there's, you know, a channel or an issue, right, that's going on that's really, causing performance decline for your business without those, events being captured, we're unable to really diagnose as effectively. Right, because everything's being in there kind of, you know, at a high level or blanket level, we can't really dive into the, to the level that we want to. In addition to that is obviously then when we're talking about connecting platforms like this, right, like actually being able to say, hey, Google, I want you to take credit for this lead we drove so that we can go after, you know, folks that are of higher value to us, that actually turn into funded clients, effectively are unable to do that. So it's really twofold. It's going to give you the power to be able to diagnose when issues are going, you know, going our I know it will also allow you to understand. Right, right. What's your your most highest impact. Revenue driving sources that you want to obviously continue to, you know, share and invest in. And then it's going to make your platforms better. So there's a lot of, really good reasons why this isn't just like a good to have business and need to have for all our law firms, 100%. I think, this kind of this, this dives into our second point, which is like embracing the data gap. And, Tony, I know you and I talk about this all the time and that that people don't buy in single transactions any longer, right? They they gain brand awareness and and even though family law isn't a brand heavy practice area, there are still multiple touch points in this life cycle. Can you talk to us a little bit about the importance of understanding that, you know, you shouldn't just measure your success based on the last interaction someone had? Yeah. At the, I think the most recent data on number of impressions required to have recall a of your brand name and what you do, it's 32 in 2025, I believe we we I believe every individual consumer sees about 100,000 ads every single day. Different brands. So the likelihood that you're going to get a one click, one call. And now I'm going to convert into a funded a funded agreement. That's not real. That's not how it works. That's not how people buy, even silly things like, you know, my my wife, my wife takes notes in church every week and she likes to color coat her notes. So she did research on the types of pens that she wanted. And pens are like $7 right up a pack of pens. The $7 off Amazon. I don't I don't know how many different brand impressions she got for for the all the different pens she got, but I can guarantee you it wasn't a one click and purchase scenario. That's not how people buy stuff. And that's especially not how people buy family law services. When we've done in-depth studies on the length of time before they actually contact the firm, by interviewing past clients that we had good relationships with, they started their process 18 to 36 months before they start interacting with us like they were researching. Can I can I keep my same job? What happens with the marital home? How much time I going to have with my kids? All of this like massive amount of information that they don't know because they're going through tons and tons of decision making processes. So I think it's really important to understand that, like, you're not going to get a perfect, attribution model in here, which is why we, we measure on a multi-channel attribution model system, because we know it takes more than one, one impression, one click. But it's not how it works. And the more you, the more you really embrace that, the better. I think it's even worse in the family law space, because a lot of the research you're doing is in the in the incognito mode. You're deleting your sessions because you don't want someone to grab your phone and be like, oh, what are you why are you researching Sterling lawyers? They're a divorce firm. What are you doing for, you know, so the tracking is even worse in this space as a result because it's they're trying to hide it. The so our rule of thumb is we think we capture about 40 to 60% of attribution in our paid channels. So when when we measure how effective are we, we keep that in mind. And we've done done studies. I think, James, when you several years ago originally came on the account you were seeing Bing Bing wasn't working quote unquote. So I'm like, okay, cool, turn it off. Turn it off. And we watch our multi-channel attribution model and we saw our leads go down. Was our leads go down by about 5 or 7%, and then we turn it back on. They went right back up. And we actually saw our cost per customer lead as the leads went down, go up. So we did it. We saw the exact opposite of what we expected to see. And it's because the attribution models suck in the space, especially in the space of family law. So I think it's really important. Just understand that, like understand the technology and the gaps in the technology. You know, Apple's becoming more and more, consumer friendly from a data protection perspective at least, like giving your data up to other people. They still take all your data, but, they're not giving it some back to the ad platforms. Which makes it even harder because most of your traffic, I think 78% right now, it's coming on a mobile device, and more than 50 or 60% of those are on an iPhone. Those are that stuff is going to be less likely to be tracked. Well, so it's just it's a it's a fairly important point to understand the gap in the data and embrace it. Don't try to change it and don't chase yourself trying to fix it because like good luck changing Apple's