Although there are many ways law firms can generate quality leads via digital marketing, PPC (pay-per-click) marketing remains one of the most effective.
PPC campaign is particularly useful as a means of generating leads quickly and efficiently.
Keep reading to learn how. This overview will cover the essentials of PPC for law firms, helping you better understand the role it can play in your overall marketing strategy.
PPC campaign involves placing Google ads on relevant sites and search result's pages via an online ad platform. Every time a potential lead clicks on your ad, you pay the host of the ad platform. You’ll typically launch an ad or campaign by bidding on keywords related to your firm. For example, you might bid on a keyword (or phrase) like “car accident law firm Brooklyn, NY.”
Google and search engines in general tend to be among the most popular choices of Pay Per Click advertising platforms ad platforms for a simple reason: they allow you to reach leads whose searches align with your products or services. With a solid PPC campaign plan, you can be confident the people seeing your PPC ads are likely to be interested in the services your law firm offers.
It’s critical that you avoid certain common mistakes when leveraging Successful PPC campaign to help your firm attract more clients. Too often, lawyers treat as being separate from their other channels. Or, they may rely solely on PPC marketing, not realizing it’s only a component of a strategy.
Any law firm can benefit from PPC marketing to some degree. However, this method is very useful when your firm is relatively new and in the early stages of growth.
A strong PPC marketing strategy will help your firm quickly attract new leads and spread brand awareness when you’re just starting out. In the long run, your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy will help you maintain the momentum PPC marketing initially generated.
Studying your PPC marketing results will also help you plan an SEO strategy that delivers results. Because SEO vs. PPC marketings involves bidding on keywords and placing PPC ads that will theoretically feature various types of copy (you should always A/B test ads to learn what types of copy, images, etc. leads respond to), you can study the performance of individual Google ads and overall campaigns to determine which keywords and copy attract the most attention from leads.
PPC campaign essentially complements SEO marketing in this way. You can take what you’ve learned from your PPC campaigns and apply those lessons to your SEO strategy. Specifically, when you know which keywords and copy make the strongest impression on your target audience, you can incorporate them into your titles, meta descriptions, calls to action, and website content, optimizing your PPC & SEO based on a genuine understanding of what does and does not work.
PPC campaign can also be useful if your law firms has any PR problems. No one needs to tell you attorneys can face bad PR for plenty of reasons. Not all of them are good reasons. Regardless, negative articles and mentions of your firm can make attracting leads a lot more difficult than you’d like it to be if those articles and mentions show up high in relevant search engine results pages (SERPs).
This highlights another major benefit of PPC Campaigns. PPC advetising will appear in the paid results for relevant keywords searches on SERPs. If you’ve used what you’ve learned from studying your PPC campaigns to guide your SEO, your site pages are also more likely to show up in organic search results. Together, they’ll push the negative press towards the bottom of the page, ensuring leads are less likely to see it.
This combination may even push less than flattering articles off the first SERPs entirely. Ideally, that’s your goal. Research shows that the first page of search results typically accounts for 71 to 92 percent of clicks. The second page? Only 6 percent. Push that bad PR to the second results page, and its impact on your business will be minimal.
The best way to start experimenting with PPC marketings to drive your firm’s growth is by launching a paid search campaign with Google AdWords. An effective paid search campaign will place your Google ads on Google SERPs when leads conduct searches using the keywords you’ve bid on.
Again, these keywords should be related to your services and target audience. If you’re trying to attract more clients who’ve been injured in pedestrian accidents in Miami, you might bid on such phrases as “Miami pedestrian accident lawyer,” “Miami pedestrian injury law firm,” etc.
(Tip: Be ready to adjust your strategy as you learn which keyword strategies yield the most clicks. Test different approaches and monitor their performance vigilantly to ensure you’re focusing on the most valuable keywords as you adjust and enhance your strategy.)
Launching your campaign involves the following key steps:
When launching a campaign via Google, choose the Search Network Only option and enable all features. Google will prompt you to make these choices when you first start designing the campaign.
You’ll have the option to turn on location targeting. This is to ensure your search ads will generally only reach users in a particular geographical area. Unless your law firms has many offices across various regions and cities, it’s highly likely you’ll benefit from using this feature. You can use the Let Me Choose tool to target users by a specific city or radius. Select People in My Targeted Location with the Location options (advanced) feature as well.
Bidding is the next component of planning a paid search campaign. AdWords will provide an automated bid strategy based on your PPC budget. As you run your campaign, AdWords will automatically adjust your bid to maximize conversions while staying within your budget.
