Creating a Profitable Adwords Campaign for Your Law Firm
AdWord campaigns rely on keywords to get results. Choosing those keywords and creating a profitable campaign requires a strong understanding of how the system works and being able to predict the actions of your target audience. For your law firm, properly using digital advertising to promote your services results in a greater number of clients, building your firm into a business with an increased revenue stream.
As the traditional channels for advertising become less valuable and you have no way to measure and track that $20k radio or PR campaign, it’s important that your law firm focuses its resources where it can attract new case files. While radio, television, and print advertising are still effective, the reach and influence of these platforms continue to drop considerably with the rising popularity of social media and digital advertising.
It’s critical to the growth of your law firm that you attract new clients while continuing to properly serve existing ones. With over 32 million internet users in Canada, you have to advertise your law firm’s services where your audience spends their time. As Google continues to be the most popular webpage for North American internet users, ignoring the potential of a Google AdWords campaign can be devastating.
Targeting New Clients on PPC that Show Intent
You probably have some hesitation about launching an advertising campaign on a platform you aren’t familiar with, which is understandable. Yet, you shouldn’t let this potential learning curve prevent you from diving into this advertising platform and taking advantage of it’s proven success. Google AdWords is much easier to understand than a lot of people make it out to be, and by monitoring and adjusting your advertising campaign, your law firm can experience real results.
While AdWords is an advertising service provided by Google, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is a type of online advertising. The advantage to using AdWords is that it’s the only PPC service that lets you ads appear in Google search, which is a huge benefit for law practices that want to attract new customers who are searching for their services.
Keyword intent is a critical part of advertising online through paid searches. Without an understanding of why people search for the terms they do, most PPC campaigns have little chance of succeeding. Yet, by using intent for your marketing, you’ll see an increase of traffic and attract more qualified leads.
There are two types of intent keywords to consider when creating your ad, high and low. High intent keywords have a high commercial intent, which means a type of action that has a greater possibility of leading to a sale. Law intent keywords are either navigational or informational in nature and have less of a possibility of a sale.
Preparing to Use AdWords for your Law Firm
Before you begin creating your AdWords account, there are a few questions you should ask yourself to make sure you’re properly prepared to run a PPC campaign:
Do you have a well-designed website set up to convert visitors?
AdWords does an excellent job of bringing visitors to your website. To keep people on your site and convert them, you need to have a website that’s visually appealing and easy to navigate. You have to make sure you have a good quality website for people to land on before starting a campaign that will drive them there.
Do you have a well-researched PPC strategy in place?
Before you create an AdWords account, you need to make sure you have a planned strategy and defined goals for your campaign. We’ll go more into campaigns further down in this post, but as a rule, you should never go into an advertising campaign without a clear idea of what you want to get from it.
Are you willing to commit to PPC advertising?
While law firms have experienced success using a range of budgets, it’s important that you’re committed to making PPC an integral part of your marketing strategy for it to be effective. While not a golden rule, you should let your account run for 3 months to begin seeing its potential.
What You Need to Know about Google AdWords
When set up and managed properly, AdWords is one of the best sources for new customers. Before you begin we strongly suggest that you hire a professional agency that will ensure your Ad spend will translate into a strong ROI with campaign efficiencies:
Campaigns
Each campaign contains ad groups, which have keywords that tie to your text ads and direct to your law firm’s landing page. You should decide on campaign topics based on how you want to divide your marketing budget, since you set your budget at the campaign level.
Ad Groups
Under each campaign, you’ll create relevant ad groups, which are much more specific. Ad groups contain keywords, which trigger your text ads and then direct to a relevant landing page. It’s recommended that you don’t go overboard with the ad groups you create because it can quickly become unmanageable.
Keywords
Keywords fall under each ad group, are critical to controlling the way your ad is triggered. When someone enters a search query into Google, it’s matched with a keyword which triggers an ad. It’s important that you conduct thorough keyword research to give your ad the best chance of getting you results. You should also spend time refining and optimizing your strategy for your keywords over time.
Now that we’ve gone over some of the basic terms you should be familiar with, let’s get into creating your first campaign:
Creating an AdWords Campaign for your Law Firm
Once you’re logged into AdWords, click on the “Campaigns” section in the menu at the top. Next, select the red “Campaign” button to create a new campaign. You’ll need to select which type of campaign you want to perform. The choices are as follows:
Search Network with Display Select
“The best opportunity to reach the most customers”
Search Network Only
“Google search and search partners”
Display Network Only
“Google’s network of partner websites”
Shopping
“Best way to create Shopping Ads”
Video
“Video ads on YouTube and across the web”
Universal App Campaign
“Promote your app across Search, Display, and YouTube”
Once you’ve selected a type of campaign, you’ll need to choose either “Standard” or “All Features”. Standard lets you setup your AdWords campaign quickly, without any customization. All Features grants advanced users free reign over the settings of the ads.
Setting a Budget for your Campaign
No matter how large your law firm’s advertising budget is, it’s important that you accurately set default bid and daily budget. The default bid is the maximum amount you’re willing to spend per click on your ad, while the daily budget is the total amount for that particular ad group. The reason this is so important is that once your budget is met, your ads will no longer show up.
One rule of thumb to follow is setting a smaller budget at the start of a campaign and monitor how it performs. If the ad is doing well, you can start putting more money into it by increasing the budget. This is a great strategy with almost any sort of ad that you create through AdWords.
Learning about Ad Groups
As we already discussed, an ad group contains keywords that trigger your ad when someone searches for it. So for example, let’s say your ad group name is “Law Firms in Ottawa” and it contains the following keywords: law firms, Ottawa law firms, law practices in Ottawa.
When you’re deciding on which keywords should belong to the ad group, it’s important that you use a Keyword Planner to get a better idea of what some good keywords to use are. To locate the Keyword Planner, navigate to the “Tool” option on the menu at the top of the page.
Creating your First Ad
One important rule to remember when creating an ad is the character limit that Google sets:
It’s critical to the success of your ad that you create ad copy that represents the keyword the user is searching for and what they’re hoping to find. By following the character limits set by Google, and monitoring the success of your ad, you have a better chance of it performing well for your law firm.
Additional Tips for Using AdWords with Your Law Firm
Now that you have a better understanding of how to set an AdWords campaign up and navigate some of its features, you can use these tips for your law firm:
- Conduct competitive research and differentiate yourself
- Craft an actionable and relevant call-to-action
- Highlight what makes your firm better
- Make sure your geo-tagging is setup correctly
- Ensure your ads speak to the searcher’s intent and readiness
- Set up call-only campaigns
- Ensure you have a 24/7 answering service in place
- Use videos on your PPC landing pages
- Have an online chat system in place
- Invest in building a memorable brand
- Track every action and measure success
Remember, you need to talk about what makes your law firm the best. Advertising your services online is challenging because you are appealing towards a very specific group of people during a challenging time in their life. Yet, by making sure you’re equipped to help them when your target audience is searching for your services, you have the best chance of gaining them as a new client.
Wrapping up Google AdWords
We hope this introduction into the world of Google AdWords and PPC advertising has helped you understand how important this area of digital marketing is for your law firm. AdWords has the potential to transform your practice by bringing in new clients and introducing your services to unexplored markets.
For all your digital marketing and advertising needs, feel free to contact us at Above the Fold Media. We’re an established digital marketing agency with experience working with law firms and legal representatives. From PPC campaigns to search engine optimization strategies, we can help create new revenue for your practice.