Building a Simple Marketing ROI Dashboard for Probate Cases

Why probate firms specifically need this

Probate marketing has three quirks that make ROI tracking harder than for, say, personal-injury or family-law firms:

• Cycle time is long. A lead that signs a retainer in November may have first found you in May. If your tracking only looks back 30 days, you'll kill the channel that actually paid.

• Case value is wildly uneven. Treating a $1,500 small-estate filing the same as a $25K contested probate in your reporting hides the channels that bring high-LTV work.

• Calc tools shift the funnel. A free probate-cost calculator changes the visitor → lead path — engagement happens before the contact form, so you need to track the calc completion as its own conversion event.

LawKPIs called this out in their 2026 framework: most firms still rely on lagging indicators — closed cases, billed revenue — when the leverage is in the leading indicators (LawKPIs 2026). You can't fix March's pipeline in October. You can fix March's pipeline in March if you're watching CAC and source ROI weekly instead of quarterly.

The 6 metrics that actually matter

You don't need 30 KPIs. You need six. Here's the spine:

1. CAC (Client Acquisition Cost) by source. Total spend on a channel divided by clients signed from that channel. Google Ads spend was $4,800 last month and you signed 4 cases? CAC = $1,200. Track per channel, not in aggregate — aggregate CAC hides the channel that's actually losing you money.

2. LTV (Lifetime Value) by case type. Average fee × close rate, segmented by practice area. Contested probate at $18K average × 0.6 close rate = $10,800 LTV. Small-estate filings at $1,800 × 0.85 = $1,530. Same firm, two completely different economics — and your dashboard has to show that.

3. Calc-to-consult rate. Of visitors who complete your free probate calculator, what percentage book a consultation? Industry baseline I see for solo/small firms running our calc embeds: 8-15%. If you're below 5%, the issue is usually a missing CTA on the results page.

4. Consult-to-retainer rate. Of consultations booked, what percentage sign? Healthy range is 35-55% for probate. Below 30% means either intake quality is bad or you're booking unqualified leads — both of which are dashboard signals, not gut feelings.

5. Source ROI. Revenue generated by a channel divided by spend on that channel. Google Ads spent $4,800 and produced $32,000 in signed fees? That's 667% ROI. Anything under 200% gets a 60-day cure window — then it gets cut.

6. Time-to-close. Days from first touch (calculator completion, form fill, call) to signed retainer. Probate's natural cycle is 30-90 days. Channels with a 7-day time-to-close are bringing emergency or contested work — the highest-LTV segment.

The free stack — no expensive BI tool required

Here's the entire toolkit, and every piece is free or has a free tier that's enough for a solo or small firm:

• Google Analytics 4 (GA4) — traffic, source, UTM tags, calculator-completion events. Free.

• Google Sheets — your master leads log. One row per lead, columns for source, case type, consult booked (Y/N), retainer signed (Y/N), fee. Free.

• [Looker Studio](https://lookerstudio.google.com/) (formerly Data Studio) — connects to both GA4 and your Sheet, builds your dashboard. Free.

• CallRail or HubSpot free tier — optional. Useful if you want call-source tracking, but you can get 80% of the way there without it.

Real numbers — case studies you can benchmark against

Comrade Web (Ivan Vislavskiy's agency) publishes some of the cleanest before/after numbers in legal marketing. Three real client outcomes from their 2025 ROI guide (Vislavskiy 2025):

• Lehmbecker Law (Seattle personal injury): 645% ROI, 1,425% increase in qualified leads after moving to ROI-first attribution and channel rebalancing.

• Stracci Law Group (Indiana criminal defense + PI): 1,591% qualified-lead lift, 91% drop in cost-per-lead, 7,146% organic-traffic boost. The CPL drop is the line that matters most — it means the same dollar bought 11x more leads.

• Hodgson Law Offices: 440% qualified-lead lift and 62% CPL drop in 6 months, plus a 2,715% organic-traffic increase.

These aren't probate firms specifically, but the mechanic is identical — track per-source CAC, kill anything under 200% ROI after 60 days, double down on what works. Probate firms running our calculator embeds at /probatecalc see the same pattern: the channels that drove "lots of clicks" in 2024 often turned out to be the worst CAC sources once attribution got tight.

Build it this Saturday — the 5-step checklist

Here's the order I run with every new client:

Step 1 — List every active marketing source and monthly spend. Google Ads, Facebook Ads, SEO retainer, directory listings, networking events, referral fees. One column for source, one for monthly $ spend. If you can't fill this in from memory in 10 minutes, that's the first signal — you're spending money you've stopped paying attention to.

Step 2 — Tag every form, calc, and CTA with UTM parameters. This is the 30-minute job most firms skip. Every Google Ads link, every email campaign, every Facebook ad needs ?utm_source=X&utm_medium=Y&utm_campaign=Z. Without UTMs, GA4 lumps everything into "direct" and your dashboard is meaningless.

Step 3 — Log every lead in one Sheet. Columns: Date, Source (from UTM), Case type, Consult booked? (Y/N), Retainer signed? (Y/N), Fee ($), Notes. One row per lead. Have your intake person fill it in within 24 hours of every call.

Step 4 — Build four Looker Studio cards. (a) CAC by source, (b) Source ROI (revenue / spend), (c) Calc-to-consult and consult-to-retainer rates, (d) Time-to-close trend. That's your full dashboard.

Step 5 — Review weekly, decide monthly. Block 15 minutes every Monday to look at the four cards. Block one hour at month-end to kill any source under 200% ROI for 60+ days and double down on the top two. The dashboard only earns its keep if it changes a spend decision.

What probate firms get wrong

A few patterns I see over and over in audits:

• Tracking only signed retainers, not consults. You need both. Consult conversion is the leading indicator — by the time the retainer signs or doesn't, the channel has already had its budget for the month.

• Counting "calls" without source. A call log with no UTM/source field is a vanity metric. CallRail or even a manual "How did you hear about us?" intake question solves it.

• No LTV per case type. A $1,500 small estate and a $25,000 contested probate are not the same lead. Channels that bring trust admin work are worth 10x what channels that bring small-estate filings are worth.

• Ignoring leading indicators. Calculator completions, time-on-page, and contact-form starts are early signals that a channel is about to convert (or not). LawKPIs frames this as the shift from "managing history" to "managing now" (LawKPIs 2026).