You should probably stick with AdWords’ automated strategy until you have more experience launching paid search campaigns. Odds are you’re reading this because PPC marketings for law firms is a relatively new concept to you. When you’ve spent more time measuring the results of your campaigns, you may be more confident in your ability to design your own bid strategy. Right now, you’re still experimenting.
Google AdWords also gives you the option to include “extensions” in your ads/campaigns. Extensions serve to boost click-through-rates and conversions by including additional information in your ads.
The following are extensions you should consider using:
At least for your first campaign, you should create ads groups for individual keywords. For example, you would create an ad group for “Miami personal injury lawyer” and a separate ad group for “Miami car accident attorney.” Each ads groups should feature PPC ads that target exact matches (when a user query exactly matches your chosen keyword/phrase), phrase matches (when a query contains your keyword), and broad matches (when a query features keywords that may be a variation on your chosen phrase, such as “car accident lawyer in Miami”).
Creating individual ads groups for each keyword may seem tedious and costly. However, in the long run, the benefits will justify how much time and money you’ve devoted to this task. When you have individual ads groups for individual keywords/phrases, you can more closely study which keywords yield results, and which don’t. Over time, this helps you optimize your budget and bandwidth by focusing on the keywords with the most value. If you create ads groups based around multiple keywords, you may not be able to determine which keywords were actually responsible for driving clicks and conversions.
Keep in mind there are also multiple ways to incorporate your chosen keywords into ads. You can incorporate them into headlines, URLs, and the overall ad description. As always, monitor their performance to identify the most effective strategies.
Your work isn’t over once you’ve created your PPC ads and launched your campaign. Now you need to monitor its performance in the following key ways:
Google AdWord's offers a search term report which tells you which search term's result in your PPC ads being displayed on SERPs. The report will also tell you whether the keywords used in queries were exact matches, variations, close matches, etc.
Regularly check the search term's report to learn which keywords and phrases are delivering the strongest results. This report can also let you know when you should stop focusing your efforts on a particular keyword.
After monitoring the performance of your campaigns for a few weeks or months, you should have a sense of which ads are most valuable.
Your next task involves creating new versions of your top ads. Based on what you’ve learned, make changes to the copy, headlines, and other elements that you believe may improve an ad’s performance.
Launch these new versions along with your existing top ads. You can now monitor their performance to help you refine your ads to an even greater degree.
Remember that. There’s usually always room for improvement when launching and adjusting a PPC marketing campaign for your law firm. The more you learn, the more you’ll understand about what does and doesn’t work. You can also adjust your bid strategy when you reach a certain level of expertise.
Setting up and launching an effective PPC campaigns requires knowing what to do right, while also knowing what you could be doing wrong. You’ll be more likely to see optimal results from the start if you avoid these key mistakes:
Except in specific circumstances that warrant doing so, you typically shouldn’t send users to your homepage,landing page or even a service page when they click on an ad in your ads groups. Instead, ads should have landing pages.
Homepages/landing page and service pages can feature far too many distractions. These often limit conversions. With a dedicate landing page featuring limited or no navigation options to minimize distractions, testimonials to build trust, and a call to action, you’ll be more likely to convince a lead to take a certain action.
Tracking conversions is key to measuring your return on investment. However, you have to track conversions properly.
Luckily, tracking conversions the right way doesn’t need to be a major challenge. It involves two simple steps:
Just as you should monitor keyword and overall PPC performance and make adjustments accordingly, so too should you monitor your location targeting to determine when changes need to be made.
For example, you may find that certain areas within your radius are irrelevant in that leads are rarely found in these areas. In this case, you can go to the Locations tab for a given campaign via Google AdWord's and click Add to add specific locations within a given radius. You can then choose to exclude those locations to further optimize your targeting.
Again, PPC marketings is a valuable component of a law firms marketing strategy, but it’s just one component. The more you experiment and test the suggestions provided here, the more you’ll appreciate how PPC marketings can complement your other channels. The result? A thriving law firms that consistently attracts clients.
We do PPC management services for law firms as well as law firm SEO. Get in touch today!
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When you want to use paid search marketing platforms, Google Ads often leads the list. Because of its versatility, simplicity, and popularity, it’s obvious why it’s a popular choice. But when you drop all of your PPC advertising money into one marketing strategy, you could lose some leads.
That’s why some businesses explore paid advertising marketing outside of Google, with many turning to Linkedin Ads.
Google Ads and Linkedin Ads are highly efficient ways to market your products and services to businesses and consumers. But each marketing channel has its advantages and disadvantages. Whatever you choose, make sure you discuss the matter with your web development company.
