What we’re reading: “Who is visiting your website?”

In the September 2012 issue of the National Law Journal, legal marketing consultant Adrian Dayton wrote a very interesting piece about the “digital bread crumb” that gets left behind when someone visits a website.

Adrian describes reverse IP lookup tools that allow you to access that digital bread crumb to see which companies are visiting your website. Awesome.

A tool like reverse IP lookup should be part of every marketer’s arsenal. It offers two huge benefits:

Actionable information. The value of knowing who’s visiting, and how often, is incalculable. As Adrian describes, it provides the firm/attorney a reason to reach out to a potential client. It also provides intelligence on things such as which of your competitors are stopping by.

Elevation of Marketing’s status. Reverse IP lookup tools offer the hard data that C-level executives (Managing Partners) so desperately want. The information provides insight. It also reveals the value that the Marketing Department can bring, which ultimately allows Marketing to secure a seat at the table.

Reverse IP lookup is a standard feature in Great Jakes’ website content management system (CMS). Knowing which companies are visiting your website is crucial – and therefore needs to be easy to access. That’s why we provide this information on the first page that marketers see when they log into their website’s CMS.

But for mid-sized and large law firms, with dozens of practice areas and hundreds of attorneys, we felt that we had to sort this information in a way that would be more meaningful for the marketing department. That’s why we configured our system to delve deeper and provide this same information for each and every attorney and practice area.

Imagine what it could mean to an attorney or practice area leader to know exactly who’s visiting her bio or practice area. Now imagine how elevated the status of the Marketing Department becomes after you’ve shared this information…

Increasingly, enhanced analytics will help marketers drive successful initiatives. What new analytics tools are you employing to achieve your firm’s goals?