Attorney PPC Agency

What is PPC Management for Law Firms?

Attorney PPC management consists of creating and optimizing paid advertisement campaigns for law firms. Despite that simple explanation, let's explore it further.

To provide expert PPC management, a paid ads agency for attorneys should get to know you and your goals. This information helps determine the next steps, since the way you'd approach PPC advertising for a local law firm is much different from how you'd handle it for nationwide attorney ecommerce site.

For example, local law firms are often only interested in contact form submissions or phone calls. To accomplish this, paid ads can generate traffic to a landing page or sales funnel that is optimized. We recommend Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms if those pages/funnels don't exist or need to be reworked.

In contrast, ecommerce-focused law firms are most likely to be interested in online sales. Using paid advertising, you can grow traffic to a page optimized for products or categories. You might even want to include Google Shopping Campaigns in some cases. Our sales funnels have also helped us to sell subscriptions, products, and services.

The next step in attorney PPC management is understanding the metrics that will be used to optimize and scale. For some law firms, that means looking to platforms like Google Analytics. However, there are other options out there too, like Wicked Reports, Triple Whale, or Northbeam.

To be successful with paid ads, your law firm needs to use multiple strategies and marketing tools. Some of the best PPC advertising packages for law firms include tactics to:

• Promote your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc.) via search engines, social channels, and third parties.
• Make money online or through qualified leads for your law firm.
• Integrate third-party attribution tools to better understand ad attribution.
• Showcase social proof through case studies, white papers, video testimonials, and other factors.
• Build and nurture relationships through user generated content, story creation, and email address collection.
• Test the effectiveness of different ad creatives across different media and ad placements.

Tips for Managing PPC for Attorneys

Our team of paid advertising consultants is knowledgeable in the latest paid ads trends for attorneys and other industries.

Here are some of our best tips to follow for keyword research, audience research, landing page / sales funnel optimization, conversion rate optimization, and ad creation.

1.) Keyword Research Tips

In the context of paid ads, you'll find keyword research for attorneys mostly relates to search network campaigns on the Google Ads and Bing Ads platforms. After all, search ads only show up based on what your law firm targets on Google or Bing.

A search for "nearby attorney" on a search engine, for example, might lead someone to a law firm website in their area. It wouldn't be necessary to conduct extensive keyword research to target that exact phrase.

However, what if the exact match keyword isn't generating enough search volume and the law firm needs to expand their advertising reach? To solve the problem, keyword research would be required.

After discussing options, the next step might involve the paid advertising manager talking with the law firm about what products / services they want to target more often and where. A broader keyword targeting plan than exact matches might also be necessary.

For instance, the PPC manager might discover high search volume for "nearby law firms" or even "attorney services." The first phrase is targeting a type of business or organization in the area. In the second phrase, a service is being targeted, which might result in a more lucrative conversion opportunity.

When building negative keyword lists, keyword research can also be beneficial. You can use negative keywords to prevent your paid ads from showing in search queries that you know won't convert to more clients.

For example, an individual searching for "free services from law firms" or "when to advertise to attorneys" is unlikely to convert. Your paid advertising may appear if you use broad keyword targeting without negative keywords such as "free" or "advertise".

You can see that as you scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend, the needs for keyword research become more complex.

2.) Audience Research Tips

When you hear audience research talked about for law firm PPC advertising campaigns, it is often within the scope of scaling social ads on Facebook and Instagram. However, Bing Ads and Google Ads also allow audience targeting.

We'll review some audience research and targeting history within Facebook Ads.

Facebook custom audiences were heavily relied upon by law firm paid ads managers in the past. In fact, one of Facebook Ads' most attractive features was the ability to collect data on users, which advertisers for law firms eagerly took advantage of.

A number of factors, including data privacy and machine learning, have had an impact on custom audiences over time.

In the iOS 14.5 update, Apple included a pop-up message that allowed users to opt out of tracking for personalized ads. This had a negative impact on Facebook's ability to track user behavior on mobile devices. In fact, it even affected the accuracy of ad attribution reporting.

For most attorney-focused advertising companies, machine learning algorithms greatly reduced the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences. With such sophisticated algorithms, it's often more harmful to choose your own interests compared to letting Facebook figure it out for you.