Below is a closer look at each option.
We think it’s reasonable to conclude that Google reaches a vast audience worldwide – its ad reach is a stunning 4 billion people. Google search handles about 70% of desktop searches, and many companies report that they get about 90% of their organic traffic from the search engines. Also, up to 95% of the mobile search market comes from Google.
People use Google’s search a lot, and having the ability to target search terms with specific search ads is a massive benefit of Adwords. People tend to search for very specific things in Google, so if you can customize your Google advertising for your targeted audience, you’ll receive plenty of leads.
So, we can assume that most people’s targeted audience uses Google to some degree. That’s a massive advantage for companies when they want to target an audience.
However, businesses that want to narrow down their search may have issues getting their Google ads settings right with both Google Ads. And if you blunder when segmenting your audiences, your digital ad campaign could suffer.
LinkedIn features a narrower audience – 500 million users – namely businesses and business professionals. But this more limited audience makes it the perfect place for effective B2B marketing. LinkedIn lets marketers serve online ads to decision-makers and vital audience members in several ways.
Summary: For B2B firms that want to reach decision-makers, Linkedin is a terrific advertising platforms. If your B2C company intends to increase its reach, Google Ads could be the best fit.
When you target your audience with Google Ads, you have a few options: location, affinity, technology, buyer behavior, demographics, and interactions with your app or website.
No matter how much you know about your buyer, you may struggle to avoid clicks from worthless leads that cost too much.
In some cases on Google, people may not even know what they’re looking for. You can try to advertise to your desired targeted audience on Google Ads, but it can be challenging to get to the precise people who will most likely buy what you sell.
When people sign up for LinkedIn, they usually provide many details, such as their occupation, title/job title, experience, industry, education, interests, and more. All of this information can be leveraged for great advantage when you start your marketing campaigns.
Also, LinkedIn users can join many groups, start conversations, and obtain followers. The data is priceless when you want to target a specific audience and market to them. LinkedIn also has a Matched Audience that helps advertisers match their email marketing lists and website visitors with users on LinkedIn.
Many marketing experts think that LinkedIn Ads offer more value. LinkedIn has refined targeting, and you can make your product known to them so that you can tell them about something they didn’t know existed.
Summary: For B2B and B2C companies looking for a broad audience, Google Ads has enough targeting features. But for B2B firms that want to target specific groups, LinkedIn Ads has about 100 segmentation methods for micro targeting.
When you want lead generation, Google Ads has a broader reach and is the most effective. First, you can bring in a lot of prospects to your site without breaking the bank. The audience you’re after on Google visits the search giant with the idea to find the best product or service. This makes generating leads easier.
Getting leads from LinkedIn can be more challenging. Users of the platform may sign in to read industry news or talk to group members. No matter how perfect your ad is, viewers may not be in the mood to buy anything.
That said, Linkedin has a way to target ad leads through in-site messaging, which can generate plenty of leads.
When it comes down to dollars and cents, LinkedIn Ads usually are more pricey than Google Ads. As in Google, you can select cost-per-click or cost-per-impression.
LinkedIn also features a cost-per-send for InMail advertising. Typically, you’ll pay about $5 for each click, $6 for 1,000 impressions, and .80 for each send.
With Google Ads, the average CPC is $1. But to leverage that low cost, you need to work on your audience segmentation. If you don’t your ROI may be below what you want.
Summary: Advertising budgets for each platform depends on several factors. On average, Google Ads cost less than LinkedIn Ads. If your B2B company has a tight budget, you may want to focus on a limited variety of LinkedIn ads instead of a broad range of Google Ads.
So should you advertise with Google Ads vs LinkedIn Ads? Yes!
What we mean is, it depends. The correct choice depends on your budget, product or service offered, marketing goals, and target audience. You should not assume that when you need a digital marketing campaign, Google Analytics Adwords is the only choice.
It’s critical to evaluate the market, understand who your buyer is, and make a data-driven decision about the best marketing platform to reach your well-defined goals. One type of company might do better with Google Ads, and another may find LinkedIn Ads preferable.
The great news is you don’t need to choose between the two platforms. Many businesses use both, as well as Facebook, Instagram, and others. If you have the budget, it may pay off to diversify your paid search advertising to get the best ROI.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Digital marketing is a classic marketing strategy that’s commonly used to supplement organic web traffic, but it’s hardly the most straightforward way to increase your site’s audience. In fact, from a technological perspective, it’s a rather fussy practice. That’s why brands that want to include a PPC marketing strategy in their overall strategic decisions need to work with an experienced agency. Agencies facilitate ad distribution, track clicks, and calculate fees – and the best ones can help their clients thrive. Unfortunately, there are a lot of subpar agencies and bad actors out there, and you need to know how to spot them.
