Does your law firm use Google Ads?

Have you fiddled around with Dynamic Keyword Insertion but are unsure of its full potential?

You’re not alone. Dynamic Keyword Insertion or DKI is a powerful Google Ads feature that enables you to create text ads that update themselves to match a person’s search query.

(Pixabay / Wokandapix)

But why would someone want to do that and not use static text in their campaigns?

This post will give you a complete overview of DKI to help you answer this question and more.

What Is Dynamic Keyword Insertion?

DKI is a Google Ads feature that prompts your ad to match a person’s search query.

Its aim is to ensure the text of your ad is hyper-relevant to what a user is looking for.

More relevant ads can result in better CTRs (click-through rate) and higher Quality Scores.

Plus, they can pave the way for more conversions by meeting the expectations of online searchers.

Some advertisers consider DKI to be an advanced feature because it requires you to add a small piece of code into the ad text, but don’t let that scare you off.

The code basically involves writing the search term after “Keyword:” (that’s Keyword and a colon) and putting a text string between { } (brackets).

For example: Utah Bankruptcy {Keyword:Attorney}

Let’s assume you’re running a Google Ads campaign to advertise your law firm and you’ve created an ad group that promotes your bankruptcy filing services. When you use DKI, the Ads platform will dynamically insert the phrase “Attorney” instead of a keyword that’s closest to what the user searched for to trigger the ad (at the ad group level).

In this case, if a user searches for “Utah Personal Injury Lawyer,” they may see an ad that says “Utah Personal Injury Attorney.”

Be Mindful of the Character Limit for Headlines

It’s worth mentioning that DKI only works if what a person is searching for fits into the headline space (i.e., the search query is no longer than 25 characters).

If what they’re searching for exceeds the character limit, the Ads platform might display the original text you had within the brackets.

In our case, if someone searches for “find a lawyer in Utah for slip and fall injury,” Google Ads may just display “Utah Personal Injury Lawyer” as the headline, as the search term is too long to trigger a Dynamic Keyword Insertion.

What’s Wrong with Dynamic Keyword Insertion?

There’s nothing wrong with the idea behind this nifty little feature. However, there are some scenarios where DKI can negatively affect the performance of your Google Ads campaign. Here’s when you should avoid using it:

• You have broad match keywords

  The aim of Dynamic Keyword Insertion is to display ad text that’s hyper-relevant to a user.
  Broad Match keyword type, however, tells search engines to present ads for several variations of the keywords in your Ads account, including singular/plural, related searches, and more.

  So, if you’re using DKI together with broad match keywords, your ads can end up looking weird and irrelevant.

• You’re targeting misspellings or poorly worded phrases

  Avoid applying Dynamic Keyword Insertion in campaigns where you’re bidding on misspellings or misworded phrases. The Ads platform accommodates misspelled phrases, but can’t display ads with the same.

  For example, say there’s a keyword in your ad group that is “Utah Bankruptcy Attorney.” The phrase “Utah Bankrupt Attorney” won’t blend well with DKI. If the DKI insertion is “Utah Bankrupt {Keyword:Lawyer}”, your ad may show as “Utah Bankrupt Lawyer” and won’t make sense.

  Make sure to test your results so that you can avoid embarrassments and instances like these.

  Pro tip: Use care to enter your DKI code correctly. Proofread to ensure there’s no incorrect use of capitalization, extra spaces, or parentheses instead of brackets. Mistakes like these can make your ads look amateurish and turn prospects away.

• You have several long-tail keywords

  DKI and long-tail keywords make for a confusing story.

  That’s because long-tail keywords are usually too long to fit within the 25 character limit of an ad.

• You’re targeting competitor terms

  The last thing you want is competitor terms popping up in your ads. In an industry as sensitive as legal services, putting a competitor’s brand, name, or trademarked service can get you into trouble.

  While Google allows you to bid on competing search terms, adding their name to your ad is a surefire way to land your firm in hot water.

  As such, if you have ad groups with competitor terms as keywords, avoid using Dynamic Keyword Insertion for that campaign.

Other Things to Know

1. Google has Rules for Capitalization

   An important thing to keep in mind when using DKI is capitalizations. The Ads platform has guidelines on what kinds of capitalizations can be used.

   Although using capital letters for something like “PS” might be allowed in DKI, all-caps for words like “DONUT” or “DISCOUNT” will most likely will be disapproved and flagged for removal.

2. Tightly Themed Ad Groups Work Best

   DKI makes your ads more relevant to a searcher’s experience, but you can further improve this by using relevant keywords in your ad groups.

   For example, you might have “personal injury lawyer,” “personal injury attorney”, and “personal injury law firm” in an ad group, but having “divorce lawyer” might not make a lot of sense. Unless you’re a law firm offering all kinds of services and your Ads description is covering all of them, it’s best to create closely-themed ad groups.

   By ensuring that your keywords are closely related, and your ad groups are tight, you’ll achieve relevancy with your ads.

3. Landing Pages Are Important

   DKI isn’t limited to PPC platforms like Google Ads. It’s also useful when it comes to your landing pages.

   To help convert clicks into customers, having a landing page that aligns with the ad copy will work better than pages that don’t have anything to do with what a searcher sees in the ad.

   Generally speaking, the more relevant you can make the ad-to-landing page experience, the higher the chance that you’ll convert a searcher into a customer, and DKI can be a powerful tool to achieve just that.

   If you’re unsure if you have the knowledge and skills to use DKI correctly, contact a PPC specialist at Webrageous. We specialize in Google Ads management for law firms and have the knowledge and experience to tell you if you’re using Dynamic Keyword Insertion correctly. You can also delegate your DKI to our experts by requesting that we handle your campaigns altogether. Ask about our proven track record and how we can work wonders for your ROI.

Google Ads can be extremely profitable for your law firm if all the geotargeting parameters are utilized correctly.

Most firms usually target far too large of an area, causing them to spend budget on clicks by people who are nowhere near their place of business.

Others restrict their radius too much, excluding people who are a reasonable distance from one of their offices.

With geotargeting, you increase the chances that people clicking on your ads can actually take advantage of your firm’s services.

Plus, you avoid situations where you’re squandering your ad budget targeting people who are a thousand miles away from your firm’s location.

(Pixabay / rastaemmler)

In other words, geotargeting allows you to make the most efficient use of your PPC budget.

Even if you’ve got multiple locations dispersed throughout the country, you’re still going to get more conversions when you target a precise group based on location.

In this post, we’ll walk you through the types of locations you can target with Google Ads. We’ll also give you tips on how to best utilize geotargeting features to reach your ideal audience.

Here’s what you need to know.

Geotargeting Options in Google Ads

You can access geotargeting in Google Ads by taking these steps:

1. Select a particular campaign
2. Click ‘Settings” > “Location”
3. Choose “edit” under locations to access geotargeting

In the window that pops up, you can type specific locations into the search tab. The Google Ads tool allows you to target prospects by location based on several options, including:

• Country – This option allows you to reach people across the entire country. You can ignore it if your law firm is based in and serving people in a specific locality.
• Areas within a country – With this selection, you can target cities, states, and even postal codes. This is more relevant to attorneys who are operating in a particular area of a country.
• Radius around the location – You can also choose to target a distance radius around a certain location. Create a radius of 15-30 miles, and you’ll cover a large metro area in one go.
• Location groups – Select this option to reach places of target demographics, your office locations, or places of interest. As an example, you can target airports to reach those coming into your city or state.Google Ads also displays a number near each of these options – an estimated count of how many people in a particular area fit within your geotargeting range. And for each location in the drop-down menu, you can define the following options:
  • Target – this is the section where you list the locations you want your campaign to reach.
  • Exclude – allows you to disregard certain areas and prevents your ads from reaching people in those locations.

Pro tip: If you know that people in specific locations won’t benefit from your services, then exclude those places from your targeting.

Now that you have an idea of various geotargeting options, here are four tips for using the feature to your advantage.

How Law Firms Can Get the Most Out of Google Ads Geotargeting

1. Use Location-specific Terms in Your Ads

People tend to use specific queries when searching for businesses on the Web, and they often type the location to narrow down the results.

You can attract their interests by using location-specific terms in your ads along with the keywords you specify for your campaign.

For example, the phrases “personal injury lawyer in Las Vegas” or “Utah bankruptcy attorney” provide location intent that should pique the interest of locals.

Besides the city name, you can use and experiment with other location terms, like area codes, ZIP codes, street numbers and other keywords.

Pro tip: When it comes to location-specific terms, experiment a bit by using phrases and words that only a local audience would know. This helps create hyper-local messaging. Research local slang and reference words and include them in your ads to distinguish yourself from your competitors.

Once you include a location-specific term in your ad, it will appear in bold when the ad text matches the search query, enabling your ad to stand out in search results.

2. Exclude Places Where Your Ideal Customers Are Unlikely to Be

While targeting the right localities is important, area exclusion is just as critical to the effectiveness of your campaign. It helps you avoid clicks from faraway areas and use your campaign budget wisely.

