Any firm who’s worked with an agency knows that Thirty pages of activity metrics is not an answer. It’s a document designed to feel thorough while avoiding the one question that actually matters: what’s working, specifically, and what should stop.
Quick answer
A long marketing report padded with impressions, reach, and engagement percentages usually exists to demonstrate effort, not results. The metrics that actually tell a firm whether its marketing is working are narrower and more specific: per-page traffic, keyword ranking movement, and clicks — tracked individually, not rolled into a site-wide total.
Why the padding happens
Site-wide totals always go up over time as a site accumulates content, regardless of whether any individual piece is doing well. That makes a big rolled-up number an easy thing to point to, even when the underlying picture is mixed. A 30-page report with charts trending upward can be entirely consistent with half the firm’s content doing nothing.
What a useful report actually looks like
- Page-level, not site-level. Which specific pages are ranking, for which terms, and how that’s moved since last month.
- Comparable over time. The same pages tracked month over month, not a rotating set of vanity metrics.
- Short. If it takes 30 pages to say what’s working, something is being obscured, not explained.
What this doesn’t solve
Being able to see which pages are getting found and clicked is not the same as knowing which one closed a client. That link — a specific asset to a specific signed matter — requires the firm to confirm it, because it lives in a CRM or intake system the marketing platform doesn’t have access to. Anyone claiming to trace that automatically is skipping past a step that doesn’t exist yet in most law firm marketing stacks.
The one thing worth asking your agency this month
Skip the report. Ask for a list: every page on the site, its traffic this month versus last month, and its current search ranking for its target term. If that list can be produced in five minutes, the agency already has the data — the 30 pages were optional. If it can’t be produced at all, that’s worth knowing too.
FAQ
Why do agencies send such long reports if the real data is simpler?
A long report with rising totals is easier to present as progress than a short one that shows some pages up and others flat or down — even when the short one is more accurate.
Is a rising site-wide traffic number a bad sign?
Not necessarily, but a lot can be missed. A handful of strong pages can carry a rising total while most of the site does nothing. Page-level data is what tells the two apart.
What should replace the monthly report format entirely?
A live, per-page view a firm can check anytime, rather than a document assembled once a month.
Josh Corbelli has spent 20 years building revenue systems for law firms and professional services businesses — from directing growth strategy for top-tier firms at Thomson Reuters to founding Agency 310, where he's driven results like a 217% increase in lead volume and 214% revenue growth for client firms. Today he's applying that same battle-tested discipline to AI: building and testing AI-enabled lead enrichment, CRM automation, and client-acquisition systems as the founder of GrowthAgents. He writes about where AI actually moves the needle in professional services marketing — and where it doesn't, yet.