Choosing the Best Settings for Your Law Firm PPC Account
By Drew Hansen on January 9, 2024 in Internet Marketing Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
One of the main benefits of advertising your firm on Google Ads or any other paid search platform is control. You choose when your ads can show, in what locations your ad can show, and what practice area focus the ads will have. So, what settings should your firm use for your pay-per-click (PPC) ads? Every account setup will be unique, so it is important to go over the main factors to consider when setting up your campaigns. The three most important factors are location, schedule, and practice area focus.
Practice Area: What Should I Focus On?
Choosing the practice area on which to focus your law firm’s ad seems like it would be an obvious decision: Choose whatever brings in the most money. While getting a great return on investment is the ultimate goal of any paid campaign, the most lucrative option is not always the best one. Odds are high that, if the practice area or case type focus brings in large sums, it will also have high competition and be very expensive to advertise. As an example, truck accident cases can be very lucrative in the realm of personal injury, but those are also the most expensive keywords to advertise for across all legal practice areas, costing potentially multiple hundreds of dollars per click.
On the other end of the spectrum, medical malpractice cases have a low acceptance rate but also cost only a small fraction of what it takes to advertise for something like truck accidents. With proper research, you or your advertising professional can determine what the different case types will cost in your target area and determine the best strategy for your level of budget.
Location: Where Should My Ads Show?
As the old adage goes, the three most important factors in determining the desirability of a property are “location, location, location.” Geographic location is equally important to advertising with Google and other search platforms. Having too large of a target location area can overextend your budget and potentially waste ad spend on leads who think your firm is too far from them, while having too small of a target location area can constrain the budget to the point of getting almost no traffic. Once a budget has been decided upon, you or your advertising professional can research the desired locations to see what kind of traffic to expect or if the size of the desired area falls too far in or out of the projected budget.
Additionally, while keyword research can provide those general projections and forecasts on location in terms of traffic and spend, the best resource in determining where to target the firm’s ads may come from your knowledge of the region. If your firm is not contingency based, you may know of more affluent zip codes or neighborhoods that can better afford services. You will also have a better understanding of “how far is too far” from the view of a perspective contact, meaning at what distance will someone be reluctant because they might want “something closer” (this can be true even if your attorneys are willing to travel or your office is virtual).
Schedule: When Should My Google Ads Be Displayed?
Once practice areas and locations have been determined, the next decision will be when to show your law firm’s Google ads. This can be as simple as running during business hours or as complicated as running during hours the firm knows to be high volume (i.e., afternoons for people on lunch breaks). The most important determinant of when to show ads is to make sure they run during times when someone representing the firm will be able to respond. If the firm has business hours on weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and no after-hours answering service, then those would likely be the ideal days and times to run the ads. If the firm has a 24/7 answering service, then the schedule can be more open in terms of when to show the ads.
Budget is another factor to consider, as smaller budgets might be exhausted in the early hours of the day if the schedule is left too open. You will want to be selective with the hours if budget is smaller or if the keywords for your practice area focus are expensive, so that the ads can have better effect and be more likely to result in contact. As an example, removing weekends, which our experience has shown are less likely to result in quality outreach, can stretch out a monthly budget by nearly 30% more on average. Hopefully this has shed some light on the when, what, and where of advertising your firm on search engines.
If you are still unsure of the settings on your PPC account or just not seeing the results you were hoping for, our recommendation would be to find and contact an experienced agency, like PaperStreet,