For example, an attorney who’s offering legal services in Texas may exclude Minnesota if he/she doesn’t have an office in that city.

The exclusion setting in Google Ads allows you to stop your ads from being shown in specific areas of your targeted locations, such as a city or a city within a country.

You can exclude areas by one side of the street or venue or any area that you can specifically target.

3. Use Google Trends to Keep Things Interesting

If you aren’t familiar with Google Trends, it’s a website that shows how often a certain search term is typed into Google relative to the overall number of searches conducted on Google over a specific period.

While the tool is mostly used by e-commerce companies to research consumer preferences, you can make smart use of it by exploring which locations are getting the most searches for legal services.

You can see where a specific keyword is most popular by country, sub-region, city, or metro.

Pro tip: Keep tabs on local news and other trends, which can spike demand for legal services. Insights like these will help you create relevant ads that will better resonate with your target customers.

4. Take Advantage of Extensions

Ad extensions can give your geotargeted campaign the edge it needs to be a huge success.

The primary benefits of these extensions include, but aren’t limited to:

• Make it convenient for local customers to call with a single click
• Give more context about the areas you serve without cluttering your ad copy
• Increase clicks that turn into conversions

But what extensions blend well with Google Ads geotargeting? The most popular ad extensions for location-based targeting are:

• Call extensions – These extensions add a phone number to the ads. When your ads display for a search query, call extensions present users with a clickable call button (if they’re browsing from a phone) and a number so that they can get in touch with your company directly. Do you only work Monday-Thursday from 9 am till 5 pm? You can schedule the call extension to display only during your office hours.

• Location extensions – If you want your phone number and business address (clicking which directs the user to Google Maps for easy navigation) to display on your ads, be sure to activate the location extension from your Google Ads dashboard.

But before turning it on, make sure your Google My Business profile is up-to-date, correct, and linked to your Google Ads account since your information is sourced from GMB.

• Sitelinks extensions – Essentially, this option tells the Ads platform to choose site extensions for your ads based on a searcher’s past site visit history and intent.

In other words, sitelinks present searchers with relevant content. By linking to webpages on your website, the extension generates contextual relevance to make it easy for people to learn about your business.

For example, if you have a webpage that details how consultation works, the extension can create a sitelink for the page and take searchers to it directly.

In some instances, the Ads platform might even supplement your extensions with the information you’ve published on those pages.

As such, sitelink extensions are a great way to share more details about your business.Plus, they let searchers view the content they’re interested in rather than forcing them to spend time in order to find what they plan on knowing.

Conclusion

Google Ads geotargeting can leave you feeling overwhelmed given all of the different options, but the ultimate goal of this feature is to increase the ROI of your ad spend.

By showcasing your ads in areas where people are more likely to buy your services, geotargeting ensures that the dollars you invest translate into customers and recurring profits.

That being said, if you aren’t sure of geotargeting or need help with getting started, contact us. We do PPC management for attorneys, and we know the ins and outs of Google ads geotargeting. Watch this video to learn about what differentiates us from the competition.

Google announced several updates to its Ads platform at the company’s 2019 Marketing Live conference. One of the most interesting things to come out of these updates was conversion action sets. It’s a powerful new feature that allows you to optimize campaigns and analyze performance based on the most relevant conversion action types.

(Pixabay / launchpresso)

Let’s say your law firm is running campaigns for different personal injury victims. One campaign allows people to schedule a consultation while the other is designed to make people fill out lead forms on your website. If your campaigns are meant to encourage different conversion actions, you can set up conversion action sets to use for campaign optimization and reporting.

To understand the practical usage of conversion action sets, it’s crucial to first learn how Google sees Ads-related conversions.

How Google Treats Conversions

When you create a Google Ads campaign, it’s a good idea to use conversion tracking. This enables you to gather visitor data that correlates to the conversion goals and touchpoints you have defined in your Google Ads account. You can use this data to measure the ROI of your PPC efforts, as well as to generate data points to optimize towards (both for yourself and for Google’s algorithm).

Most law firms have various conversion sources that should be tracked. Some examples are:

• Book a free consultation
• Call
• Get a quote
• Subscribe
• Contact us page

You might also have other conversion touchpoints such as content downloads and video views.

The thing you need to understand is how the Ads platform treats these conversion sources by default. It uses all the touchpoints you define at the account level and implements them for all of your PPC campaigns. Plus, if you’re using Smart Bidding, like Target ROAS, Target CPA, or Maximize Conversions, you’re telling the algorithm to optimize for all conversions. This may not seem like a problem at first, but it could lead to serious issues down the road.

Still can’t figure out the problem with default setting? Let’s simplify this with the help of an example:

Say your Google Ads campaign drives 15 conversions, and the breakdown is:

• 5 calls (calls are the conversion touchpoint you intend to optimize towards)
• 3 sign-ups
• 3 contact us page inquiries
• 2 quote requests
• 2 email subscriptions

If your main goal is calls, your campaign is under-performing as only 5 out of the 15 conversions involved people picking up the phone to contact your firm. The Ads platform, however, treats them equally by default and spends your budget equally to drive more of all these conversions.

So how do you tell the Ads platform to optimize towards the most profitable conversion sources?

By creating – you guessed it – conversion action sets.

Introducing Conversion Action Sets

Conversion action sets essentially enable you to create a set of conversion actions that you can apply to specific campaigns. They let you tweak campaign settings to define which actions to optimize for and populate in the “Conversions” column. Plus, any Smart Bidding strategy you’re using will begin optimizing towards the conversions you define through the new setting.

You can use conversion action sets to:

1. Target people at different stages in the customer journey
2. Manage budgets by multiple business goals

In the first case, you might create a set for your highest value conversion sources and label it as “Set 1.” Then you create another set for softer and less valuable conversions and name it “Set 2.” What you could do is apply the first set to the campaigns, targeting people ready to schedule a consultation with your firm. The other set could be applied to campaigns targeting prospects in the early stages of the customer journey, such as people who are exploring their legal options.

As a result, you can use conversion action sets to generate the right type of conversions in the right phase of the customer journey, which can help you gain a competitive advantage over other law firms.

Using conversion action sets is also a great way to manage campaign budgets. For instance, you can focus on form sign ups when business is slow and your aim is to generate as many qualified leads as possible. In a future campaign, when you have a bit more budget, you can spend on prospecting and populating the top of your sales funnel with new clients.

The best part of using this new feature is that you can assign a certain value to each action, which can be handy when you’re using the Target ROAS bidding tactic.

How to Create Conversion Action Sets in Google Ads

To set up a conversion action set for your law firm’s Google Ads campaign, follow these steps:

1. Open your Google Ads account.
2. Select a campaign, and then click “Settings.”
3. In Settings, choose the drop-down menu for “Conversions.”
4. From the left-hand tab, choose “Conversion action sets.”
5. Click the “+” sign to create new conversion action sets, and then follow the on-screen instructions.

Pro tip: If there are some inactive conversions in your Google Ads account, they can’t be used in conversion action sets. The Ads platform requires that you should have two or more active conversions in your account to use action sets.

Keep tabs on your campaigns in the initial weeks after you create a conversion action set. We suggest this because you may have to reduce or increase your Target ROAS or Target CPA campaigns to keep your KPIs in check.

For example, if your main conversions actions cost $60 each on average, and you’ve created conversion action sets to target “top of the funnel” newsletter and email signups, you’ll have to trim your Target CPA bids to better account for these lower value events.

Conclusion

There could be many instances where you may have campaigns that you want to be able to optimize for different conversion actions. With Google Ads conversion action sets, you’re now in a position to apply individual conversion actions to each campaign. Keep in mind that the new setting will override the previous “Include in Conversions” setting at the account level and define conversion actions for a specific campaign (or a group of campaigns). This shouldn’t be an issue unless you’re tracking just one type of conversion for your campaign.

If you like the idea of conversion action sets but are unsure of the setup process, let a specialist from Webrageous create them for you. We not only specialize in Google Ads management for law firms, but we also keep track of the latest developments in the pay-per-click space. Contact us today to learn how we can help define conversion action sets for your business.

What would you do if you found that the keywords you picked for your law firm’s PPC campaign have the status “low volume?” Would you proceed? Create another campaign? Reach out for help? If you’re unfamiliar with the volume side of keyword searches, chances are that you would put the effort in the wrong place.

(Pixabay / 27707)

The truth is that some niches just don’t receive a significant number of search queries, particularly in the legal industry where the audience is tightly defined. In many Google Ads campaigns, you could be running unproven ads on keywords with fewer than 100 searches a month. In fact, your ads may not even show until the volume projections for their keywords increase above a specific threshold.

Fortunately, there are ways to avoid low volume keywords. With the help of a few techniques, you can address low search volume in your campaign and improve your ROI. But before we list the methods for managing low traffic search phrases, let’s cover a few basics.

What Exactly Are Low Volume Keywords?

Low volume keywords refer to phrases that attract minimal search traffic on Google. That’s because they have no to very little search history and are often deemed as irrelevant to search engine users. Phrases that commonly get low traffic include new, branded terms and unpopular, long-tail keywords.

