So many components go into family law marketing strategy, typically including a mix of traditional advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), and online paid options like PPC. While SEO and using social media platforms to market can improve your brand awareness, paid ads can bring in more immediate clients while you grow your followings in those other places.
To see a return on investment with ads placed on search engine results pages, you must go in with a broad plan and then get into the details of running test campaigns. Done right, PPC advertising with Google Ads lets family law attorneys punch above their weight class to get new clients quickly. Google Ads is powerful for leveling the playing field against bigger firms with bigger budgets.
What is PPC Advertising?
PPC advertising is a digital marketing strategy where advertisers pay each time a user clicks on one of their online ads. Unlike traditional advertising, where payment is made for space or airtime, PPC only costs when there is an engagement, making it a cost-effective solution. The most popular platforms for PPC advertising include Google Ads and Facebook Ads, which display ads in search engine results and on partner websites.
Why PPC for Family Law Firms?
For family law firms, especially smaller ones, PPC advertising is an invaluable tool for several reasons. First, it offers immediate visibility in search engine results, placing your services directly in front of individuals actively seeking legal advice on family matters—be it divorce, child custody, or other related services. This immediate exposure can be particularly beneficial in competitive markets, where organic search results are dominated by larger firms with more extensive SEO strategies.
Second, PPC advertising provides measurable ROI, allowing your law firm to track the effectiveness of its ads in real time. This data-driven approach ensures that firms can adjust their strategies swiftly, maximizing their marketing spend.
The Benefits of Employing PPC in Family Law Advertising
- Targeted Advertising: PPC ads can help your family law firm target its marketing efforts based on keywords, geographic location, and even the time of day, ensuring ads are shown to the most relevant audience.
- Flexible Budgeting: With PPC, firms have the flexibility to set their own budget and adjust it based on performance and other business considerations, making it an attractive option for firms of all sizes.
- Immediate Results: Unlike SEO, which takes time to build momentum, PPC can provide immediate results, generating leads from the moment the campaign goes live.
- Competitive Advantage: For small firms, PPC levels the playing field, allowing them to compete against larger firms by targeting specific niches within the family law space.
Setting Up Your PPC Campaign for Success
Launching a successful PPC campaign for your family law firm requires strategic planning and attention to detail. From defining your campaign goals to selecting the right platforms and conducting keyword research, each step is crucial for ensuring that your PPC efforts yield the desired results. Here’s how to lay the foundation for a powerful PPC campaign that drives leads and increases visibility for your practice.
Defining Your Campaign Goals
The first step in setting up a PPC campaign is to clearly define what you want to achieve. Goals can range from increasing website traffic, generating more phone calls, and building your email list to ultimately converting leads into clients. By setting specific, measurable objectives, you can tailor your PPC strategy to meet these targets and track your campaign's success accurately.
Keyword Research: Targeting the Right Terms
If you need help defining the demand level, you must dive into keyword research. Your chosen keywords and the naming of negative keywords in ad campaigns, ad groups, and ad setup are crucial here. Negative keywords are those you wish to block so that an ad does not trigger them.
You can use Google Keyword Planner to help with this by following these steps:
- Select the campaign you want to edit and click the three dot symbol afterward.
- Select "Make a rule."
- Add negative keyword lists.
- Pick the lists you wish to include in your campaigns by checking the corresponding boxes.
Make no doubt about it: this can be tricky, and making mistakes comes at a significant cost. If you don't accurately develop and input a negative keyword list, you'll end up with:
- Irrelevant clicks
- A lower Quality Score which causes lower ad rankings and higher costs
- Higher costs per click
- Low click-through rate
- Ad fatigue, meaning people see too much of your ad, and it performs poorly
Hiring an outside marketing agency to help with this can streamline your strategy, so you maximize all your essential metrics and deliver your ads to the right potential clients.
Know Your Audience
Depending on the practice area, firms spend $10,000 a month and up on paid ads. Small law firms may have a smaller budget and, therefore, can't afford to be careless with Google Ads.
If your targets and copy are too broad, you'll blow through your budget with no results. This most frequently happens when attorneys don't have a solid "broad match" strategy for their keywords.
For a divorce lawyer, you must know your top 3 most likely scenarios with ideal family law clients. That could be:
- High-conflict divorce with child custody or child support issues
- Prenuptial agreements
- Mediation/collaborative divorce
When you know what's most valuable to you, you can tailor your marketing efforts accordingly.
Each group has a different intention and questions about their legal issue. These are your three groups of primary ad viewers, and you'd need a separate ad strategy for each. Some family lawyers find it helpful to retain marketing experts to help with this.
When developing successful law firm marketing campaigns that are hyper-local, focus on bidding for keywords that bring you the best cases.
We can break this down to "demand X win rate X your margins."
You need to know your operational efficiency or differentiation to find your margins. To get more insight into that process, look at our guide on law firm marketing.
