At the start of each year, we bask in the tons of data compiled from 12 solid months of user behavior collected from all of our websites. January always brings us intriguing new insights into site visitors.

This week, we are considering the number of times a visitor typically visits your website before filling out a contact form.

We reviewed 70,000 leads generated on law firm websites in various practice areas and regions to determine what percentage of web leads come from returning visitors — and how often that visitor goes to your website before sending your firm an email. This report shows only the number of leads coming from web contact forms and does not, therefore, account for phone calls. Our results displayed a range of user behavior with a strong single-visit majority:

• One Visit: A little more than 82% of web leads contacted a law firm the first time they visited its website. It's a safe majority.
• Two Visits – Almost 10% of web leads waited until their second visit to contact the firm.
• Three Visits – The third time was the charm for approximately 3% of web leads.
• Four and Five Visits – 1.3% of our evaluated leads needed four to five visits before gaining the confidence to email. It did not appear that four or five offered any significant difference.
• Six to Eight Visits – Less than 1% of leads required six to eight visits before contacting the firm.
• Nine to 100 Visits – A surprising 1.7% visited nine to one hundred times before using a contact form. We actually discovered about 10 total web leads that were generated after a visitor went to the website over 100 times. Those very informed potential clients made up just 0.01% of the sample.

What is a Visit?

For this report, a “visit” is counted as a unique visitor to your website. To qualify for any additional visits, he or she left for 30 minutes or more, then returned. Someone spending the day looking for an attorney, for example, may have clicked on your website, left, read other websites, then returned and contacted your firm. That process counted for two visits for that lead. However, if someone visited your site, clicked away for under 30 minutes, then returned and contacted you, he or she was counted as a one-visit lead.

This report supports two positions:

• 1) Your first impression is the most important.
• 2) Remarketing is still a great investment.

If you make a great first impression and bring visitors back to your site, you address the behavior of 92% of web leads. (And who knows, they may come back to visit you 99 more times.)