opinion on how they're going to build their iPhones because it's not likely going to be something new. And Tim Cook are going to have a good conversation about. Well said. Well said. I think it's so important to recognize that, you know, we're we're kind of talking on both sides of our mouth. Right? We're saying, hey, you have to track every piece of data you have access to, and at the same time saying, hey, you're not going to have access to all the data. So embrace that fact and understand that that's that's the reality we live in. And so, James, you touched on it a little bit. But you know, third point here being track revenue generating conversions to talk a little bit about that. Yeah. Absolutely. So a lot of times we're kicking off with, with new clients. One of the first steps we'll do is do paid media audit. So you know, obviously a law firms out there listening to us, you know, I'm sure you've gone through this process before. What we look at is one of the most important things to insurers in a good spot, even before we start building, is that they're optimizing for the right conversion actions. So at minimum, that's going to be, web form submission successfully. And then, assuming the type of call tracking platform, then, connected, calls obviously driven by those ad platforms. And that's totally minimum, because what this is going to segway into next is really. Yeah, that's that's good data to tell the platforms to optimize for. But it's really still not going to be your highest impact conversion action that you want to point these ad platforms out. Yeah. So the way that we like take your that's your 100, 100 lead to 18 quote right there. Great. That, you know, where the hundreds of 100 leads are coming from. But like, there's a lot of junk in there. So just tying it back. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And so one of the things that, that we always like to do when we kick off with clients here to understand the different stages within their CRM are where they're tracking their customers that are, that are obviously working with them. And what we'll do is create specific conversion actions based off of different stages in there. So that can be obviously the final stage, which is they, you know, sign their retainer. They're an active client, right? They paid up, or somewhere in the middle. So I think, Tony, you had said at one point, what we did with Sterling is we, you're going to always want some quantity of this, right? To be able to give, a reliable and consistent feedback to the ad platforms. So we like to find a stage within, the CRM in which folks are going to get to at a pretty consistent, frequent basis that we can pull back to the, to the platform. So what we used for Sterling and pending. So the user is actually gone from lead to opportunity, met with the attorney and actually received a quote. So we know based off our waterfall that there's a high, percentage of folks that get a quote that end up becoming funding agreements. So we know it's going to be a really high quality conversion action to optimize around, and that's, completely improved, and account over the, over the course of time there as we've started to optimize for that. And what's really powerful there is like obviously, by knowing how many quotes we need to give out to our customers to get us on an agreement, we can then go assign value back to that so we can actually be going after a revenue driving type, conversion actions like that based off of your CRM data. Yeah. What you're really trying to do in that is like, figure out you want to go as far down the funnel as you possibly can and get statistically relevant data. So it's like a balance there. So I think it's a 30 day period to get a minimum. We would be looking for 30 to 50 actions that would go back. Anything less than that you got a pretty weak sample size. So then you'd want to go up to the next, the next level of the funnel. So the further down you can go, the better. But it's going to be contingent on how much data do you have. And that's why we like I said before, marketing is purchasing data, analyzing it. And optimizing and then doing it, doing it again. So you're constantly just retesting your hypotheses and the more you do that and the more you can push things down, the more return on spend you're going to get, and the better you're, profitability is going to be. Well, so and so I think it's important to recognize that not all parts of the funnel you're talking about are created equal. Right? So how do you go about the process of assigning value to those different interactions that happen? Since we know, you know, people don't buy in a single interaction. So okay, I don't want to over optimize for just lead forms, because I know that people actually find our website and do research on the front end. So how do I build that? That process. Yeah. So the the way that we've done it with clients is by building that waterfall, like we've been talking about a lot on this, by understanding what's your average, map of value, right, of folks that end up actually working with you, we can then reverse engineer how many leads we need, both from, you know, a combination of web form and calls to then becoming marketing qualified leads to opportunities. So actually working with an attorney to then producing that quote, like I talked about previously to then ultimately getting a signed retainer. So by kind of reverse engineering what our average value is for assigned client hiring us, we're able to then assign value back. Right. So if it's let's say our average order value is, you