Budgeting and Bidding Strategies for Effective Family Law PPC Campaigns
After choosing the correct ad targets and writing good copy, maximizing your budget is one of the most important aspects of running Google Ads. If you spend too much on ads, but they don't convert, or they don't turn into cases worth a decent amount, you're just wasting money.
Set Budgets Based on the Most You Can Afford to Pay for a New Client
Determine the maximum amount you are willing to commit to PPC advertising monthly. This involves understanding your firm's overall marketing budget, the average cost per click (CPC) in the family law niche, and the cost per acquisition (CPA) you can afford while still maintaining profitability.
A good rule of thumb is to never pay more than 20% of what a client is worth. To know this, you have to track data carefully.
Follow your client acquisition expenditures and determine cost-per-click criteria to keep all your clients within the target range. During your initial test phase, use conservative estimates to make sure you're within your budget range.
Consider Campaign Duration
Define the length of your PPC campaign. A short-term campaign might require a higher daily budget to make an impact, while longer campaigns can spread the budget more evenly over time.
Use ad scheduling to adjust bids during peak times when potential clients are more likely to search for family law services. Increasing bids during these times can improve ad visibility and lead generation.
Explore Ad Extensions and Features
Utilize free ad extensions and features for Google Ads that enhance your ads' visibility and effectiveness without additional costs. Extensions like call-outs, site links, and structured snippets can provide more information and encourage higher engagement rates.
The Best PPC Platforms to Increase Geographic Visibility for Your Family Law Firm
For small family law firms, Google Ads is the best PPC advertising platform to start with as you delve into pay-to-pay. For this article, we're defining "small" as less than 15 employees, which probably includes a few lawyers and their assorted staff in a divorce firm.
So why Google PPC as a starting point for family lawyers?
There are other pay-per-click platforms out there, the most obvious being Facebook. But what's beneficial about Google PPC is the ability to target and capture existing demand rather than create demand.
Google Ads are short and sweet, which positions you well to get a conversion.
Google Ads Vs. Facebook Ads
Someone who types "Houston divorce lawyer" into Google has a high chance of becoming a divorce attorney's new client—someone who randomly sees an ad for divorce in Texas on Facebook, less so.
While you can dig down into many demographics on Facebook, such as specific zip codes, gender, and interests, there's no Facebook data you can use to know whether someone's even eligible for divorce or thinking about it at that time. On Google, however, that client took a proactive step by typing bottom-of-funnel keywords into a search engine. That means an ad for a Houston divorce firm is well-targeted to the user's intent.
Facebook is a great PPC tool with a solid algorithm and cost options for divorce lawyers, but executing correctly requires more skill. You'll also have to refresh the creative more often, test more copy, and deal with any comments.
Simply put, Google Ads have better targeting, and it's easier and faster to get started. On the downside, Google Ads are more competitive, but digging where you know there's gold first is key. With Google Ads, you can set things up and get cases in less than two weeks, whereas Facebook may take more upfront funds and testing along with a longer turnaround time from ad view to converted client.
Google Ads Vs. Local Services Ads
Another pay-to-play option for divorce attorneys is local service ads. While they sound similar, these function differently from PPC. Local service ads are pay-per-lead, meaning you pay when you get the lead, not just when someone clicks on the ad.
Local services ads work well in a divorce lawyer's marketing strategy and can also complement Google Ads. Generally, advertisers get 8x of the profit they spend on Google Ads, so it's a smart place to invest your money first. You can add local service ads down the road.
Crafting Compelling Ad Copy
If you want to get clients, don't write your copy. A professional copywriter knows what works and can help you create and publish far more effective ads. Likewise, you'll want that copywriter to draft the follow-up from your initial ads, namely your landing page copy.
- Each landing page should be scenario-specific and include:
- In-depth analysis
- Answers or details on common legal concerns
- Compassionate advice
Including phrases like “Compassionate Legal Assistance” or “Expert Guidance Through Tough Times” can really resonate with individuals seeking your legal services. Always include a clear call-to-action (CTA) to guide prospects on what to do next, such as “Call Now for a Free Consultation” or “Learn More About Your Rights.”
Create Service-Specific Landing Pages for Each Hyper-Local Ad Campaign
To do this, you need to know your target audience first. Family law refers to a broad range of practice areas and specialties, so you'll need to target your niche effectively.
If you're writing a page to someone considering a prenuptial agreement, that's an entirely different style and area of focus than someone looking to hire a high-conflict divorce lawyer. For each landing page, stick with clear and concise language. Make sure your family law firm website is organized in a way that's easily navigable so potential clients can find the services and locations they need to access as easily as possible.
Throughout the landing pages, remember to show social proof. Insert feedback from satisfied clients and your success stories in landing pages. Video is the gold standard for client testimonials; you can ask clients to record this from the rear camera on their phone. Don't waste time or money on fancy productions since this can hurt your conversion rates. Sticking with authentic videos showing your clients as real people is better.
You might also mention awards or accreditations on your landing page, but these should never replace client feedback.
Make your landing page interactive. Checklists, divorce calculators, or downloadable information on landing pages build trust and make the content more engaging.