Some other reasons for low search volume include:

• Restrictive match types (you’re using exact match keywords)
• Seasonal keywords (you’re trying to advertise in the wrong season)
• Irrelevant keywords (you’re bidding on phrases that don’t address your customers’ questions)

To know if the keywords you chose have a low search volume, upload them into the Google Ads keyword planner tool. This will give you an idea of volume projects, as well as inform decisions about potential monthly spend or impressions for your keyword group.

Keywords reported as having low or no search volume are unlikely to trigger ads until the search traffic for them increases over time. So, if you’re relying on these keywords to generate clicks, you may not get the best results and fall behind the competition. The good news is that there are some proven techniques you can implement to prevent low search volume.

How Can I Avoid Low Volume Keywords?

If most of your keywords are coming under the “low search volume” status, consider taking the following steps:

1. Change Match Type to Broad Match

Long keywords in phrase match and exact match formats are a common cause of low search volume. This is because the probability of people searching for different variations of phrases with 5-6 words is quite low. The solution to this is to change the keyword match type. Search up what match type is currently selected for your main keyword and change it to “Broad Match Modifier.” After that, put “+” in between the individual words of the long-tail phrase.

Broad Match Modifier tells Google to account for close variations of your chosen keywords. As a result, your ads are triggered by long phrases based on singular/plural, stemming, accents, misspellings, and abbreviations.

Let’s say you’re in the personal injury space and help victims of slip and fall injuries get compensation. You create the following keyword set to display ads for how you expect someone to search for a business like yours:

• Slip and fall injury lawyer
• Slip and fall injury lawyer near me
• Slip and fall injury lawyer local
• Slip and fall injury lawyer contact

If you choose Broad Match Modifier as the match type for the first, it will capture any searches related to it as well as the ones that the remaining keywords might attract. Essentially, the last three keywords are likely the ones flagged for low keyword volume, so using Broad Match Modifier helps you eliminate inefficiencies while covering the searches that might be important for your business.

2. Raise Awareness

If you have just launched a new company and want to trigger ads for branded keywords, your campaign will likely have a low search volume. Why? Because people won’t search for something that they’re unfamiliar with. Improving search volume for these keywords isn’t a short-term process, but with the right strategies, you can make people aware of your firm so that they are searching for it on Google.
You can increase brand awareness by focusing on press releases, social media or content marketing in the meantime. Once you spread the word about your firm, people will start to become familiar with your new brand or service. The domino effect of this is the rise in search volume for those keywords that previously had a low search volume.

3. Identify New Keywords

Another smart tactic is to identify new keywords that are similar to your low volume ones but have a higher search volume and similar intent. We recommend using the Google Ads keyword tool and Keywords Everywhere to discover and analyze fresh keywords for your PPC campaign.

When using these tools, you’ll notice that many of the suggested keywords are long-tail phrases. Make sure to pick the ones that have a high volume and use the Broad Match Modifier technique to cover searches for the rest.

For example, if you’re a law firm targeting people who’ve been in an auto accident, you can pick keywords that have a search volume of 500 monthly searches or above. Any keyword below 500 monthly searches can create problems for your campaign.

4. Expand Your Geographical Targeting

As the last step, you can try expanding the geographical reach of your campaign if your firm has a flexible service area. In many instances, taking this step will increase the search volume enough to trigger your ads. For instance, if you’re targeting people in Jersey City, New Jersey, you may expand your targeting to include people in Hoboken, New Jersey to see if it has a positive impact on your keyword volume.

If you try these steps but still need more oomph for your campaign, let Webrageous help. We don’t just specialize in pay-per-click management; we specialize in PPC management for attorneys. Webrageous knows how to solve low keyword volume issues, and that translates to higher traffic and conversions for you with much less hassle.

Your law firm isn’t getting the desired leads, despite your competitive bids and the swanky ads you’re running. Your email list, too, has been stagnant for the past few weeks. No calls. No sign ups.

The first thought that comes to your mind is that your Google Ads campaign is struggling to generate sufficient clicks. But then you check your analytics, and everything seems normal on that front.

Then it hits you: it’s not the amount of clicks you’re getting on your ads, but the conversion of those clicks to leads and sales.

To put it simply, your conversion rate is far below the industry average of 6.8% — meaning you’re letting your marketing dollars go to waste.

(Pixabay / 377053)

So how to fix this?

First, understand that low conversion rates are incredibly common in the legal marketing space.

The issue lies in execution. Many law firms dabble in pay-per-click and, although some do well, many do poorly because they’re not focused on metrics that matter. Plus, most of these firms tend to make rash choices based more on expediency than quality. As a result, they’re easily snowed by PPC companies that are least concerned about the conversion rate.

The good news is that diagnosing and fixing the causes of poor conversions is within your reach. In order to get that phone ringing and subscriber counts growing, we recommend that you take the following steps.

1. Check Your Ad Groups

For those unfamiliar with ad groups, they’re a built-in feature that manages your ads and related keywords.

You put the keywords you want to trigger the ads for in these groups, and then segment them based on the different service types you offer.

The issue we see in most law firm PPC campaigns is that most ad groups aren’t structured to trigger specific enough ads. Instead, they contain all sorts of keywords that take visitors to different pages on your website, rather than to a webpage that relates exactly to their original query.

For example, a personal injury law firm may have an ad group that contains the following keywords:

• Personal injury lawyer
• Personal injury firm
• Slip and fall injury expert
• Car accident attorney
• Medical malpractice lawyer

All of these keywords will trigger ads for that firm, but someone who’s just interested in, let’s say, slip and fall compensation services will need to find their way around the firm’s website, and not many people are willing to put in that much effort.

To prevent people from churning, you have to give them exactly what they ask for.

And the best way to do that is create closely related keyword ad groups.

For example:

• Slip and fall injury expert
• Slip and fall injury attorney
• Slip and fall injury law firm

You can also try using different variations of a single keyword in ad groups to see if that improves your conversion rate. Here are a few ideas:

• “Slip and fall injury attorney”
• slip+and-fall-injury-attorney
• [slip and fall injury attorney]

If you apply this technique, you can insert one specific keyword in exact, phrase, and broad modified format in each ad group.

From our experience, more ad groups with fewer, hyper-focused keywords result in more relevant ads that revolve directly around those terms with a corresponding landing page.

2. Examine Your Landing Pages

One of the main causes of poor conversion rate is sub-par landing pages.

There are a number of factors that can make your landing pages suboptimal. The first is the speed of your website. If a searcher clicks on your ad and the consequent landing page takes more than 3 seconds to load, they’ll abandon the session and look for another law firm.

Make sure to access the loading time of your site and take the necessary steps to improve the user experience. This may require you to reduce the size of your images, use a content delivery network, and change your hosting provider.

If your landing pages are loading quickly, examine the content on those pages. Is there a disconnect between the ad copy and the content on the landing page? If yes, then make some tweaks (or redo the whole thing if necessary) to ensure the landing page is tightly aligned with what prospects will be presented in the ad copy.

Pro tip: When creating or tweaking a landing page for Google Ads, make sure the intent is on point. If a search for a “criminal defense lawyer” takes the visitor to the homepage of a law firm where they’ve listed all of their practice areas, the conversion may not happen due to missing customer expectations.

3. Make Sure to Monitor Conversions Accurately

The last reason for your low conversion rate could be poorly configured conversion tracking. Without proper tracking in place, your law firm is spending its budget in the dark. Take the appropriate steps to address this if you get insights into your conversion value and CPA targets (so you optimize your campaign to improve overall ROI).

Here are some tips to keep in mind:

• Link your Google Ads account with a Google Analytics Property

Doing so will tell you how much of your sales or website traffic is coming from Google Ads. Also, you’ll be able to create remarketing lists in Google Analytics to us in your ad campaigns for targeting certain audiences. Plus, you’ll gain the ability to import Analytics transactions and objects into Ads as conversions.

• Activate Call Tracking

The Call Conversions feature in Google Ads allows you to track phone calls at session level across every source via a call tracking software. The data allows you to track calls back to your keyword and the campaign from which the ad was delivered and make better ad optimization decisions based on phone conversion information. Make sure to set this up properly to clearly measure the ROI of all conversions driven by your Google Ads.

• Use Google Tag Manager

This is a cost-free tool that enables law firms to insert and remove tracking code from their sites whenever they prefer. You can watch a YouTube video or two to learn how to add it to your site and understand the process behind conversion tracking.

Conclusion

No law firm wants a low Google Ads conversion rate, but remember that there are always ways to improve this essential metric. Besides taking these three steps, definitely review the user journey to ensure there are no barriers present in a searcher’s path to conversion.

For example, your form may be malfunctioning, or there’s a call to action button that isn’t working. Streamline all of your conversion opportunities to ensure there are no gaps in people’s path to conversion.

Finally, consider taking the help of a specialist Google Ads Management company from the legal marketing space.

At Webrageous, we specialize in personal injury and mass tort Google Ads management and more. We are aware of all the technical issues and friction points that cause Google Ads conversion rates to decline and have plenty of tricks for turning your campaigns around. Contact us if you’d like to address the problem of low conversion rates once and for all.

