Understanding PPC in the Legal Sector

PPC, or Pay-Per-Click advertising, is a digital marketing strategy where law firms create ads that appear at the top of search engine results pages. These ads are displayed when a user searches for keywords that the advertiser has successfully bid on. The advertiser pays a fee each time the ad is clicked and the user is directed to the law firm’s website.

For law firms, this PPC approach allows them to target potential clients actively searching for legal services. It’s an effective way to reach the right audience at the right time, and enhance your chances of attracting new clients. PPC campaigns can be tailored to specific legal specialties, locations, and client profiles, making it a highly customizable and targeted marketing solution for law firms.

Tips to Optimize Law Firm PPC Campaigns

• Landing Page Optimization: The landing page should clearly articulate legal services and include an easy-to-find call-to-action. We recommend separating your practice areas into individual landing pages so that users are sent directly to the service they are looking for instead of having to navigate around the site. 
• Keyword Strategy: Utilizing long-tail, practice-specific, and location-specific keywords can more effectively target potential clients. These longer keywords tend to be less competitive and less expensive than more broad options. For example, bidding on keywords such as “employee rights lawyer for discrimination” or “family law firm specializing in adoption” are more targeted  to specific services and situations than simply “lawyer” or “law firm.”
• Use of Ad Extensions: Google Ad Extensions are additional pieces of information that can be added to Google Ads to enhance them. They include details like contact information, links to specific pages on your website, or location information. These extensions help increase an ad’s visibility, provide more relevant information to users, and can improve click-through rates. It allows you to start educating users about your offerings even before they click on the ad.
• Response Times: Fast responses to client inquiries can significantly boost conversion rates. Prompt responses build trust and demonstrate to clients that their concerns are taken seriously. This is essential in fostering a professional relationship based on reliability and respect.

Tactics for Achieving Success with PPC for Law Firms

From our extensive PPC experience with law firms, here are key strategies for creating effective PPC campaigns for lawyers:

• Understand Your Audience: Tailor your campaigns to the specific needs and search behaviors of your target audience. Understand their pain points, the legal issues they face, and the language they use to search for these solutions.
• Track and Analyze Data: Regularly review your campaign data. Use metrics like conversion rates and cost per conversion to evaluate performance and make informed adjustments.
• Test Ad Variations: Run A/B tests for your ads to see what messaging, formats, and calls-to-action resonate best with your audience. Continuous testing and optimization are key to improving campaign performance.
• Stay Compliant: Ensure all your PPC campaigns comply with legal advertising standards and ethics. Misleading or non-compliant ads can lead to penalties and damage your firm’s reputation.

Performance Max Campaigns for Lawyers

In 2023, a personal injury law firm in Raleigh, NC, set a strategic goal to increase their lead volume. To achieve this, they pivoted towards Google’s Performance Max (PMax) campaigns, a newer facet in the PPC landscape. PMax leverages Google’s machine learning to optimize ad performance across its entire ecosystem, including Search, Display, and YouTube. This holistic approach is particularly effective for specialized fields like law, offering a unified and targeted advertising strategy. By reallocating resources from traditional PPC to PMax, focusing on their primary practice area, the firm saw a remarkable 80% increase in conversions year over year, significantly enhancing their client engagement and acquisition.

This success story demonstrates the immense potential of PMax campaigns in the legal sector, where precision and reach are key. Law firms looking to harness the power of advanced AI-driven advertising strategies can benefit greatly from partnering with a digital marketing agency skilled in Performance Max services. Such agencies provide the necessary expertise to develop and manage tailored PMax campaigns, optimizing them to meet the unique demands of the legal market. Embracing Performance Max not only puts law firms at the forefront of digital marketing innovation but also opens up new opportunities for client connection in a competitive digital arena. For more information on specialized Performance Max services and how they can transform your law firm’s digital marketing efforts, visit our Performance Max services page.

Investment in PPC Marketing

Average PPC expenditures for law firms vary, with small to midsize firms often spending between $1,000 to $10,000 monthly, while larger firms or those in competitive areas might spend $20,000 to $50,000 or more. Costs depend on factors like the competitiveness of legal keywords, the firm’s size, practice areas, and location. Despite high costs, the potential for a significant return on investment makes PPC a valuable part of a law firm’s marketing strategy.

Evaluating the return on investment (ROI) is key in assessing PPC campaign effectiveness for law firms, particularly considering the varying nature and potential returns of different legal cases. Each type of case, such as personal injury, corporate law, or large truck collisions, has its own average profit margin which should guide your PPC budgeting and allocation. For instance, large truck collision cases typically yield higher revenues, sometimes reaching six-figure settlements, compared to smaller personal injury claims which might average around $10,000 to $30,000. This discrepancy in potential revenue is a crucial consideration in determining how much budget to allocate to various campaigns.

