Are analytics how you measure the success of your law blogs?

It may not be easy, but you ought to be measuring what you really care about when it comes to your law firm’s blogs.

From best selling author and marketer, Seth Godin:

The easiest path is to find a stand-in for what you care about and measure that instead. For example, websites don’t actually care about how many minutes someone spends on the site, they care about transactions or ad sales or making content that moves people to take action. But those things might be harder to measure at first, so they focus on minutes.

Unfortunately, this is so true for the vast majority of law firm personnel and lawyers when it comes to their law blogs. They can taste, feel and measure analytics and subscribers so firms use them as a measure of success. So misguided.

Per Seth:

The problem with stand-ins is that they’re almost always not quite right. The stand-in looks good at first, but then employees figure out how to game the system to make the stand-in number go up instead of the thing you’re actually trying to change.

Stand-in web-stats mean you’re measuring law blog success with virtually meaningless numbers. You’ll even get lawyers penning blog posts that they think will draw greater numbers.

How should you measure blog success? Here’s a start, per Seth:

If you had to choose between increasing the stand-in stat and increasing the thing you actually care about, which would you invest in?
Your law firm managing partner and CFO are not going to invest in web-stats and subscribers. Heck, there is no line item for stats in your firm’s financial statements.

Specifically, here’s what you ought to be looking at to measure blogging success.

• Are you growing a network of relationships providing professional and business development opportunities.
• Are your lawyers growing a word of mouth reputation as “go-to” lawyers in their area of practice and/or your locale.
• Are you not just retaining and landing new clients and work, but high quality work and clients.

Ask yourself if you are achieving these things through law blogging. Word of mouth and relationships do not come over night, that’s okay – they’re what count.

As Seth says, when tempted to fall back on irrelevant, but easy, measurements, take a look at the sign over your desk. The one that says what you are actually seeking to do.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Historias Visuales

* A similar post to this one was published by me at LinkedIn