A new survey conducted by Bristol-based Conscious Solutions has found that the average time visitors spend viewing law firm websites is just 2 minutes. According to Conscious Solutions sales & marketing director David Gilroy… We analysed 83 sets of data we collected from a combination of clients and non-clients. The benchmark consisted of six key pieces of information from Google Analytics for the month of March 2009. The key metrics we tracked were:• Total number of page views• Total number of visits• Average number of pages/visit• Average time on site• Average bounce rate• Percentage of new visitsThe summary table below shows the summary data for all 83 firms, along with a breakdown in three categories based on number of partners in the firm.
The highlights of these initial finds are as follows:• The most consistent metric across all sites is the time spent on the site. There is very little variation in this number based on size of firm; it’s just two minutes per site. However, the range here was quite marked, from a lowly 40 seconds (where the site had little valuable content) up to 3:48 for a large, well written, content rich site.• There is a clear correlation between the size of a law firm and the total number of page views per month. The table above shows that that larger firms are getting significantly more pages viewed in total.• We attempted to correlate a metric of the number of page views per partner, but our feeling is that this metric is less useful than others.• This is directly related to the total number of Visits. Larger firms clearly get many more visitors than smaller firms, which I do not think would be a surprise to anyone.• However, if we compare the average number of page views per visit, then there is far more consistency between different size firms. This leads us to conclude that as long as you have a decent amount of content on your website, then you should be getting around 4 page views per visit.• There was also consistency in the bounce rate ie visitors to the site who looked at one page then “bounced” away from the site to somewhere else.• The final metric we looked at was the percentage of new visits. This tracks what proportion of visitors each month are coming to a website for the first time. This was also consistent with our thinking in that larger firms had a lower percentage, ie their clients are more likely to be repeat visitors as they tend to have more valuable content that people want to visit; either that, or they are probably more active with email marketing activities to draw visitors back to the website.The attached spreadsheet shows the underlying data. Conscious Solutions can be found at www.conscious.co.uk