Fees, not inquiries
Channels are ordered by collected fees rather than by volume, which is usually a different list from the one your ad account shows.
Marketing attribution for immigration firms
Which channels produced retained immigration clients?
Match retained matters and fees to the inquiries and campaigns that produced them, across cases that run for years.
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Immigration Law workspace FY2026 Sample data
Fees traced to a channel
$305,000 61% of $500,000 paid
- Google Ads $190,000 · 38%
- Meta Ads $95,000 · 19%
- Email marketing $20,000 · 4%
- Direct / Unknown $195,000 · 39%
Direct / Unknown is shown, never shared out across the channels above.
Google Ads · LeadFY2026 14 · (•••) •••-0134
Closed sale · FY2026 27$2,900
Matched · high confidence
The blind spot
What's actually happening
Immigration inquiries arrive in volume, in several languages, and most are not viable. Inquiry counts reward the channels producing the most noise.
What you get
Built for immigration firms.
Matters resolve much later
The gap between the inquiry and the matter costs you nothing — there is no window to expire and nothing decays.
Defensible in a partner meeting
Every match is auditable and reversible, and matters that trace to nothing are shown as Direct and Unknown rather than shared out across the paid channels.
A worked example
The number you can take into a budget meeting.
Not impressions, not leads, not cost per click. Closed revenue, by the channel that produced it, for a period you choose — with the portion we could not trace shown rather than quietly shared out across your paid channels.
Total revenue$500,000paid fees
Attributed to a channel$305,00061% of revenue
Average deal$2,900per paid sale
Match rate61%of sales matched
| Channel | Sales | Revenue | Share | % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads | 63 | $190,000 | 38% | |
| Meta Ads | 34 | $95,000 | 19% | |
| Email marketing | 7 | $20,000 | 4% | |
| Direct / Unknown | 66 | $195,000 | 39% |
01
Volume is the trap in this practice area
Immigration marketing generates inquiries cheaply and abundantly, which makes cost-per-lead look excellent almost everywhere. Viability is what varies: a channel can produce hundreds of inquiries from people with no route to a filing.
Ranking on retained fees rather than inquiry count is what separates a channel producing clients from one producing correspondence.
02
Community and language channels are real channels
Much of this work arrives through community organizations, in-language publications and word of mouth, and those are almost never measured while ads are measured to the click.
Any list of inquiries with a source label can go into the lead file, which puts community referral on the same axis as paid search.
03
A case type is a price list, and volume hides it
Immigration practices run work ranging from a straightforward application to a complex removal defense, and the fees differ by more than an order of magnitude. Each is one retained matter.
Because the lower-value work is far more numerous, any ranking built on matters signed is effectively a ranking of which channel produces the most routine applications. The channels that reach clients with complex, high-fee matters are systematically undervalued by it.
Ranking on collected fees with a case-type column reverses that, and it lets a firm decide deliberately which kind of work it wants to buy more of rather than drifting toward whatever is cheapest to acquire.
04
Language and community channels do not look like marketing
A great deal of immigration work arrives through community organizations, places of worship, consulates, and word of mouth inside a language community. None of that is media spend and none of it appears in an advertising account.
Left out of the report, those channels are invisible and the paid budget appears to be carrying the practice. Firms then over-invest in search because it is the only thing they can see.
Adding community and referral sources to the lead file, each row tagged with its source, puts them on the same revenue axis as paid search. The result may be that the relationship work is worth several times the advertising, which is actionable in a way no impression of it ever was.
05
Policy changes demand comparison across years, not months
Immigration demand moves with policy, and a rule change can transform the volume and the mix of inquiries within a quarter. Comparing consecutive months in that environment tells you about the policy, not about the marketing.
Uploading two or three years lets the report compare equivalent periods and separate a channel that genuinely improved from one that happened to be running when a category opened.
It also shows which channels held up through a downturn in a category, which is usually the better guide to where the durable demand is.
Why it matters
What changes when you can prove it.
You stop defending the budget and start growing it
"We generated 400 leads" invites an argument. "This channel closed $186,400 last quarter, here is the reconciliation" ends one. The teams that can show closed revenue by channel are the teams that get the next increase approved, because they are asking with evidence rather than with conviction.
You can cut the wrong channel without a fight
Killing spend is politically harder than adding it, because someone always owns the channel being cut. A number that reconciles to the sales export takes the argument out of the room — you are not overruling a colleague's judgment, you are reading the same ledger they are.
Your reporting survives the finance review
Platform-reported conversions do not reconcile to revenue, and eventually someone in finance notices. Reporting built from your own closed-sales export starts from the number finance already trusts, which is why it holds up when it is checked.
You answer in an afternoon, not a quarter
Because this reconciles exports rather than tracking visitors, it works on months that have already closed. You are not instrumenting now to learn something in ninety days — you can answer for last quarter today, which is usually when the question is being asked.
Honest answers
The pushback we hear from Immigration Law.
They say
We get enormous numbers of unqualified inquiries.