Though there will still be plenty of law firm paid advertising agencies using custom audiences, the trend is moving toward broad targeting. Don't take our word for it though. If you've been involved in the creation of Facebook ads, you've probably noticed the removal of interest-based targeting options here and there. Maybe you've even seen changes to how "Advantage Detailed Targeting" is recommended during the setup process.

Interested in another take on audience targeting? Social Media Examiner's blog article does a good job of explaining recent changes.

It's not to say audience research and targeting are going away. There will always be targeting options that can be manipulated within attorney ad campaigns to squeeze a little extra performance.

3.) Landing Page Optimization Tips

It is important to focus on a high quality landing page when running paid advertisements for attorneys.

Let's begin by examining the landing pages for your law firm to make sure they follow best practices. In this review, we consider the following factors and more:

• Is there a benefit-focused headline?
• Are there any images above the fold?
• Is the content written in a compelling manner?
• Am I able to find a lead form right away?
• Are the call to actions easily noticeable?
• Does the page load quickly?
• Is there social proof?
• Am I able to load the page on a mobile device?

There are so many factors that come into the design and development of a quality landing page. Here is a great blog article about what makes a results-driven landing page.

Please, don't spend money on paid advertising until you have a landing page that follows best practices! Ideally, you should never consider your landing page to be finished. Try running A/B testing every few months to continue refining your sales pitch.

4.) Funnel Tips

As an alternative to a landing page, you might want to consider building out one or more sales funnels. We rely heavily on sales funnels for lead generation, email audience building, and even online purchases.

For example, we have a client that promotes an online fitness challenge that you could even join from your local area. While managing their website marketing we built multiple sales funnels within Click Funnels. Here are some of the funnels we made:

• We used squeeze pages to help capture email addresses while building awareness for the program.
• We used lead magnets to provide people with healthy eating tips, fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peaks in exchange for an email address.
• We used application funnels to push people toward the idea of wanting to apply to participate in exclusive programs.
• We used sales letter funnels to serve as the registration system for the online program.

There are many different types of funnels, so your law firm isn't limited to only these options. Just keep in mind these can be incredibly helpful for gauging interest in a product or service, building out an email subscriber base, and selling a product or service online.

5.) Conversion Optimization Tips

Having a clear understanding of your conversion rate is critical to making informed advertising decisions. The average conversion rate is between 1-3%, but that varies greatly between industries, products, and services.

Let's run through a basic scenario to help illustrate the impact of conversion rates.

1. You sell a $100 product or service on your website.
2. You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 people who visit your website you sell 1 product or service.
3. You have a $1.00 average cost per click (CPC), meaning for each person who visits your website you spend $1.00.
4. To sell 1 product or service, you need 100 clicks from paid advertising, which would cost you $100. This is known as your cost per acquisition (CPA).
5. Your return on ad spend (ROAS) would be 1x, meaning for every dollar spent in paid ads you get one dollar in return.

For most law firms, this return on ad spend wouldn't be acceptable. Sadly, we often see this type of ROAS when jumping into new client accounts.

To improve the situation, you hire a paid advertising firm to modify your campaign settings, ad creatives, and landing page experience.

Let's assume those improvements bring your conversion rate up from 1% to 2%. That means for every 100 visits to your website you now sell 2 products. This is twice the return on ad spend! You might be profitable now selling that product or service, if your margins are good.

Understanding your conversion rate, and knowing how to improve it, can be crucial to the management of your paid advertising.

6.) Ad Creation Tips

This is potentially one of the most important aspects of a Facebook Ads account, but it also applies to Google Display Ads.

When you run Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads for attorneys, you are mostly targeting a cold audience that is more interested in quickly scrolling by advertisements in favor of seeing what their friends and family are up to online.

You should develop an understanding of how to capture someone's attention in a split second.

To do this, you need to build out awesome ad creatives that make someone stop for a second and say to themselves, "wait a second, what...?"

This doesn't happen by running the same ad creative over and over and over again. Even if it is a great ad, it will eventually become stale. You should change things up frequently, even if you are just targeting people nearby.

If you don't change out your ad creatives and test new ideas, you'll suffer from what is called "ad fatigue." This is the state in which your target audience has already seen your ad so many times that they instinctively scroll by it without ever interacting with your brand.