know, 10,000 for a divorce case, if we need to give out two, quotes, we know quotes are worth about 5000, right? So you can do this all the way back with how many leads it takes to come down. So as we're looking at the right stages to optimize for, we can give that, value back to, Google or other AI platforms to really, give it, you know, a target in terms of what we're trying to get back at out of our ad spend with a return return, our announcement goal there. Hey, family law firm leaders. My partner, Tony Karl's just released his book where he lays bare our precise blueprint for growing sterling lawyers from 0 to 17 million. This is the blueprint that we still use daily. And Tony explains it in very simple terms. The truth is, this is not simple to do. Success requires and demands hard work. But if you have the patience and the work ethic to do it, your family law firm will succeed as it relates to a return on ad spend. Because I think we talk to our clients about this all the time, and I'm sure this is going to come up. What should attorneys expect? Like if I'm spending $100 online, how much should I get back and what does that look like? Yeah. So, obviously understanding, right. Like every law firm is gonna be a little bit different on what their actual case value is. Right. So a law firm that's, really going after the most premier, you know, complex, high net worth type divorce, right? Are going to have a little bit of more wiggle room in terms of, you know, what they're willing to spend upfront to get those leads. You know, generally speaking, we want to get a minimum 400 return on everything that we're doing in these platforms, knowing that there is, you know, data discrepancy between, what we're driving and what obviously, the law firm is going to be getting back. We want to adjust those goals to, to often be on the more conservative. And that way we can kind of offset the fact that not all of this is going to be perfect 1 to 1. And then from there it's really just doing some optimizations. To, to see where you can push and pull. Right. So obviously the more stringent your target is going to be, then the, the less likely Google's in a spend, you know, the same number of, of dollars to, bid up and get your, your ad shown at a higher rate. The more you loosen that right, the more opportunity you'll get to potentially, update some of your competitors. So that's where really the fun part comes with obviously understanding of the law firms, you know, goals in terms of what they're trying to get out of their platforms, what you know, what's their average order and stuff like that for assigned retainer. And then kind of again, reverse engineering back into that to making sure we're doing everything on the platform side to to set a good target there. I think an important reminder there is that this everything we're talking about is an investment in growth, right? If you're leveraging paid ads to try and save your firm or create a life raft to get you through a bad month like this, everything we're saying is not not accurate. The revenue goals and the return on ad spend goals we're talking about assumes that there is a desire to grow your firm and reinvest into your firm so that it can continue to grow in the future. And I think that's a really important point, because I think sometimes entrepreneurs will say, well, I need I have to get a 5 to 1, you know, for every dollar I spend, I gotta have $5 back. And it's important to ask the why, you know, what's happening there and why do you require that type of return as opposed to being able to reinvest in your business? I think part of it, too, that is misunderstood, as most of the time when these conversations are pointed out, marketing cost and the less effective and efficient your operation is, the lower the lower you need your cost from a marketing perspective to be. So coming from, you know, background, being in in the affiliate space, we were able to compete in a national, national level at very high CPCs because we had a really good call center. It actually had nothing to do with our marketing. Like we we drove traffic, we converted it at the best we could, about 20% conversion rate on the landing pages, but our call center performed at like 42% conversion rate, which allowed us to like be number one in the space. That had nothing to do with our marketing. It had everything to do with our operation. And when our operations started performing worse, we had to scale back our marketing because the cost per lead wasn't appropriate for the return on ads when that was required. So these two things are very connected, like your total. You're in a market in a law firm, you really shouldn't be spending more than 12% on your sales marketing. You're likely not to be profitable. You know, a good way to think about that is if if you're spending 15 to 20%, if you're spending 20% of your budget on marketing, that means for every $1 that comes into the firm, or for every $5 that come into the firm, $1 is actually just go to marketing platforms like that's that's not good. So, it's not what you want. And you still haven't paid your entire team. So they've done a lot of things. You've just paid your ad platforms. So you're going to want to see a higher return on ad spend. That part of the leveraging point is not just in platform conversions on website conversion. But also like how are you actually converting in the funnel? So like, how effectively are you answering the phones? How effectively are you following up with your web leads? How good are the people that are doing that, that job scheduling them