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Ask a firm where last month’s signed cases came from and you will usually hear one of two answers. “Google.” Or a shrug at a source column in the case management system that says Unknown over and over.
Most of the time, the ads are fine. The links are tagged, and the ad platforms report the clicks and the form fills. The trail goes cold somewhere between the click and the intake record, in a part of the process the marketing side rarely sees.
A quick refresher if UTMs are new to you. A UTM is a short tag on the end of a web address, like ?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc, that tells your reports where a visitor came from. The catch is that it lives in the web address, and the web address does not follow the visitor into your intake system by itself. Something has to copy it over.
These are the three places we most often see that copying fail.
1. The visitor reads before filling out the form
People rarely fill out a form on the first page they land on. They read about the firm, open a practice page, maybe look at the attorneys, and then go to the contact page. The UTM was only ever in the address of that first page.
If your form’s hidden fields read the tag from the current page’s address, they come through blank on the contact page. Test the form on the landing page and everything looks perfect. Test it the way a real person moves through the site and the fields are empty.
The fix is to save the tag values when the visitor arrives and fill the hidden fields from what was saved. Your web developer will know what that means. Ask them to test the form two clicks away from the landing page, not on it.
2. A phone call has no web address
At many firms, a lot of new cases start with a phone call. A call does not carry a web address, so a UTM cannot ride along with it. Without call tracking, every call from the website looks the same.
Call tracking services handle this by showing each website visitor a phone number from a pool. When that number rings, the service knows which visit it belongs to and what brought that visitor to the site. The UTM names the click, and the tracking number connects the click to the call. You need both.
3. The intake system gets a name and a phone number, and nothing else
This one is quiet. The form captured the source. The call tracking captured the source. Then the lead lands in your intake or case management software, and the source is not in the record.
Sometimes the connection between the two tools only passes along the name, the phone number and the message. Sometimes the source field exists, but nobody mapped anything to it. Sometimes the software fills a blank field with a default, so every lead says “Website.” And sometimes someone on the intake team types the source in at the end of the call, from memory. That is how you end up with a month of cases from “Google.”
A tool that can store the source is not the same as a tool that is set up to. Ask your vendor to show you with a real test lead, not a description.
The ten-minute test
You can check all three of these yourself, and it takes about ten minutes.
- Make a tagged test link with a campaign name you will recognize, like
2026_10_intake_test. The free UTM Builder will put it together for you. - Open the link in a private browser window. Click through two pages, then go to your contact page and submit the form as “Test Lead.”
- Find the new lead in your intake system. Check that the source, medium and campaign match the link, letter for letter.
- Open the link again, then call the number shown on the page from your cell phone. Check the call record for the same values.
Whatever is missing tells you which of the three breaks you have. Fix that one, then run the test again in a fresh private window.
Until the fix is in, have your intake team ask every caller how they heard about the firm, and write the answer in its own field. It is a backup, not a replacement. People often say “Google” for an ad, a map listing, a review site, or a billboard they saw and then searched for. That makes it a useful second opinion, as long as it is never the only one.
The free UTM Tracking Mini-Course goes through each step in more detail, including what to ask your intake software vendor and how to name your links so your reports stay readable. It takes a free account.
Questions
- Why do UTM values come through blank on a law firm’s web form?
- Usually because the visitor read a few pages before filling out the form, and the UTM was only in the address of the first page. Save the values when the visitor arrives, then fill the form’s hidden fields from what was saved.
- Can UTMs track phone calls?
- Not by themselves, because a phone call has no web address. Call tracking shows each website visitor a number from a pool, so the call can be matched to the visit and to the UTM that brought them.
- How do I test whether my UTMs reach my intake system?
- Open a tagged test link in a private window, click through two pages, submit your contact form, and check the new lead’s source, medium and campaign. Then do the same with a phone call to the number on the page.