So, how do you know if it’s time to fire your PPC agencies? Keep an eye out for these 9 red flags. They could indicate you’re working with the wrong agency and that it’s time to make a move.
Companies leave their PPC agencies behind for all sorts of reasons, but according to a 2015 report by the Society for Digital Agencies (SoDA), the most common reasons include outgrowing the agency’s capabilities, cost overruns, and dissatisfaction with their strategy. These are all valid reasons, and ultimately many of them can be reduced to an agency’s failure to generate any or enough growth. After all, disliking the agency’s strategy isn’t likely to be much of a problem if that strategy is generating major growth. Similarly, a brand is unlikely to view itself as having outgrown the agency is their accounts continue to grow.
Ultimately, what these different reasons for firing PPC agencies demonstrate is that, any way you slice it, no one wants to work with an agency that isn’t making them money. So, while it might take a little while for your PPC ads to gain traction, if you’re not seeing growth based on the launch of or changes to your PPC campaign, it’s time to move on to a different agency.
While most brands work with a PPC advertising agency to run their campaigns, it’s not only possible but advisable for you to set up your own accounts with the major PPC advertising platforms, which include sites like Google AdWords, Yahoo, and Facebook. Still, if you’re not the most technologically savvy, it can be tempting to let your agency do it for you. Don’t give in to the impulse. Instead, ask them to guide you through it so that you can ensure that you’re the one with owner access rights.
Unless you have the owner access rights to your company’s PPC accounts, you can’t be sure you have unmediated access to your campaign metrics or feel good/ confident that you’ll be able to transfer your accounts to another agency or bring them in-house if needed. In other words, your agency could be misrepresenting best results to you or could refuse to relinquish control if you end your contract. You need to retain those rights and then give your PPC agent the appropriate permissions to manage your campaigns. If they balk at this arrangement, show them the door.
Typically, when you look at your company’s profile on a site like Google AdWords, you’ll see that your PPC agency has set up specific goals to help your business grow. These commonly include such metrics as Cost Per Acquisition, Return On Advertising Spend, and Cost Per Lead, though there are plenty of other valuable metrics that are worth tracking. Such measurements assure you that you’re spending your Digital marketing money in the right place, help you budget for ad spending, and offer insights into what’s working and what isn’t.
Unfortunately, you’ll occasionally encounter PPC advertising agencies that fail to set up these metric reports, and they’re not to be trusted. Even if they claim to be using an in-house system, it’s your right to demand they use the standard reporting system for each PPC platform and to fire them if they refuse to. Dashboard-based metrics exist to provide consistent measurements regarding the success of PPC campaigns ad those are the numbers you want to reference.
In a similar vein, some PPC advertising agencies skip the core metrics noted above in favor of less valuable but more appealing “vanity metrics.” Vanity metrics don’t help your business make money and they offer limited insight into your operations. Examples of vanity metrics include any campaign value based on impressions, engagement metrics that don’t drive conversions, and even many of the behavior-based metrics that used to be considered the gold standard in website evaluation, such as bounce rate or time on site.
Ultimately, vanity metrics don’t serve your company because they can be created artificially. An untrustworthy PPC agency might drive up engagement numbers by sharing a great meme on your brand’s landing pages, which will drive likes and other reactions, but won’t actually funnel clients to your site or create sales. Similarly, you can get a huge number of impressions by getting your PPC new ads onto a very popular site, but if no one is clicking on it, all you’ve got is a tally of how many people visited/ web traffic to someone else’s website.
Having the right metrics is important, but if you’re going to meet your goals then your Good PPC agency needs to be adjusting your account settings regularly to refine your campaigns. At a minimum, that means accessing your account to regularly monitoring and fine-tune the settings at least once a week. Such regular check-ins allow your agency to quickly adjust your social media campaigns based on updates to the search engines algorithm, catch any conversion mistakes that could cost your company money, and even react to competitors campaigns.
Be sure that you not only ask your PPC agency how often they access and update your accounts, but that you’re also checking your accounts regularly for updates. The reality is that, although many companies run PPC campaigns, only 10% of AdWords accounts are updated weekly. If your PPC agency can’t meet that standard, ditch them for one that will stay on top of your campaigns.