Don't be caught in this situation. You should understand when to pause an ad because it isn't performing as well as it once did. You should understand when to test new ideas, especially if you are emotionally attached to an ad that you spent a lot of time making.

Pricing for Law Firm PPC Ads Management

If you want us to dedicate more time to your campaigns, the price of our PPC management services will be adjusted accordingly. Below is the starting cost for our PPC management packages, but we are happy to have a conversation about adjusting the budget if your ad spend or service requirements exceed our initial estimate.

Types of Paid Ads for Law Firms

For law firms, there are many ways to run PPC advertising. The following are some of the most common paid advertisements options for attorneys.

1.) Local Marketing

You can use nearly any advertising platform to run nearby ads for your law firm. Depending on the nature of your local law firm, you may find better success in one platform versus another. To find out which option works best for you, you should try all of the options available. Now let's discuss some nearby advertising options.

Google is going to offer two options.

As a first step, you can run traditional Google Adwords, possibly using their newer Performance Max campaign type. The Google algorithm finds the best combination of headlines, images, videos, and service locations to bring you local customers using this type of dynamic ad campaign. Performance Max campaigns are used frequently by accounting, legal, dental, and medical professionals. Even local area stores use this campaign type.

The second option from Google, if you are in a qualifying business industry, is to check out their Local Service Ads. The Google Local Service Ads offers a pay-per-lead model, which means you get charged a flat fee for each lead the platform provides you. Home service contractors, such as plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers, frequently use Google Local Service Ads.

You can also target people in your local area using Facebook Ads. The first step is to set up a campaign with ad sets restricted to certain geographic areas. Local Facebook Ads are often used by law firms of all types.

2.) Social Media Ads

Almost all online ads you see on social networks qualify as social media advertising.

The trick to social media marketing is keeping the ad creatives fresh. If you don't rotate out ad creatives every few weeks your campaign performance will slowly decrease. A weekly change in ad creative is often recommended for higher-spend ad campaigns.

One of the best things about social ads is that you can target audiences who aren't yet aware of your product or service. The opposite is true when you run search ads since your ads will only show when someone is actively looking for what your law firm has to offer.

However, this benefit can also be a curse, since conversion rates are typically lower when people aren't closer to making an immediate purchase.

3.) Search Advertising

You'll want to invest in search engine advertising if you know people are searching online for the products you offer.

There are some people out there who refer to this as attorney Search Engine Marketing, or SEM for short. This is just a different way of explaining search ads, which are advertisements placed on the search results page of a search engine above the SEO placements.

If you have been running search ads on Google for a while and have been successful, consider copying your campaigns over to Bing Ads. In an October 2022 study from StatCounter, Bing was the primary search engine used by approximately 3.57% of online users.

4.) Display Ads

Many different message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (even local news stations), gossip sites, and more run display advertisements.

Bing Ads and Google Ads both offer these.

With display ads, all you need are a few different sizes of ad creatives. It also helps to have a general idea of your target audience, but both ad platforms have their own algorithms that help you produce results from your ad spend.

5.) Retargeting Ads

There is a good chance that not everyone will convert during their first experience with your law firm website, landing page, or sales funnel.

To help people return to your website after they've thought through various options, retargeting ads are almost always recommended.

Almost any ad platform can be used for retargeting ads.

6.) Shopping Ads

This type of search ad was popularized by Google Shopping Campaigns.

To get started with Google Shopping, you just need an ecommerce website, a product feed (CSV or TXT), a Google Merchant Center account, and a Google Ads account for your law firm.

With these tools in place, you'll be able to provide Google Ads an updated list of all your accurate product data, including the title, SKU, image, price, and availability. From there, they will be able to find the right types of search queries to display your products at the top of the search results page.

7.) Video Ads

You can run video ads on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and other social networking websites.

If you are interested in running YouTube Ads, you'll just need to set up a video ads campaign in Google Ads.

To run video ads in Facebook or Instagram, you'll need a working Facebook Ads account.

Both ad platforms offer excellent conversion opportunities with video ads. We frequently use video ads to showcase product launches, custom services, personal introductions, and more!

If you have the budget to support ad creatives in video format, look to implement them into your paid advertising campaigns.