When setting up PPC campaigns, it’s essential to balance the cost per lead (CPL) with the expected revenue from these cases. For example, investing more in PPC campaigns targeting high-revenue cases like truck collisions can be more cost-effective, considering their higher average settlement values. Additionally, factoring in the average close rate – the percentage of leads that turn into clients – is vital. A higher close rate justifies a higher CPL, as a larger proportion of leads will convert into profitable cases. By continuously analyzing PPC performance against the revenue from closed cases, law firms can adjust their strategies to optimize ROI, ensuring that their marketing efforts are not just generating leads, but are also contributing to the firm’s financial growth in a measurable way.

PPC marketing is a fantastic tool for law firms looking to boost their online visibility and connect more effectively with potential new clients. By thoughtfully planning and implementing the strategies we’ve shared in this guide, your law firm can amp up its marketing game. We’ve put together these tips and insights with the goal of helping legal pros like you master the PPC world, transforming those clicks into valuable client relationships.

Expert PPC Tips for Lawyers: Your Guide to Better Online Marketing is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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That, however, leaves advertisers with the harder task: how to get users to click on the ads. To start, it is important to select the correct ad format for your overall campaign goals. LinkedIn offers five lead generation ad formats to choose from: 

• Single Image
• Carousel
• Video
• Message
• Conversation 

Single Image Ads 

Single image ads tend to be the “go-to” ad format here at Go Fish Digital because they show up in the newsfeed and capture the users’ attention as they scroll. We love this format because it looks like a native LinkedIn post but is able to capture user information. 

The image has to be a .jpg or .png with ratios either 1.91:1, 1:1, or 1:1.91. Horizontal and square image ads can be served on LinkedIn mobile or desktop, while vertical ads are limited to the mobile platform. Best practice calls for single image ads to be visually stimulating with minimal amounts of on-image text to avoid overwhelming the user with visual clutter. Bonus points if the image is of people –  studies show photos of people grab more attention than those without.

Use case: Single image ads are ideal when a client wants the user to download a PDF or case studies, promote events, or even try to capture demos.

Carousel Ads

Carousel ads consist of up to ten images, each with individual links that users can swipe through and explore. This gives advertisers much more room to get creative. For example, marketers utilize carousel ads to capture different images of an infographic or case study that tell a visual story to the user before they submit their information. In this way, carousel ads allow the user to begin interacting with a brand’s content even before navigating to the website. Unlike single image ads, carousel ads can only be square with a 1:1 ratio, but the other best practices still apply. 

Use Case: Carousel ads are ideal for displaying product portfolios or telling an interactive story that can unfold as the user swipes through the images. 

Video Ads

With video ads, content options are just about limitless. The videos often range from three seconds to 30 minutes, but best practices recommend keeping them concise (under 30 seconds, if possible.) Focus on storytelling and start strong by getting the point across in the first 10 seconds. LinkedIn users do not intend to interact with your content while scrolling, so you must grab their attention quickly or risk losing their interest. 

Use Case: Video content is typically more successful in building brand awareness than generating leads. However, here at Go Fish, we still utilize video content for lead generation while recognizing that this format may yield a lower lead form completion rate.

As of July 11, 2022, LinkedIn’s recommended video ad aspect ratio changed from 9:16 to 4:5. Make sure to plan your videos accordingly to avoid LinkedIn adding black bars to the sides of video frames.

Message Ads  (previously known as Sponsored InMail)

Message ads are exactly as they sound: direct messages sent to prospects’ LinkedIn inboxes. They consist of a call-to-action button, the body text, and a banner image (only available on desktop). They are sent in real-time and intend to spark immediate action from the user. Like video ads, brevity is best, and the content should focus on the company’s potential value to the user. No one wants to read a long, drawn-out message with no prospective gain for themselves. Message ads can be up to 1,500 characters, but it is recommended to keep it to 500 or less.

Use Case: Message ads are ideal when the goal of the campaign is to reach a very specific audience. It is especially useful when inviting the user to perform one specific action (i.e. download a pdf or attend an event).

Conversation Ads

Like message ads, conversation ads are served directly to LinkedIn members in their inboxes. The difference is that conversation ads aim to start a dialogue with the user by including multiple call-to-action buttons that link to different landing pages or open a Lead Gen Form. Advertisers create prefilled response options for the prospects to choose from and create a message decision tree that guides them through their specific user journey.

Use Case: Conversation ads have similar use cases to message ads, however they offer the option to adapt the offer to each user’s personal journey. It is especially useful when the advertiser has multiple calls to action.

Conclusion

LinkedIn has grown to be so much more than a networking site. In the ever-changing world of online advertising, it stands out as the platform that reaches 65+ million decision makers in the B2B space. Now that you know how to apply LinkedIn ad formats strategically, you can begin serving highly-targeted ads to your organization’s best potential prospects. 

The 5 LinkedIn Ad Types for Lead Generation is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.