Are you running a paid ad campaign? Don’t forget about ad extensions, which are critical for making the most of your search ads. Some extensions are added automatically, but others require work on your part, so it’s important to know the difference. We asked a panel of professionals to share their thoughts on which extensions yield the most benefits. Read on to learn more.

Abir Syed

Abir Syed, a CPA and digital marketing consultant focused on helping accountants get more leads. Web: upcounting

Sitelink

I’m a fan of sitelink extensions. Firstly, they are probably the most effective at showing a viewer the various types of content or categories of products you have on your site, much more so than Callout or Structured Snippets. Secondly, they send people to exactly where they’re most interested in going, which reduces friction for the visitor. And thirdly, they take up the biggest amount of space, with a big headline and description.

Konstantinos Tsilkos, MD

Konstantinos Tsilkos works with PharMed, a digital marketing company run by doctors, for doctors.

Site link and review extensions

The best ad extensions are site link extensions and review extensions. Sitelink extensions are helpful because you can send potential customers to specific pages and offer several page choices that could interest your audience. Review extension is great because they validate you as a company, and in my experience, raise your CTR. I don’t know what it is about those 5 stars, but they certainly have an effect on most audiences.

Stacy Caprio

Stacy Caprio, Founder of Accelerated Growth Marketing.

Callout extensions

I find callout extensions to be one of the most useful because they tend to be shown when you are in one of the top positions. This causes your ad to expand and become much bigger, making the CTR much higher. I recommend applying account-wide callout extensions to every campaign you run to increase ad visibility and CTR.

Paula Glynn

Paula Glynn, Director of Search of Pixelstorm.

Sitelinks

Sitelinks will always be the most powerful site link. However, the key to get the most out of site links is to ensure you are adding the descriptions in. When shown, this creates an undeniable dominance in the SERPS as an authoritative website and can increase CTR significantly, which is the objective. Ensure you are using unique URLS on each site link.

Location Extensions are an imperative PPC Sitelink for any brick-and-mortar location. They show in the local pack and provide all the benefits of the local pack, including strong CTR. They show potential customers where you are located and opening hours before they’ve even clicked through. Very powerful.

Emily Sugano

Emily Sugano has 10 years of digital marketing experience. She has held in-house and agency positions as well as worked across various verticals to manage multi-million dollar SEM accounts. Web: yourmarketingpeople.com

Sitelinks, review and location extension

It really depends on your goals and industry but sitelinks with filled-out description lines can take up the most real estate on the search engine results page, and it is one of the easiest ad extensions to implement. However, the review extension may be most beneficial for retailers while location extension is the most useful for brick-and-mortar stores. In the end, think about what matters most to your customers and how they search for you.

This is a crowdsourced article. Contributors are not necessarily affiliated with this website and their statements do not necessarily reflect the opinion of this website, other people, businesses, or other contributors.

Crafting great copy for ads is one of the most critical aspects of PPC for attorneys. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the trickiest. Not only do you get a small number of characters to work with, but you also have to keep your practice area in mind when writing the actual copy. And because no two legal areas are alike, there is no single ad copy template that you can download and fit your ad around.

(Pixabay / MiamiAccidentLawyer)

Fortunately, there are ways to write effective copy for your ads, and it all starts with learning the fundamentals. Below are 6 essentials to help you compose powerful copy.

1. Leverage Numbers

People have a thing for numbers. They’re visually different from text, and they allow for faster reading. Numbers also represent facts, so using them in your ad copy can make your firm appear more credible and trustworthy. Law firms can use numbers in the form of years of experience, as well as to convey the amount collected in settlements and verdicts to date. Here’s an example:

2. Focus on Benefits

It may sound coarse, but the majority of your customers (except loyalists, maybe) do not really care about your business. They care about how it benefits them. As your competitors in the online marketing space offer a service similar to yours, it’s a good idea to highlight what makes your firm unique compared to other businesses.

For example, take a look at these two ads:

Notice how the first ad highlights what’s in it for a prospective client: Qualify in 60 seconds. Now compare this with the second ad that does not mention any unique benefit (every other law firm nowadays offers free consultation).

So, when writing your ad copy, think about the end goal your customers are trying to reach. How do you make their journey easier or better? If you specialize in offering a benefit, be sure to make that a focal point to get the most clicks and conversions for your PPC ads.

3. Include Emotional Triggers

Just because your copy needs to be short and concise doesn’t mean it has to be boring. By including emotional triggers in your ad headline, description or CTA, you can stir a response in people reading your ads.

To come up with emotional triggers, you need to know who you are dealing with. Ask yourself:

• Who is the customer? Are you trying to target a recent divorcee? An injured commuter? A debtor?
• What is the persona of my firm? A transparent advisor? A supportive friend? A quick fix?

Once you have figured out the answers, write your copy from the perspective of your company persona to trigger the appropriate emotions in your customers.

For example, if you’re planning to serve as a transparent advisor to an individual in debt, here’s the type of ad copy you could use:

Essentially this PPC ad copy does three things:

1. It focuses on the individual’s pain point (the struggle to pay bills)
2. It promotes transparency by indicating that bankruptcy may or may not be an option (by using the word if)
3. It uses one of the most powerful words in marketing, i.e., “you”

Pro tip: Power words such as “you,” “now,” or “learn” are ideal for grabbing people’s attention. They carry the capability to trigger emotional and impulsive reactions. By evoking feelings present in their mindset at the time of the search, you can make people feel more connected to your firm and be more likely to click through and sign up for your service.

4. Answer Questions in Advance

The mark of a proactive law firm is anticipating how its audience will react. To address this, you can try using your ad copy to answer questions your target audience will ask before they ask them. Here are some questions they may have:

• How much does the appraisal cost?
• What do I get in terms of customer service?
• How long does it take to complete the paperwork?
• Is there any type of guarantee in place?
• What other services can I sign up for?

Here’s an example of an ad copy that answers most of these questions:

When you provide the audience with the most important information up front, you give your PPC ads a chance to snag all those clicks and conversions before your competitors do.

5. Craft Specific and Actionable CTAs

When it all comes down to it, law firms run PPC ads because they want people to take a certain action. In your case, that might be picking up the phone and making a call to your business. For others, it might be downloading an ebook, subscribing to an email list, or filling out an appraisal form.

Regardless of the action you want people to take, personalize your invitation. For example, you can craft a call-to-action that invites people to do something about their legal situation, somehow creating a sense of urgency or FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).

Here’s an example:

Slip and fall injury is a terrible accident to be in, and any delays in contacting a lawyer can reduce the victim’s chances of getting compensation. That’s why calls-to-action work really well for this area of practice. The CTA “Speak to a Lawyer Now” in the ad above reiterates the importance of acting fast and invites searchers to take action and get in touch with a legal firm as soon as possible.

Pro tip: Make sure the call-to-action in your ad copy is coherent with the information present on your PPC landing page. Using the example above, the landing page for the law firm’s ad should include a phone number that people can dial to speak to a lawyer or a way to connect with the law firm virtually.

6. Use Keywords in The URLs

The last tip is to place your top keywords in the URL of your ads. This will help your ad rank better as well as make it easy for searchers to identify what your business is about.

Most PPC solutions, including Google Ads, allow you to customize the URL for your audience. The display URL and the final one can be different from each other. It’s the former that you can customize to better promote your law firm’s services.

For example, see how this law firm uses a customized URL to attain better visibility in SERPs:

In this ad, the URL is customized to include what’s probably the main keyword the firm is targeting (personal injury lawyer).

In addition, the company has also included the name of the city in the URL to give people an idea of the location it covers.

You, too, can include the name of the city where your firm is located in order to drive relevant leads for your business.

Conclusion

PPC is a game of inches, and small improvements in your ad copy can mean the difference between winning and losing. By following the tips above, you can make your ads stand out from the crowd. Of course, as a leading PPC firm in the legal and attorney marketing space, we still have a few more tricks up our sleeves.

At Webrageous, we know the nuts and bolts of writing great ad copy for law firms, as well as how to optimize not only keywords, but landing pages and overall campaigns, in order to achieve measurable outcomes. If you’d like some help with your law firm pay-per-click management, give us a call at 855-225-9478.

Maybe your law firm is paying a freelancer or a marketing agency to optimize your Google Ads campaign. Or perhaps you have an employee who’s an expert in Google Ads and helps with keywords, ad groups, etc. But how can you tell if their efforts are working? Only by identifying key Google Ads metrics, monitoring them regularly, and applying tweaks as needed can you quantify their performance and learn if your investments are paying off.

(Pixabay / PhotoMIX-Company)

Whether you outsource or manage campaigns internally, metrics must be tracked, evaluated and analyzed on a frequent basis. So the million-dollar question: of the many Google Ads metrics available, which are most worthy of your attention? We break down the most important metrics law firms should monitor when looking to optimize their campaigns.

1. ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)

ROAS is a measure of how many dollars you will get for every dollar you spend on Google Ads. For example, if you spend $1,000 on advertising and generate $7,500 in revenue (conversion value), your ROAS will amount to $7.5. This means you will get $7.5 each time you spend $1 on advertising via Google.

There are no specific benchmarks to determine what your ROAS should be. In fact, it really depends on your average gross earning per client and how competitive your practice area is. For instance, those in the personal injury space may see a higher ROAS than someone offering bankruptcy and family law services. However, in general, an ROAS of 3:1 or above indicates a high-performing campaign.

Pro tip: You can use the Smart Bidding feature in Google Ads to set up Target ROAS. This lets you bid based on a target return on ad spend and get more revenue or conversion value at the figure you set. Because Smart Bidding is automated, machine learning makes most of the calculations. You enter the maximum amount you’re willing to pay and the target ROAS. The strategy then works to help you get as close to your desired ROAS as possible with the bid you’ve entered.

2. IS (Impression Share)

Impression share tells you what share of the eligible, targeted searches your ads occupy. It’s calculated by dividing the number of impressions your ads received by the number of eligible impressions they potentially could have received. When analyzing this metric, you can view impression share data at the campaign, ad group, and keyword level. For all levels, you can pull the metric by navigating to columns and modifying them to display IS.

Generally, your impression share should be in the 80-90 percent range. If it’s lower than that, you could be experiencing a loss in impressions due to:

• Budget: Your ads may not be showing frequently because your ad spend is too low.
• Rank: Your ads may also fail to achieve a high impression percentage because of low ad ranking. Ad ranking is determined by your ad quality and the bid amount.

Fortunately, there are ways you can increase the search impression share of your ads. Here are some tips:

1. Improve your Quality Score
   Your Quality Score or QS has a direct impact on your ad quality. Boost it by ensuring your ad copy, keywords, and the landing page you’re sending traffic to are relevant to one another.
2. Expand Your Budget
   Sometimes the simple act of injecting more funds into your campaign can bring a drastic improvement in impression share.
3. Leverage geo-targeting
   Your ads may get more impressions if they’re relevant to local searches in a specific locality. By exploring where your target audience resides, you can focus your efforts into certain regions and gain more control.
4. Set up an ad schedule
   Another way to increase impression share is to run ads during high activity periods. Ask yourself:

• At what point in the day are prospects most likely to click your ad and call your firm?
• Are your website visitors more engaged on a Monday or Friday?
• Do most of your leads come in the morning or around evening time?

You can find the answers to these questions and more by syncing Google Ads with your Google Analytics account. Grab the “time of the day” report in GA to get an idea of audience activity.

3. Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is simply the rate at which searchers are taking an intended action post-click. It gives you an idea of whether the existing keywords, ad copy, and landing pages are suitable for your campaign. According to industry benchmarks, the average conversion rate for the legal industry is almost 7 percent.

You can determine your conversion rate by installing conversion tracking for Google Ads. This a powerful tool that lets you see how good your ads are at generating sales, leads, subscriptions, and more for your law firm. Conversion tracking also records data that helps you identify what areas of your campaign need improvement, so you can tweak your keywords, ad copy, and bids accordingly.

Pro tip: One of the best ways to increase your conversion rate is to segment your audience and have different landing pages and marketing materials for each audience group. Remember, people may have varying reasons for contacting a law firm and will conduct their research in unique ways. Hence, the more you tailor your landing page and ads to their specific needs, the more likely they are to take action.

4. CPA (Cost Per Action)

If you have conversion tracking set up correctly, you can actually measure your cost per action (also referred to as cost per acquisition or cost per conversion). This tells you the amount you’re paying for each desired action taken. Of course, the action or conversion can take many different forms. For a law firm, the conversion could be a phone call, email signup, or form submission.

You’ll want to pay close attention to your CPA for every offer you run, as the metric is likely to vary for each. It may cost you $50 to get a conversion with an ad promoting “cheap legal aid attorney,” for instance, but the customer you gain may not be willing to spend more than $500 on your services. In contrast, an ad promoting “best legal aid attorney” may result in a higher CPA of $70, but it would be more beneficial if you’re now getting high-value customers who spend an average of $1,000 on your services.

So, the only thing that matters isn’t how much you’re paying for each customer, but how much value you are getting from a customer compared to what you pay to acquire them.

Pro Tip: Consider using Targeted CPA bidding in Google Ads to get as many conversions as you can without going over the CPA you set. For accessing this feature, you will need to have conversion tracking set up and to be getting a minimum of 30 conversions per month.

5. CPC (Cost Per Click)

The last metric on our list is the good old cost per click. CPC gives you an insight into the level of competition you’re facing as well as the general performance of your Google Ads campaigns. In the legal industry, it’s normal to have a high cost per click (the average is around $6.75), but you’d still want to monitor the metric to ensure you’re not overpaying and find opportunities to bring down the cost. If you’re looking for quick ways to slash CPC, here are some tips:

• Lower bids on poor performing keywords: Assess your search query reports to identify low-quality keywords. These are phrases that attract poor quality traffic with a low conversion rate. Try lowering the bids for those keywords or even remove them completely from your Google Ads campaign
• Use ad extensions: Ad extensions let you show links to specific webpages on your site below the ads. Even though they don’t have a direct impact on your CPC, they can improve your clickthrough rate and ad rank. Both of these factors can help reduce the cost per click.
• Use long-tail keywords: Always remember that less competition means lower cost, so use a keyword research tool like Keywords Everywhere to find as many long-tail keyword variations as possible. Use those less competitive keywords in Google Ads, and you’ll likely end up paying much less than what your competitors are.

Conclusion

In summary, ROAS, Impression Share, Conversion Rate, CPA, and CPC are valuable metrics that will help you identify areas in your campaigns that require tweaks and are eligible for a performance boost. When tracked and optimized, these metrics can help you boost overall profits. The key to ensuring your Google Ads campaigns are headed in the right direction is to monitor and drill down into these metrics regularly. You can do this on your own or get help from an expert Google Ads management company to get the most out of your campaigns.

Webrageous doesn’t just specialize in pay-per-click management, they specialize in PPC management for attorneys. They know exactly how to get the best ROI on Google Ads for your specific industry, and that translates into higher profits for you with far fewer headaches.

When setting up a Google Ads campaign, you’ll be asked about bidding. Specifically, Google wants to know what type of bidding you want to use: Manual? Automated?

Most law firms choose automated because nobody wants to adjust bids all the time, and that’s where mistakes happen. In this post, we’ll look at the most common automated bidding blunders and what you can do to prevent them.

(Pixabay / 422737)

1. Engaging in Vanity Bidding

Vanity bidding is disconnected from ROI-based objectives. For example, it aims to maximize clicks, whereas smart bidding strives to maximize conversions. The idea behind both is that Google will learn how people are interacting with your ads so they can serve the best ones while optimizing your campaigns based on the data compiled in your specific ad account.

For smart bidding, the company asks for a minimum of 15 conversions over the past 30 days, but it emphasizes that 50 is better. Advertisers who miss the minimum benchmarks consistently are probably employing vanity bidding. Instead, run a few manual campaigns and A/B test to generate enough conversions so Google has better data to build off of when you do engage in automated bidding.

2. Having a High Target CPA and Budget

When you choose automated bidding, your PPC platform of choice looks to spend as much of your budget as possible while achieving a healthy level of return. But let’s not forget that automated strategies are honed in by data and search volume. It’s common for them to rapidly spend through your maximum caps during the initial phase. To put it simply, entering too high of a budget and target CPA can result in inflated CPCs that decrease the cost-effectiveness of your Google Ads campaign.

A solution to this is to start with budgets roughly 20 percent lower than your 30-day average spend. With this approach, you can at least see how automated bidding will impact your campaign while not blowing your standard budget. Bidding algorithms look at changes over time; performance shifts due to sudden changes in the market, consumer behavior, or demand may not be immediately reflected and require patience from advertisers.

Related: Check out this video for an insight into the success we’ve had with target CPA bidding:

3. Ignoring the Importance of Individual Bids

We’ve seen law firms practicing automated bidding and neglecting the importance of individual bids. They think if it’s all automated, all they need to do is pick an overall budget. Yes, it’s critical to define a total budget for your campaigns, but if you don’t pay attention to your individual bids, your budget might be spent in ways that don’t really suit your Google Ads campaign. This is especially crucial where you’re running non-smart campaigns, which optimize for an ad metric you select during configuration rather than for profitable cost-per-conversions.

Let’s say that you’ve launched an impression share campaign with $1,000 as the total budget. You’ll most likely achieve the impression share you’re after, but the clicks might cost you $100 a click. That may or may not be favorable for your law firm, and without individual bids, algorithms won’t know that they’re overpaying for clicks. Fortunately, campaigns like these enable you to pick a maximum CPC limit.

4. Changing Offers/Ads on a Weekly Basis

Whenever you make changes to your ads or offers, you reset them, which in turn resets Google’s machine-learning algorithm. By the time the algorithm figures out what works well and what to avoid, you reset it again, which defeats the purpose of automated bidding. A simple workaround is to use the same ads or offers until Google optimizes your campaign for optimal conversions.