We say
Which is exactly what ranking on retained fees fixes. Unretained inquiries appear as unmatched leads and cost nothing against your allowance.
They say
Our clients speak several languages.
We say
The match works on phone numbers and email addresses, so language is irrelevant to it. Phones are normalized to international format.
They say
Our clients are anxious about data.
We say
Only a contact detail, a fee and a date are needed. No case type, no status, no document details.
Pricing
Flat monthly pricing. No per-call fees.
The price here is the price on the invoice, plus any sales tax that applies — no per-call, per-minute or per-form fees. Growth usually fits immigration practices — thirteen months of history to compare a month to the same month last year, and a PDF you can put in front of whoever holds the budget.
Recommended
Growth
A business scaling ad spend
$49/mo
billed monthly
- 1 workspace · 2 seats
- 1,000 sales records / month
- 13-month history (year over year)
- Campaign drill-down and period comparison
- PDF + shareable read-only report
- Your logo on every report
Questions
Questions we get about Immigration Law.
Anything else? Talk to us — a person answers, usually the same day.
Each matter as a row carrying a contact detail, the collected fees against it, and a date.
Yes, with a matter-type column — family, employment and humanitarian work differ sharply.
They are normalized to E.164, and the country default is set per dataset.
Yes — any inquiry list with a source label can go into the lead file.
As long as it turns out to be. There is no window to fall outside of: however much time passes between the inquiry and the retainer, it matches if the client is in both files.
Encrypted, isolated per workspace, deletable in one click, DPA available.
Yes. Nothing needed to be installed when those matters happened, which is the whole reason this works on history.
Matter rows analyzed in a calendar month. Inquiry rows do not count.
Yes, with a case-type column. It is the most important cut here, because fees vary by more than an order of magnitude.
Yes — they go into the lead file, each row tagged with its source, and are ranked on collected fees alongside paid channels.
Two to three years, so policy shifts can be separated from marketing performance.
No. A contact detail, an amount and a date. Nothing about status, nationality or the matter.
Yes: an office column mapped as Location, or a language column mapped as Product / service (one extra breakdown per import).
Every matter on that number is credited automatically to the earliest inquiry carrying it; a shared number is not sent to review. That is common in immigration work, so exporting an email address alongside the number, wherever you hold one, is what separates family members who came through different channels, because email is checked before phone.
The fee is credited automatically to whichever directory produced the earlier inquiry; the overlap is not reported as its own figure. The pattern across a quarter — whether two directories are selling you the same audience — is still the finding worth having, and comparing their lists with each other before combining them shows it.
It does not judge whether a case should have been taken, predict an outcome, or tell you how a source will behave next quarter. It states which sources the clients who paid you actually came from. Anything about approvals, timelines or the merits of a matter stays outside it, deliberately, because that is where invented numbers begin.
Once a month, and expect the picture to firm up slowly. Immigration matters can be billed across years, so every run adds fees from clients acquired long ago as well as new ones. That is why a channel's total keeps rising after you stop funding it, and why a quarter is a better unit for decisions than a month.
A month of silence from a referral source is usually an artefact of how that work arrives — in clusters, around filing deadlines and community events. Compare the source across a full year before concluding anything. Ending a referral relationship on the strength of one quiet month is a decision that is hard to reverse later.
Nearby
Also worth reading.
Employment Law
Match retained matters and fees to the inquiries and campaigns behind them, on both the claimant and employer side.
See how it worksLaw Firms
Match signed, fee-earning matters to the calls and ads that produced them — including the ones that settled a year later.
See how it worksFamily Law
Match retained matters and the fees they earn to the inquiries and campaigns that produced them.
See how it worksWhere your sales already are
What to export, by system.
PracticePanther
Export collected fees, upload the inquiries beside them, and rank marketing on what clients paid rather than on consultations booked.
What to exportSmokeball
Export billings from Smokeball, upload the leads behind them, and rank channels on work that was worth doing.
What to exportLitify
Export resolved cases from Litify, upload your intake sources, and rank a large acquisition budget on fee revenue.
What to exportLawmatics
Export your leads from Lawmatics, match them against collected fees, and rank intake sources on what they actually produced.
What to exportFrom the blog
Further reading.
Your call tracking knows which ad rang the phone. It does not know which call paid.
Call tracking answers one question well: which campaign produced the ring. It has no view of what happened after the call ended, which is where the money is decided. This is what the gap costs, and how to close it without replacing the call tracker you already have.
Read the articleNobody clicks a billboard, which is why it can be measured honestly
Out-of-home advertising is sold on impressions nobody can click and measured, increasingly, with location data few buyers ask about. For a business that closes by phone or in person there is a better route: a number on the board, sales matched back to the calls it produced, and a comparison between the places the board could be seen and the places it could not.
Read the articleYour “Direct / Unknown” bucket is the most honest number on the page
A big unattributed bucket is not a broken report. It is a measurement — and there are only four things it can be. Here is how to read it, how to shrink it, and why any tool that hides it is lying to you politely.
Read the article
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