SEO reporting that answers "where did this month's signed cases come from." Call tracking, form attribution, GA4 events, GBP-to-CRM. Cost per case.
None of those numbers answer the question a managing partner actually has. The question is: where did this month's signed cases come from, and what did they cost? The chart that matters is one chart: cost per signed case by source, against last month and last quarter. Every other chart in the report is supporting evidence for that one.
Most agency reports are a wall of vanity metrics — impressions, clicks, average position, sessions, bounce rate, time on page.
To produce a real cost-per-signed-case number, the firm has to track every lead from source through to signed retainer. That's a full attribution stack:
Most law firms have one or two of these wired up. Almost none have all five. The first 60 days of a Rubiks engagement is usually spent getting the attribution stack working before any optimization decisions are made — because optimizing without attribution is guessing.
dynamic numbers per source (organic, GBP, paid, referral) that record source against every inbound call.
UTM parameters captured against every form submission, with source recorded in the CRM.
phone-click events, form-submit events, chat-start events, all tied to source.
calls and direction-requests from the GBP tagged distinctly so they don't get lumped into "organic."
the CRM records which leads converted to signed retainers and the source survives that flow.
The Rubiks monthly report has six layers, in this order:
The headline answers the question. The rest explains why the headline moved.
One chart. Last 12 months. The headline.
Volume layer. Same axes.
Quality layer. Where leakage happens.
for priority queries. Visibility layer.
Calls, direction-requests, profile views, photo views.
Pages published, internal-link health, freshness.
Impressions. Average position across all keywords. Bounce rate (especially for legal pages, where high bounce often means the prospect found the answer they needed and called). Sessions. Pages per session. Time on page. None of these numbers correlate cleanly with case acquisition; they do correlate with making the report look thicker.
Monthly reports are operational. The quarterly review is strategic. Every three months, the firm and the agency review the trend, identify the channels that are scaling efficiently, identify the channels that are not, and make budget shifts. Most firms make these decisions monthly, which is too noisy. Quarterly is the right cadence for major reallocations.
Attribution is also a culture question. Some firms are not used to looking at marketing data, and the first time they see a real cost-per-case number it can be uncomfortable — sometimes paid is wildly more expensive than expected, sometimes referrals are the largest channel and the marketing budget is only producing 20% of cases. The reporting frame is also a conversation frame: the agency walks the partner through the numbers monthly until the partner is comfortable making decisions from them.
Before a dollar is spent, you see exactly where your site leaks equity and which structural fixes compound.
The attribution stack — call tracking, form attribution, GA4, GBP-to-CRM tagging, CRM-to-signed flow.
Monthly reports against the six-layer template.
Quarterly strategic reviews.
Dashboard build (Looker Studio, GA4, or whatever the firm prefers) that the partners can open between reports.
The contract is simple. if a channel can't show signed-case impact, we don't keep spending on it.
See the same 30-point audit we ran on ourselves. Before a dollar is spent, you see exactly where your site leaks equity and which structural fixes compound. No vanity metrics, no obligation.