We also recommend that you use conversion tracking to differentiate between bad and good clicks. Smart advertisers optimize for clicks that are most likely to bring conversion. It’s all about doubling down on the profitable aspect of Google advertising. So, while you might be able to get a lot of cheap clicks, you might actually be able to gain better results by using conversion tracking and buying expensive but more valuable clicks.

Note: Some conversions may cost less than your target while others may cost more, but overall, Google will try to align your cost-per-conversion with your target CPA. Actual CPA is influenced by factors beyond the platform’s control, such as increased competition in the online advertising space and changes to your website. Hence, conversion tracking is necessary to guide the campaign through to success.

5. Not Accounting for High Conversion Delay

Conversion delays are the lags between when prospects click on an ad and when they take a specific action (for instance, call your business). If your conversion delays are naturally long, there’s a chance that you may end up under-weighting your campaign’s performance. You can check your conversion time lag by going to Tools – Search Attribution – Paths – Time Lag + Path Length. The view can be based on the visitor’s first click, last click, or first impression.

If you are comparing the performance of an automated campaign with one that was set up manually, know that it may not look as efficient because some of those who clicked on your ad may not have converted (yet). These conversions will ultimately happen, but because the spend is already reported, it may seem as if you have a higher CPA, fewer conversions, or the ads just aren’t working. Make sure to take conversion delays into account when analyzing campaign performance.

Conclusion

Automated bidding may look simple on paper, but making the most of it requires careful planning and vigilance. Hands-off bid management is a myth, as you still need to make the right tweaks to ensure that each campaign is working well for your business. In addition to avoiding the mistakes above, use the Google Ads Experimentation tool to A/B test different bid strategies against each other. If you need guidance or second opinions, or if you are a law firm looking for Google Ads management, contact our experienced PPC management team today.

Google Ads Target CPA Bidding Case Studies & How To

Video

Few things are more frustrating than spending a small fortune on a PPC campaign only to have it sputter and die. If this is happening to you, don’t panic or overreact. Often, there are steps you can take to turn the campaign around and start seeing a better return on your investment. Read on to learn about real-life campaigns that came back from the brink—and the specific steps that revived them.

Tonya Davis

Tonya Davis is a marketing professional at ThoughtLab, a full-service Salt Lake City, Utah based web design and digital experience agency.

Few reasons

I did have a failing PPC campaign. It rarely had any ad impressions even though the keywords had good search volume. There were about 5 or so different ad groups set up, and they all housed around 10 search terms. They maybe averaged around 3 or 4 impressions a day. With some troubleshooting, we were able to find a few reasons as to why our ads were not showing.

The first issue was that we had conflicting search terms in different ad groups. The search terms were not exactly the same, but due to the broad match modifier keyword type, both keywords could be triggered on the same types of searches. Google won’t know which ad to show when this happens, so they just won’t show any. By adding some negative keywords to each ad group, we were able to eliminate any issues with both ads being eligible to run for the same types of searches.

The second issue was the bid strategy that was set up. It was on a “optimize for conversions” strategy. Normally this would be fine, but Google does need to have some previous conversion data before they can start running the campaign for you. If you don’t have the data, Google won’t know when the best times are to run your ads. So changing the bidding strategy to manual bidding allows us to gather some conversion data before we switch it over to an automated bidding strategy.

With both of these fixes in place, we were able to see our ad impressions really start to pick up, which finally started leading us to some conversions. Once we had a fair amount of conversion data, we switched over to an automated bidding strategy, which helped to improve our conversion rate.

Brett Downes

Brett Downes is a new business owner with a decade of experience in agency and in-house SEO and PPC at harohelpers.com.

Neglected the real problem

We were so focused on increasing the impressions and click-through rate of our Facebook ads, we neglected to look at the real problem until we had spent 10k of our budget.

The problem was our landing page; it was very hit and miss, like marmite if you will. It only gave information on one of our packages, whereas if someone wanted something different, there was no information on that, so they just bounced off. Our sales conversion rate was 0.2%.

Once we changed the landing page and added more packages and further reading options, we saw a much lower bounce rate, with the sales conversion average at 1.3%, a whole 1% higher more than the previous version.

We were so concerned that the FB ads weren’t working we failed to realize they were but we were funneling the majority of prospects down a blind alley.

This is a crowdsourced article. Contributors are not necessarily affiliated with this website and their statements do not necessarily reflect the opinion of this website, other people, businesses, or other contributors.

COVID-19 has ushered in a time of monumental challenges as well as silver linings. Where do legal firms fall on the spectrum? That depends. Read on to learn about the good and bad of the pandemic’s effects on different law firms.

Renata Castro

Renata Castro, Immigration Attorney Castro Legal Group.

Beneficial

As an immigration attorney, I saw our clients take this time to prioritize the pursuit of their lawful immigration status, and that was beneficial not only for our business but also to the way clients are finding our work more important than ever. There’s a sense of community building among us, and for that we’re grateful.

This is a crowdsourced article. Contributors are not necessarily affiliated with this website and their statements do not necessarily reflect the opinion of this website, other people, businesses, or other contributors.

There are a lot of law firms that use PPC advertising, and there are plenty of agencies pitching PPC management for lawyers. But how do you pick the right agency from hundreds of pitches, media kits, and portfolios? We’ve got you covered with a checklist of things to consider before you hire a particular agency. Although there’s no “best” PPC agency for law firms, these questions can help you identify the right option for your firm.

(Pixabay / succo)

1. Does the Agency Specialize in Pay-Per-Click?

You’ll come across agencies who claim to do it all (SEO? No problem. PPC? Leave that to our experts). They promise a one-stop-shop for all your online marketing needs. This may sound great, but you’re unlikely to get satisfactory results as these agencies treat PPC as any other tradecraft. Pay-per-click requires skill, experience, a deep familiarity with the tricks of the trade, and continual optimization. If the agency you’re looking at doesn’t exclusively focus on PPC, consider looking elsewhere.

2. What Experience Does It Have in the Legal Industry?

While there are some overlaps in techniques used for PPC management in general, law firms require some specific considerations. Converting clicks into calls, using appropriate keywords, and confidentiality are just a few things you should discuss. An experienced PPC agency should have knowledge in the following areas:

• Ideal negative keywords to improve campaign performance
• Best keyword match types to increase CTR and lead generation
• Top ad extensions to activate
• Steps to get banned accounts reinstated
• Account audits to identify data-backed opportunities

Just like when potential clients inquire about your experience, make sure the agency you pick is familiar with the areas that matter to you.

3. Does It Have Reviews and Case Studies That Display Results?

PPC agencies can boost social proof like online ratings, testimonials, and reviews for services, but those don’t always add up to new cases. In fact, it’s fairly easy for an agency to say that their existing customers have had great results without sharing material to solidify their claims.

Agencies that truly understand the process of optimizing and auditing law firm PPC accounts will have real-world results and testimonials on hand to show how they can improve your paid search efforts, including CTR increases, improved ROI, and more phone calls.

4. Is It Making Specific Promises for Leads and Investment Returns?

If an agency makes specific guarantees based on your budget (like 50 leads minimum), you should probably say no and get in touch with another agency. In reality, no one knows how a campaign is going to run, as several factors can influence the number of leads and ROI.

The only thing an agency can do is apply proven tactics and tweak as they go, based on how the account performs. When speaking with an agency for your law firm’s PPC management, watch for any claims that sound too good to be true.

5. Can It Pivot Based on Trends and Account Performance?

The search marketing space evolves at a rapid pace. Small changes in advertising technology can fundamentally alter the execution of PPC campaigns. Therefore, it’s important that your preferred agency adopts an agile approach to pay-per-click and can adapt to changing behaviors and trends. Success in PPC is often defined by continuous tweaking and A/B testing, so it’s critical that your PPC specialists understand this, and not just offer an off-the-shelf service that would become ineffective a few months after deployment.

6. Does it have transparent processes?

When you put your law firm’s paid search presence in the hands of a PPC agency, you expect to get transparent answers to your questions – and fast. This means the agency should present a detailed and actionable plan for improving your campaign performance, give you access to metrics and results, and build strategy sessions to help you identify available opportunities. Some agencies may also provide you with ways to get involved, such as through content reviews, periodic account check-in, campaign suggestions, and more.

If you don’t receive full visibility into the performance of your campaign, then it may be an indication that the agency is attempting to create a smoke screen so that it can shed a positive light on its efforts.

7. Will It Offer Guidance on Budget?

In many instances, law firm PPC budgets come down to the desired result, i.e., how much do you need to spend to achieve this amount of leads over six months? Budgeting is critical and will also determine the level of service you receive from the agency. A good agency will guide you based on their experience, as well as suggest a specific direction based on your overall budget and expected return. Here are some budget-related questions to ask yourself:

• What amount of money can I allocate to my advertising goals?
• How many leads do I want to generate?
• How many conversions do I want to see?

Give the agency some details of your budget to get an idea of whether or not it will be enough to help you achieve your campaign objectives.