in the in the consultations? So and then how well are your attorneys monetizing those, those appointments, were you kind of moving everything around and changing the schedule. And you get a lot of no shows and a lot of cancellations, and you're going to see you need your marketing costs come down pretty significantly because your operations impacted. Yes. It's very, very intricate. And I think just to add some more complexity to this mix, we do need to talk about phone calls, right? Sometimes attorneys will say, well, they called me so, you know, I'm an accountant as a phone call. Well, in reality, maybe they saw an ad or saw a billboard and got your phone number from that. And so how do we treat phone calls? And so what I do with those. Yeah. So, in terms of working with our clients. So one of the things that we, we required to work with us and would really push for all law firms that are working with us to go out and do is to make sure you have some sort of call tracking platform, purchased for your organization. I'm trying to so it back and everything. We talked about attribution summary data. Right. Like if you don't have a call tracking system in your law firm, you're probably getting a decent amount of calls, probably more typically then web forms coming in through your website. You need to have call tracking, platform set up to be able to really understand what what different marketing channels and sources are obviously driving both, you know, crappy calls to your business as well as calls that end up turning into, sign retainers and, revenue for your business. So there's a number of different platforms out there. A lot of them do integrate, directly with, J4 and Google ads and meta. So you're able to actually optimize for conversion actions. Coming from those call tracking platforms. In addition to that, not only from obviously, an ads perspective, we're talking about tracking and attribution, all these things. It's also just from like an operation standpoint. You can get a lot of great understanding of, you know, what's going on, right? When when folks are calling in, you can set up different flows and things like that to help you better manage the inbound calls coming in and making sure they're getting routed to the right place. So like Tyler, you talked about this a turning example. You know, obviously return callers right by using a call tracking, system. A lot of times you can then make sure that that call then gets routed the correct way. That activity is then updated in your CRM for that existing customer. And they're not treated as a brand new one. And of course, not new leads that are coming in through the Google business profile or maybe a, you know, an ad extension or a PPC add to the website. Those, you know, obviously coming in as net new leads into your CRM. So, some tracking platforms are huge in this space. Highly, highly recommend it. That's always a big surprise when we're kicking off new clients. And it's like, oh, you don't have this. It's fun because it's a lot of times I don't understand the power of this, both, again, marketing wise and operationally. So that's my spiel. If you don't have it, definitely get one. It's definitely required for, marketing. Be able to understand, where there's opportunities and how we can send data back to some of these platforms. One other, like, just to put a, exclamation point on something James just said there. So the a lot of times what we'll see is, law firms will actually be capturing all of their data. So like, the, the intake team will only enter things that are qualified and they won't enter all the other stuff. That is that is like one of the biggest mistakes and best ways to spend a lot more money in advertising because you're not entering all of your data. You need you need to like, treat the data as if it's gold and like even if it's not the right type of gold and you can't monetize it, you can stop sending it in. If you capture it. And like the benefit of having the call center enter everything, track everything is that data then goes back to the marketing team and the and the machine learning systems to optimize better versus only entering qualified stuff in your CRM. So it's one of the biggest opportunities is just capture everything. Don't just enter the stuff that you want like literally capture everything. If you're doing family law and the criminal defense lead comes in, you know, do criminal offense enter the criminal defense lead, and we're going to get the tracking information off of it and see where it came from. Then we're going to try to minimize those that exposure on those channels. So it's a good James, as you mentioned, that it's a really important point. Capture all the data, but you're already purchasing it. Leverage it. 100% guys. Really appreciate the time. Love the conversation. If you're listening to this, that you're confused. We have a lot of different episodes diving even deeper into the weeds as it relates to everything. Law firm growth is is related to, but at the end of the day, this this is all about just just tracking your data. You know, you can make it really easy and really simple to start with. And you can always get more complex. So if you found this episode valuable, you will love our next episode. As we dive into keyword categories in Google Search Console, we'll show you how to unlock new opportunities by understanding how people actually search for Family Law services. Click here to go to the next episode.

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Jeff Hughes

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