Just as your PPC agency needs to be fine tuning your accounts regularly, they should also be reporting back on your campaigns at least monthly. While seeing week-to-week progress would be great, as with many kinds of growth, this can be hard to evaluate. Comprehensive, monthly reports, on the other hand, can help you see what your agency has been doing on your behalf, how your accounts are growing, and allow you to be an active participant in your Digital marketing strategy.
Never settle for a company that doesn’t offer substantive reporting. While great reports may offer added insights from your account manager or more labor intensive explanatory work, the majority of PPC reporting is automated – any company that doesn’t provide it is just lazy.
It’s unrealistic to expect that you’ll speak to the same person every time you contact your PPC agency; that doesn’t even happen at your bank or your doctor’s office. That being said, there should be one person who acts as the lead on your account because that allows them to master your brand’s voice, develop a big picture strategy, and generally build up a knowledge base around your brand’s needs and preferences. They might be busy or out of the office occasionally, but anyone whose experienced both approaches – a core account manager and a rotating cast of agents – can tell you that having a point person makes a difference.
If your PPC agency doesn’t have you working with a single, core agent, you may want to ask a few questions to get a better sense of what’s happening. Do they have an unusual in-house strategy, or are they having trouble with employee retention? Do they think it doesn’t make a difference? You can also request that they place you with a single representative, but if that’s not their standard practice already, you’re probably better off going elsewhere. It just doesn’t bode well.
Google AdWords isn’t a new program and there are plenty of other PPC programs out there, but if an agency is committed to this work, then they should have complete Google’s AdWords certification program. You can check on this by asking them to show you their Premier Partner page – it really is that simple. Not having one isn’t necessarily the worst offense a company can commit, but it’s a good indicator that you can do better and should commit your ads spend elsewhere.
Did you pick your PPC agency based on their portfolio of appealing PPC ads/ads or optimized images? That’s a great starting point – it certainly indicates that they can do high-quality work – but it’s not enough if they’re not actually showing you your brand’s own ads before they launch them. Obvious, right? It should be, but many entrepreneurs have been duped by PPC agencies who tell them that their ad is similar to another ad product, which is called ad copy; the client, not wanting to be pushy, walks away with their own notion of their brand’s ad, and meanwhile the agency may not have done any work at all.
Your PPC agency should be giving you the final say on all your paid ads, so if you’ve supposedly got a campaign running and you haven’t seen your ads, ask to see them right away. Odds are good that if your agency isn’t showing you your PPC ads before launching them that they either don’t exist or they’re extremely low quality for online visibility. Great PPC agencies are proud of their work and they want you to see it. Anything less should raise concerns.
Hiring an agency to manage your PPC campaigns will obviously cost more than just the fees for the campaign itself, but the costs involved in running ads with your agency shouldn’t be confusing. That’s because, ultimately, your money should only be going two different places – to the agency and to the ad platform – and everyone at the company should be clear on the split. So, when we say you should be wary about confusing fees, we’re not talking about total cost (that’s a matter for you and your budget), but rather about how the money is split up. For any payment there should be the fee to the agency and the ads spend and it should always be obvious what the division is there.
As popular as PPC marketing is with businesses today, many of the agencies that execute these campaigns don’t do a very good job. They’re wasting your ad spend and your time, and you deserve better. That’s why you should switch to PPC.co’s PPC Management Service.
At PPC.co, we’re committed to ensuring that your ads are reaching the right audience and we know that most agencies just don’t deliver that. Starting from our understanding that website conversions often top out at 2%, we emphasize PPC marketing that pairs first contacts with retargeting efforts to ensure that your brand remains a top-of-mind solution for past visitors. A non-converting visitor is often just someone who hasn’t seen the right content yet, and we want to help you make those connections.
What else makes our PPC Management program stand out? With dual Google Ads and Google Analytics certifications, we have a deep understanding of the systems & AdWords account that get your ads seen and can use tracking data to its fullest potential of web traffic. In fact, that’s why we start every client engagement with a full PPC audit, because even when we’re not leading the campaigns, our skilled professionals can quickly see what’s working and what’s falling short in your current campaigns. From the start, we put our expertise to work for you.
If your PPC agency has exhibited any of the above warning signs, you can’t afford to wait around for progress. It’s time for the protection of business and moves on – to PPC.co. Contact us today to learn more about our PPC Management Services and say goodbye to wasted ad spend and rock bottom conversions. Once you’ve seen the difference a top PPC agency can make in your campaigns, you’ll never believe you let anyone else handle your PPC needs.
