How Whitehardt Brings Attribution Clarity to Attorney Marketing with CallRail

Whitehardt is leading the charge to bring attorney advertising into the Digital Age

In some industries, transitioning to an advanced call tracking system can be a daunting task. This is especially true for law firms and personal injury attorneys, who have for the last 30 years followed a reliable set of best practices — like having a single branded phone number listed across all their ad channels. If you listen to the radio during your morning commute, you’ve heard an example of this in a direct-response commercial: “Injured in a car accident or at work? Call 1-888-LAWYER-UP today.”

Many law firms and attorneys put a premium on having a unique and easy-to-remember phone number like this listed in all of their ads. But if you’re well-versed in the art of call tracking, you know that having the same number listed in all your ads can make it impossible to properly attribute calls to their corresponding marketing channel.

Challenges like these are a regular part of the day for Will Fox, Director of Digital Marketing at Whitehardt, a full-service marketing agency for law firms and attorneys. (So named for its founders, Kevin White and Felix Eckhardt.) Whitehardt’s services run the gamut: Video production, media buys, digital marketing, call center operations, management consulting, and more.

In the legal / attorney space, calls have always been the primary driver of leads: “_Advertising in the legal space is still very much a phone-call-driven business_,” Fox explained. “Even within the online space — where we’re offering 3 forms of contact between phone calls, filling out a form and using live chat — 80% of our leads still come in via phone.”

CallRail was already in limited use at Whitehardt when Fox took their reigns of their digital marketing department in 2014. And after learning about the advanced analytics and sourcing features available in the program, a plan formed in his mind: “CallRail very quickly became an integral part of what we do. I saw immediately the tremendous value that it brought, and how it could unseat this age-old notion of the importance of a branded phone number.”

Advanced analytics lead to actionable insights

Since many of Whitehardt’s clients operate in more than one geographic region, Fox saw the immediate value of creating pools of tracking numbers for their PPC landing pages and organic search listings. With their pool of tracking numbers properly set up, Whitehardt’s clients were then able to accurately match each call with the marketing channel that drove it, as well as the associated search keywords.

Fox put CallRail’s analytics suite to work right away, and the results were both illuminating and unexpected: For the 80% of leads that come in via phone, he found that a majority were driven by mobile click-to-call and text ads. It’s one of just many insights provided by CallRail that has helped guide Whitehardt’s future marketing efforts and prove ROI to their clients.

“That’s the kind of attribution not just to a marketing channel but to the actual ad dollars, which then lets us make very clear determinations around how our efforts are doing, so we can demonstrate serious ROI to our clients and prove the value of our marketing,” Fox said. And for clients who are attached to having a single branded phone number, CallRail allows Whitehardt to directly demonstrate and visualize the opaque reporting inherent to having only a single main-line tracking number.

Once a client sees the in-depth data and analytics available in CallRail, Fox says they’re much more likely to be sold on the idea of having dedicated phone numbers for each of their marketing channels. And in cases where the client doesn’t want to switch over to multiple tracking numbers, they’re usually keen to point their existing line to a dedicated CallRail tracking number.

“We’re able to provide a more than 50% attribution rate for our clients’ calls, and that’s been very valuable,” Fox said. “And even if we don’t have the source locked down because of a branded number, metrics like the number of first-time callers and call duration are incredibly valuable to our clients.”

Whitehardt is a CallRail Platinum Agency Partner. Agencies that join the Partner Program are eligible for co-marketing benefits like this, along with webinars and guest posts. Interested in joining the Partner Program? Sign up here.

Looking towards the future

For the last three decades, advertising in the legal or attorney space has stuck to the same handful of reliable (and highly competitive) channels: TV and radio spots, billboards, print ads, the YellowPages. But like so many other industries, the rise of digital and mobile tech has led to serious disruptions in what was for decades a relatively stable industry. Now that everyone has a smartphone in their pocket, the path to purchase is becoming ever more complex.

This presents tremendous opportunities for firms and advertisers who keep pace with developments in call tracking and mobile tech, like Whitehardt. “As a direct result of us using your platform, our clients are embracing digital in a way they might not have before, since CallRail allows us to show such clear attribution for their ad dollars,” Fox explained. “More and more potential customers are turning to these digital channels. We kind of always knew this as an instinct, and CallRail helped us prove it.”

Fox adds that the insights gleaned through CallRail have helped Whitehardt make smarter and more impactful decisions about nearly every aspect of their business: “[CallRail’s analytics] also led us to make tweaks to the kind of ad copy and creative content we produce for our clients. So helping our customers learn the benefits of a digital approach has actually changed the content and copy we produce and made us more effective at that.“

As Whitehardt proves, keeping pace with developments in call tracking and digital advertising can yield big returns for your business and distinguish you from the competition. Learn how call tracking with CallRail can give your business the edge it needs: Request a demo or start your 14-day free trial.