The agency report said 640 leads. Google Analytics said 78 goal completions. Same firm, same year.
Both numbers were technically true. Neither was useful.
This is the most common opening conversation I have when I sit down with a marketing lead at a law firm for the first time. Sometimes the gap is bigger. Sometimes it’s smaller. The numbers always disagree, and when they disagree the marketing lead is the one who has to walk into a partner meeting and explain why.
The reason the numbers disagree is almost never that anyone is being dishonest. It’s that nobody has agreed what a lead actually is.
Three things that get counted as leads
Walk through any law firm’s quarterly marketing report and you’ll see at least three definitions overlapping.
- The first is the website goal. A form fill. A click on an email link. Sometimes a click on a phone number, depending on how the agency has set it up. Each of these is a row in Google Analytics. They get counted because they’re the easiest things to count.
- The second is the switchboard log. Calls picked up by reception that get routed to a fee earner or paralegal or PA. These rarely make it into Google Analytics. They land in someone’s spreadsheet, get manually transcribed at the end of the month and feed into a different report.
- The third is whatever the CRM has captured. New contact records created. Matter files opened. Sometimes neither, because the fee earner has dealt with the enquiry by direct email and never told anyone in marketing it happened.
Each of these is a real signal. None of them tells you the whole story on its own. Most quarterly reports take whichever number looks best and present it as “leads,” with no footnote about what’s been included or excluded.
Why this happens
Three reasons it persists.
Agencies report what’s easy to report. Form fills are countable in Google Analytics. They’re attributable to traffic sources. They produce a tidy number that can go on a slide. The harder numbers — switchboard calls, fee earner referrals, conversion to billable matters — sit outside the agency’s reporting tools and outside their incentive structure.
Marketing leads have too much on. The job is broad. Defining a measurement framework is the kind of work that takes weeks and shows no tangible output, so it sits at the bottom of the list while the next campaign demands attention.
Nobody wants the conversation. Asking the agency “what do we count as a lead?” sounds like a challenge. The answer might lead to a smaller number. The smaller number might lead to a difficult conversation with a partner. The path of least resistance is to leave the report alone and hope the trend looks healthy enough.
What to do instead
I usually run this exercise across about three weeks with a new client. None of it is rocket science.
Get every party who counts something in the room. Marketing, BD, the agency, the switchboard team, the CRM owner. Each one writes down what they count and how. The list will surprise you.
Agree a single working definition. The one I usually push for is: a lead is an enquiry that arrives via a tracked digital channel and is logged into the CRM with a named recipient and a follow-up status. Yours can be different. The point is that it has to be one thing, not three.
Write the definition down. Put it on the same page as every report that mentions leads from then on. Make the agency adopt it.
Build a year on year tracker that lives outside the agency’s reporting. A single spreadsheet with monthly numbers against the agreed definition. The marketing lead opens it in any meeting where the question of “is the website working?” comes up.
That last one matters more than people realise. Once you have a number that you trust, that you control and that you’ve defined yourself, the relationship with the agency shifts. You stop being the recipient of someone else’s report. You become the auditor of it.
What this looks like in practice
In one engagement I ran, the firm’s incumbent agency was reporting around 640 leads a year. After we agreed a definition, ran the audit and built the tracker, the new number was about a third of that — but every entry was traceable, attributable and connected to a named fee earner. Eighteen months later, with the agency reporting against the new definition, the leads number was up 190% year on year against the new baseline.
The first number was bigger. The second number was real.
If you’re a marketing lead at a law firm and you’ve ever sat in front of a quarterly report wondering why the trend on the slide doesn’t match what your fee earners are telling you, this is almost always why.
It’s a half day of work to fix. Worth doing this quarter.
