Intake, tracking and measuring results

The ten-minute test I run before looking at any analytics

The way Hennessey Digital tested it was actually sending enquiries through law firm contact forms at scale and seeing when a reply came².

Compare that to the speed and urgency of legal clients looking for a lawyer³:

• 56% of legal consumers acted within a week of realising they had an issue
• 16% acted within a day

Those who have just been rear-ended will ring three or four firms in an afternoon, and a fast and competent reply would capture a ready and willing client. By the time a two-hour reply arrives, they've hired the first decent firm they could.

To fix a failed test you have to spend your time on people and process, not technology:

• One named owner for first response, with a target measured in minutes
• An answering service for evenings and weekends, briefed to take real details instead of offering a callback
• A weekly look at the slowest response of the week

Where legal enquiries actually arrive

The Ruler Analytics data is split into calls and forms so you can see which parts of your marketing are bringing in the most enquiries. In its benchmark, Ruler covers over 110 million sessions and tracks over 5 million conversions across thirteen industries¹.

Two of the rows are very clear and straightforward spending signals:

• Referral at 8.8%, the top of the table. Which means it's in your interest to fund the profile work on the off-site page before another blog post.
• AI referrals at 8.4%, organic at 7.3%. Fewer visitors come from AI answers, where each individual visit is worth more.

Then there's the core number that form-only reporting has always missed, it's calls.

Counting form submissions is less than half the work on measuring enquiries when you're a firm on the Google Analytics default. And you're comparing your channels on the smaller half.

The five things to set up, in order

Unfortunately, 54% of the 11,000-plus local business properties BrightLocal looked at didn't have goals with conversion rates or events (to see enquiries) or have their contact forms hooked up⁴. Local businesses in general are under-measured; the legal market (firms like yours) is certainly no exception.

1. Call tracking with dynamic numbers. It isn't really useful to lump all calls into one bucket since some come from paid search and some don't. Call tracking remains the single most valuable setup.
2. Each form as its own event. I want to cheer the form count, but how useful is this data when consultation requests and newsletter signups are lumped into the same conversion?
3. Live chat tracked as a source. Live chat setups are varied, but a full 53% of the marketers using one struggle to track it as a conversion source¹. If visitors won't pick up the phone, they will open the chat to find out more about the firm.
4. A field linking the enquiry to the matter. If you can, put that field in your own case management system. If not, try a spreadsheet the intake person fills in and see what happens, because you do need to connect each form to a signed case.
5. Search Console connected. Search Console handles AI features and classic results for you and rolls them into one overall web total⁸. The AI features report is a guide not an exact count.

We would have to set up all five of these things on your website before I give you a straight answer. The idea is to let the partners make actual decisions, rather than having agencies report to them and argue about their attribution.

Agree what counts as a qualified enquiry, in writing, before month one

This is effectively a one-email job, and can prevent most of the arguments over time. A partner counting signed cases won't agree to a month of form-fill reporting. You are both working together to figure out how to reach a definition that provides fair numbers to both sides.

The monthly report, in this order

Rankings are the "big number" that looks good in reports. Cases don't exist to prop up the rankings, it's the other way around.

1. Signed cases attributed to search, with the attribution method stated in one line
2. Qualified enquiries, split by calls, forms and chat, with the unqualified ones shown separately
3. First response time, including the worst case rather than the average. Hiding your slowest reply in an average does not impress the client who waited
4. Calls and direction requests from the Business Profile, since Google says reviews and prominence feed local ranking⁷
5. Review flow: how many arrived, from how many closed matters, and how many got a reply
6. Organic entrances and impressions for the pages that convert, rather than sitewide totals
7. AI visibility, as a share of a fixed question set, with Bing's citation data where available⁹. Method on the AI visibility page
8. Rankings last, for a short list of terms that matter, with the map pack separated from the organic results

Item five exists for a reason.

• BrightLocal's 2026 survey found 44% of consumers rate a review posted in the last month among the most important things they look at, and 37% look for the owner's reply⁵
• Whitespark's practitioners score review recency at 11 and a sustained flow at 14 of 187 map pack factors⁶

Even the review data pushes you in this direction, making it very easy to count review flow as both a ranking metric and a conversion metric at the same time. Report your reviews on a monthly basis.

What to do when a number moves the wrong way

1. Check the enquiry count before the traffic count. So in a typical firm's analytics the traffic that left is informational and any one of those visits can go away without affecting the enquiries. I'm still explaining this a lot, because every single time sessions drop in a report, firms freak out.
2. Check response time. A drop in signed cases with flat enquiries is almost always an intake problem and not a search problem.
3. Check the tracking still works. I've seen a number of routine site releases that break call tracking scripts and form events from small template changes. A common problem with a conversion cliff on flat impressions is broken measurement.
4. Then look at rankings and the pages, in that order.

How I set this up on a new engagement

Week one. We start by running the intake test above and analyzing what data is already collected. Our current top checks are call attribution, form events, and the goals BrightLocal found most local businesses never set up⁴.

Then the definition. I suggest a definition of a qualified enquiry, but the firm makes the final call. Then we go through the first report, kept short, in the order above, with cases on the first line.