8. Does It Have Proper Tracking Processes in Place?

As a client, you should expect the PPC agency to regularly present you with reports that tie in the results with ongoing processes. To put it simply, check if your agency has an effective tracking system in place. It should allow them to gather, monitor, and analyze the data from your campaigns and website to discover more about your visitors and get you more leads.

Most agencies use Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to keep track of touchpoints, but the best ones use a robust tracking system to ensure they’re also keeping track of:

• Specific webpages
• Devices types
• Form fills
• Lead magnet downloads
• Calls

Webrageous, for instance, offers a phone tracking feature that tells our clients which calls come as a direct result of our efforts. These are the essential, hard-to-manually-track elements that offer a big picture of your campaign.

Conclusion

When PPC is a daunting concept for your law firm, it’s better to take help from an experienced agency. If you’re in the midst of evaluating agencies for your business, these eight points will help you to quickly whittle down the options.

At Webrageous, we handle Google Ads management for personal injury attorneys, mass tort lawyers, and more. Check out this video to learn about what sets us apart from the competition.

Video

Pay-per-click can be a powerful tool for your lead generation, but it can also be risky if not configured correctly. Whether you’re a solo practitioner or a marketing director of an Am Law 200 firm, mistakes in your PPC campaign can cost you hundreds to thousands of dollars in missed cases. Our aim in writing this post is to make you aware of these missteps so you can avoid problems in the future.

(Pixabay / mohamed_hassan)

Here are six common PPC mistakes lawyers make and how to avoid them:

1. Not Leveraging Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are phrases you don’t want your ads to appear for. Let’s say you have a law firm in Chicago and you are using Chicago + lawyer as a keyword. You might get a ton of clicks, but your ads could also be appearing for irrelevant search terms such as “Chicago lawyer jobs” and “salary Chicago lawyer.” How do you prevent this from happening? You add “jobs” and “salary” as negative keywords in your PPC tool.

If you’re using Google Ads, you can identify what people searched for by reviewing your keywords and then clicking search terms at the top. This will display the phrases people were interested in when they clicked on your ad. Add any keywords you don’t want to appear for such as “free,” “cheap,” and “pictures” to your negative keywords list. You can add negative keywords by selecting “Keywords and Targeting” > “Keywords, Negative” and clicking “Add negative keyword” in Google Ads.

Pro Tip: When identifying irrelevant keywords, you should also ask yourself, “Are there any misspellings, synonyms, or other variations of these keywords?” If so, save yourself from wasting money by adding them as negative keywords in your campaign.

2. Sending All Leads to Your Home Page

This is arguably the worst mistake you can make. After people arrive at your home page, they need to do extra work to find the service they are looking for. Not only is that frustrating for the visitor, but search engines may penalize you for it. When search engines see that your landing page isn’t hyper-relevant to your ads, they will reduce your Quality Score – which has a direct impact on your CPC. Ideally, you should choose ads and landing pages in a way that resonates with the standard user journey detailed below:

1. Users search for something specific
2. They click on an ad that resonates with their query
3. They’re redirected to a page that has “exactly” what they’re searching for

When you send PPC traffic to your homepage, you’re dumping visitors onto the most general page on your site, so they’re unlikely to stick around and explore your business. The solution to this is to create dedicated landing pages for each ad set, and then link those pages to user intent. If users click on an advertisement about “work-related compensation,” they need to be taken to a page about work injury compensation rather than the homepage of a personal injury law firm.

Creating high-quality landing pages is an art itself, but here are a few things to consider if you want your leads to convert:

• Offer the necessary information about your law service, including how much it usually costs.

• Explain the benefits, telling people how your firm will help them get justice and/or compensation.

• Build trust, showing testimonials from existing clients.

• Make things convenient, only asking for the information you absolutely require (like their name, phone number, and email address).

• Convince people to take action, encouraging them to book their first consultation.

3. Forgetting About Geographic Targeting

Another major mistake we frequently see in legal PPC campaigns is the absence of geographic targeting. Studies have shown that people are more likely to contact your business when you are local. Careful bidding and targeting of your keywords based on your physical location is key to improving your campaign performance. Think about it. What good is it to show your ads to people in Denver when you only practice law in Salt Lake City?

Geo-targeting lets you restrict the delivery of your ads to specific locations. You can target your ads by areas within a country, a radius around a specific location, or groups of location (which can include your business locations and places of interest). Remember, you’re charged for every click, so you want your targeting to be as precise as possible.

Pro Tip: Make sure to thoroughly check the “Advanced Search and Location Options” dropdown in Google Ads. It should allow you to define the location radius as well as learn who can see your ad. Targeting people who are only interested in your location and not actually present there is unlikely to result in conversions. Change your Settings, so your ads are only delivered to those who are in (or regularly visit) your target locations.

4. Neglecting Ad Extensions

PPC platforms like Google Ads offer a range of opportunities to make your campaigns stand out. One opportunity is to display information-rich extensions in your ads. According to Google, ad extensions are often an immediate and effective way to improve an ad’s clickthrough rate, and—bonus!—it doesn’t cost anything extra.

The most popular ad extensions include:

• Call: This inserts your phone number inside the ad, giving people a direct way to connect to your office without having to visit your Contact Us page.

• Location: The location extension shows things like your name, address, and phone number. All you have to do is connect your ad account with Google My Business. Once connected, searchers can click your address to open up your business on Google Maps.

• Sitelinks: These are essentially URLs of the related pages on your website, such as About Us, Related Services, Pricing, etc. Using sitelinks gives people a better idea of what other relevant details they can access from your site.

• Message: If you have a number for receiving texts, and if it makes sense for your law firm, the message extension allows visitors to message you directly from your ad.

• Callouts: You can use callouts to display important details like features or benefits. If you accept calls 24/7, offer New Year discounts, or have a team of certified practitioners, this is the extension you should be using.

Remember to configure your ad extensions, but don’t take the “set it and forget it” approach. Analyze, experiment, and see what extension works best.

5. Failing to Create Effective Ad Groups

Ad groups are meant to help group your ads and keywords based on specific themes. Creating a single ad group for all of your keywords is not an effective strategy and could end up costing you dollars, leads, and conversions.

We frequently come across accounts with missing or ineffective ad groups, and this is one of the biggest mistakes lawyers make when setting up their PPC ads. The solution to this is to create specific ad groups by merging similar keywords and ads into different segments.

For example, if you have a law firm that deals in both family and personal injury law, you may want to set up your ad groups and campaigns as follows:

• Family Lawyer (Campaign)

• Divorce, Maintenance, Child Custody, Alimony, Property Division (Ad Groups)

• Personal Injury Lawyer (Campaign)

• Car Accident, Slip and Fall, Worker’s Compensation, and Injuries, Disability Insurance, Mesothelioma (Ad Groups)

As you can see from the examples above, the ad groups represent different services. Make sure to use text ads and keywords that are relevant to the theme of each ad group. You can also use negative keywords in each group to ensure your ads don’t appear for irrelevant search terms.

6. Not Increasing Your Quality Score

Your Quality Score can make or break your paid advertising efforts. It’s essentially a “1-10 score” given to each of your ads based on their relevance, expected CTR, and landing page. To put it simply, the Quality Score evaluates how relevant your landing page and ad experience are to the keywords you’ve put in your ads. If your score on certain ads are low and you don’t take steps to improve it, it will negatively impact your whole account.

That means you’ll be paying a greater than usual sum for each click, and your ad impressions will reduce if you’re not careful. The best way to improve your Quality Score is to use landing pages relevant to each ad group. When it comes to the keyword match type, avoid using Broad Match as it could lead to lower relevancy to a visitor’s search term. Instead, use Modified Broad Match as it allows greater control over search terms that trigger your ads.

Using Modified Broad Match in Google Ads:

• You just have to add a “+” sign at the beginning of a phrase to tell a search engine to only link it to searchers that feature the words in the phrase. For example, in the case of “criminal law firm,” including the + symbol between the words (criminal+law+firm) tells Google to only serve your ads for any broad terms that feature each of the three words.

Conclusion

As you’ve read through this article, you might have realized that there are a few gaps in your current PPC campaign. In a sector as competitive as law, you need to cover any gaps you can find. By avoiding these common blunders, you’ll have a significant advantage over your competitors.

If you find yourself struggling at any point, we specialize in PPC management for attorneys so contact us for help.

Is your law firm aiming to secure more cases and initial consultations from Google Ads? Then you need to start using what Google refers to as “call extensions.” With law-related keywords costing over $50 per click, it’s crucial that the ads you are running are optimized for quality leads and conversions. That’s where call extensions can make a difference by displaying additional information about your firm.

(Pixabay / succo)

In this post, we’re going to discuss everything you need to know about call extensions so you can start using them right away, including how to set them up in Google Ads.

What Are Call Extensions?

Call extensions are a type of ad extension that let you display a clickable phone number in your search ads, which Google says can have a positive impact on your CTR (click-through rates). Because the clicks generated by these extensions are actually “calls,” they tend to convert at a better rate than website clicks. Plus, they’re free to activate, which means you can showcase your business phone number in search at no additional cost.

Here’s what they look like:

Call extensions help to enhance the appeal of your ads and increase the real estate they occupy in SERPs. This is not only great for your online presence but also a plus point for your customers as they get another way to connect with your business.

Why Use Call Extensions for Law Firm PPC?

As a lawyer or the owner of a law firm, you likely know that speaking to claimants over the phone is far more valuable than receiving an online query. You can quickly vet leads and identify which cases are perusable. That means less time wasted and more opportunities for you to focus on your business.

Call extensions can also help grow your client base. Google’s research says that 70% of mobile searchers interact with call extensions and 47% of searchers overlook firms that don’t display a phone number in search results. If the majority of your conversions happen on the phone, you’d be smart to use call extensions in your Google Ads campaigns.

How to Set Up Call Extensions in Google Ads

You can add call extensions at the ad group, campaign, or account level. If you create them at multiple levels, the most specific ones will be used for your campaign. Here’s how to set them up:

1. Log into your Google Ads account.
2. Click “Ads and extensions” in the page tab on the left.
3. In the dropdown menu that appears, click “Extensions.”
4. Now choose Call Extensions from a list of options.
   
5. Choose whether you want to activate the extension for your Account, Campaign, or Add Group.
6. Select “Create New” to set up a call extension.
   

You also get the option to switch on call reporting. Doing so tells Google to “track calls from ads” as conversions. This helps you see which keywords are triggering the best results, as well as your ad performance breakdown in terms of location and demographics. All this data will help you make your ads even more effective in attracting new clients.

Tips to Get the Most Out of Call Extensions

1. Encourage People to Call Your Firm

Call extensions work best when you encourage prospects to call you. A simple way to achieve this is to add a sentence like “call now to get 30 min free consult” in your ad’s description. While updating your ad copy, make sure you tell Google to only show your ads with a mobile-optimized CTA on small screens. Check the “device preference” box for this purpose.

2. Test the “Call Only” Extension

Call Only is a trendy new call extension that displays your business number in the headline of your ad. This feature is only useful for devices where a call can be made, so it’s restricted to just tablets and mobile. With this extension, all of your clicks will be calls so you are able to effectively connect with many more clients. However, the Call Only extension may not appeal to customers who first like to get familiar with a company before inquiring. Run a few experiments for both Call Only and standard call extensions to determine the best option for your campaign.

3. Take Advantage of Scheduling

Scheduling call extensions is a must for customer service. Google lets you decide what days of the week and what hours of the day the call extension should appear on your ads. If you can only answer the phone between 12 pm and 6 pm on weekdays, then make sure to set up call extensions to only display between those hours. You can set up scheduling by clicking “Advanced Options” and selecting the start date and end date along with the days and hours you want the extensions to display.

4. Use a Local Number

When you enter a local number for your Call Only or standard call extension, Google will assign you a “Google forwarding number” that has the same area code or prefix as your company phone number, provided there’s one available. The alternative is to contact a third-party provider for local numbers. Segment your campaigns geographically to make the best use of local numbers. For example, if you have a branch in Canada and the UK, you can set up new call extensions for each of these offices and use a local area code for each location by inserting them at Campaign (not Account or Ad group) level.

Note: The Google call forwarding number will not display alongside your ads until your ad groups have reached a certain number of clicks. Ideally, you should get 25-30 clicks in a month for the forwarding number to show. There is no minimum click threshold for call extensions, so they will display as normal.

When Call Extensions Fail to Appear

If you’ve created call extensions but they’re not displaying on your ads, there’s a chance that they may have been disapproved. You can check this by viewing your extensions and ensuring their status is not displaying as disapproved. Google’s algorithm changes may also impact when your call extensions show up. For example, if Google’s data analysis reveals your ads will perform better with other extensions, it may display other ad extensions if you have them active instead of a call extension.

Start Using Call Extensions Today

There you have it: a detailed explanation of Google Ads call extensions.

To give a quick recap, call extensions are a really handy add-ons to generate more clients for your business. Getting people on the phone when they require legal assistance helps build trust and value and improves your reputation. Also, call extensions seem to be favored by mobile users in search engine result pages, so they can help improve your CPC and average ranking.

Hungry for more tips? Check out Important Elements for Websites To Convert Better With Google Ads.

Warning! Click fraud is worse than ever, and it’s taking a toll on PPC advertising. Losses from fraudulent clicks amount to about $60 billion per year, and the practice seems to be growing at over 50% year over year.

Click fraud has been around since PPC was invented. As more dollars shifted in from other mediums like television and print, the massive investments in pay-per-click made it lucrative enough for cybercriminals to want in on this windfall.

(Pixabay / launchpresso)

Then unethical businesses discovered an easy way to deplete their competitors’ budgets. They’d sabotage another company’s PPC campaign by funding individuals to click on their ads. Those in charge would generate thousands of clicks on ads without even knowing what they were about.

If you want to ensure your paid search budget is being well spent and your efforts are not being compromised, you need to learn how to prevent click fraud – in every way possible.

In this article, we’re going to look at what click fraud is, what are its common sources and what your business can do to prevent it.

What Is Click Fraud?

Click fraud is a form of ad fraud that falsely inflates the number of clicks on a PPC ad. By hiring people or deploying bots to commit click fraud, those with malicious intent aim to exhaust your daily budget before you’ve even had the opportunity to reach your target audience.

Click fraud may also distort the analytical data you rely on for keyword-related decisions. To give an example, let’s assume you have a profitable and high-converting keyword in one of your campaigns. If someone generates false clicks on that keyword and you fail to identify the fraud, you might decide to remove that keyword.

That’s because analytics show a low conversion rate for that keyword. Because most PPC systems charge for every click, the cost of ads will force you to get rid of it.

Common Sources of Click Fraud

There are four main sources of click fraud you need to be careful of:

1. Competitors

Market rivalry and search engine competition may cause one of your competitors to commit click fraud. For example, if you currently occupy the top rank in the SERPs, a competitor can sabotage your campaign by repeatedly clicking on your ads. They may also hire a team for the purpose so they can safeguard their own reputation.

2. Publishers

Because publishers get money for clicks on an ad, they may be interested in keeping the CTR (click-through rate) high. As a result, they may start mixing the real flow of clicks with simulated ones to siphon as much profit as possible.

3. Bots

Malicious actors may also use sophisticated systems that utilize web sessions and fake IP addresses, also regarded as bot farms. Bots will analyze the data stored in cookies (including past purchases, browser history, demographic information, and more) to determine which ads to target. Offenders can use bot farms to generate millions of fake views and clicks every single day.

4. Unhappy customers

Although rare, disgruntled customers may start clicking on your ads in order to take revenge for their negative experiences. Some may also do it out of boredom, whereas others could be hired to inflict damage on your campaigns.

Click Fraud Red Flags: How to Detect Fraudulent Clicks in Paid Search

There are lots of ways to determine whether your paid search Campaign has been targeted by malicious actors.

For example, an unusual spike in the amount of ad impressions or clicks without any conversions is a tell-tale sign of click fraud.

Plus, watch out for clicks with a high bounce rate because fraudsters may attempt to escape detection by arriving and staying on your client’s site for just a few seconds.

Clicks coming from the IP addresses of a particular country may signal another red flag. It could be that adversaries in a particular country have been commissioned to derail your campaign.

How to Prevent Paid Search Click Fraud

Feel like your paid search account is vulnerable to click fraud? Here are 5 ways you can fraud-proof it and stop adversaries/competitors in their tracks.

1. Take advantage of IP exclusions

If you’ve done your research and found that certain IP addresses are resulting in malicious clicks, you can stop paid search from serving ads to those IPs. This can be done through the IP Exclusions feature in your paid search account.

2. Experiment with remarketing campaigns

Remarketing is when you limit ads to users who’ve visited your website in the past. Maybe they browsed a product page, signed up for your email list, or checked out your new blog post. Whatever the case, they’ve demonstrated interest in your business.

With paid search remarketing, the risk of click fraud declines because bots won’t be able to see your ads.

3. Exclude lower quality publishers

In paid search, go to the “Placements” section and see what websites are contributing to clicks and impressions on your ads. Review some of the top traffic sites and see if they look like high quality sites where you want to advertise.

4. Adjust geographical targeting in paid search

If you spot a pattern of suspicious clicks from a specific location, exclude that location immediately. This can be done through the “Settings” or “Location” section of your paid search account.

Be careful when excluding a geographical area because there’s a risk of losing legitimate traffic by removing a whole location.

Conclusion

Click fraud isn’t going to slow down anytime soon. It is one of these things that will always keep harming PPC users in one way or another. The good news is that you can neutralize the impact by following the strategies mentioned above. If you are concerned about your paid search campaign or believe you are already a victim, consider getting in touch with a pay-per-click expert.

If you are affiliated with a law firm, Webrageous specializes in PPC management for lawyers. They can detect and remove click fraud from their clients’ accounts. You can find out more by reading our post entitled Stopping Click Fraud with a PPC Expert.

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