When choosing what to add to your landing pages, keep the following in mind:
- All components should be easy to use and understand
- Ensure that the components are accurate and up-to-date
- Verify that any calculator is based on the most current laws and regulations
- Make the components visually appealing and user-friendly
Add a “How Did You Hear About Us” Field to Lead Forms to Track Attribution
To get a decent sense of whether you're getting family law firm clients from a PPC campaign, you need robust analytics set up on the back end. Complex analytics setups (aka the ones that will give you the best insight) often require working with an agency to get them right within your online marketing plans.
In the interim, ask people how they heard about you and compare this with the data you pull from the Google Ads platform and whether they call you or go to your law firm's website for the next step.
Here's what to ask:
- Did you find our law firm via a Google Ads search?
- Who, if anybody, recommended you? A friend, relative, or coworker?
- Were you sent here by a social networking site or other web resource?
Regularly review the insights between Google Ads data and your insights to improve your online presence and get the most out of all your PPC marketing methods. This can help you tweak your campaigns as needed.
Conduct A/B Testing to Maximize Click-Through Rate
Your headline copy is the most critical piece of creative to get right. Your headline should accomplish one or more of a few things in a minimal amount of space:
- Offer a benefit
- Deliver news
- Provide assistance
- Tell an essential story
- Acknowledge a challenge
- Quote a satisfied client
There's a fine line between strong advertising copy and clickbait, but they are separate. Here's how to spot the difference:
- While some clickbait stories may include helpful information, the content is often outdated and irrelevant.
- Clickbait headlines often play on your interests and emotions.
- Clickbait headlines may boost clicks but often disappoint and mistrust readers. In contrast, an intriguing title correctly describes the topic and encourages reading.
- Compelling titles emphasize the value or the benefit of reading the material, whereas clickbait headlines promise something startling.
You can still get your point across compellingly without delving into clickbait territory. Once you've drafted some ad copy options, you must split-test them between two versions. The first should present information, while the second should appeal to someone's emotions.
Run Your First Split Test of PPC Ads
Split testing is valuable because it gives data about which ads will likely perform best with your prospective clients. You can strike a nice balance between getting their attention and meeting user expectations when you run these two ad types against one another.
Here's what you need to know before running your test ads:
- Set clear objectives from the outset (ex, increasing CTR vs. improving conversion rates)
- Create various ads, like one with misleading and uninformative content and another with more engaging and informative headlines
- Monitor CTR, conversion rates, and campaign success
Run a Second Set of PPC Ads: Long vs. Short Copy
Your initial test phase gives you some essential information to use for additional testing options. For example, you can try out ads with shorter, more direct lines and longer, more extensive, and complete ones. This is more important on Facebook ads since you're always limited in how much you can include on Google PPC ads.
Note: you should run split tests on Google, too. This will be for different kinds of ads and how you want them to play in front of potential clients, but they will include similar copy lengths due to PPC ad limitations.
This example from Riddler Law shows how you can only fit 1-3 short sentences in a Google Ad. Choose what will forge the most substantial connection with your target clients.
Here's a great example of a short copy Facebook ad:
The ad conveys a clear benefit with one quote from an influencer and an image showing the final product.
On Facebook, long-copy ads have their place, too. You want to run a test to see which works better when advertising family law services.
Here's an example of a long-copy ad from Volkswagen that works in print or digital. The ad tells a complete story, connecting with an audience along the way.
Run a Third Set of PPC Ad Tests: Variations by Demographic
Various demographic groups sorted by age, location, gender, and more may like different ads. Each time you run a test, be mindful of who you're trying to reach with that ad.
Observe which one your target demographic prefers, and continue to develop messaging variations so you can track CTR and conversion rates.
For example, you could primarily work with women on collaboration or mediation cases, and they have different interests than other clients. If you aim to bring in more collaborative divorce cases with women, you'd want ads run just for them.
Monitoring and Adjusting Your Campaigns
The scope of digital law firm marketing is in constant flux, as are the parameters and guidelines of search engines like Google. Continuous monitoring and timely adjustments are paramount to ensure that your efforts yield the best possible results.
Update PPC Strategies As Needed to Comply with Changing Legal Advertising Standards
Remember that there are a range of national and possibly state lawyer advertising guidelines to follow when you create an ad, including PPC ads. Try new things to keep up with the latest trends and technology, and leverage insight from your data as you go.
If you change or update your ads, campaign framework, landing pages, and associated text at any point, run it through a final review to ensure compliance with various legal advertising requirements.
Your ads may get rejected by Google, or you'll bump into limited ad extensions or features if the ads cross a major line. Your account could even be terminated.
More than likely, you're looking at possible run ins with your state bar association. As with all aspects of advertising, avoid making claims/guarantees, indications that you have a specialty or designation you don't, or calling yourself the "best" family law attorney or the "best" anything, really.
Avoid common mistakes by keeping these tips top of mind:
- Choose the right keywords
- Use negative keywords wisely and keep that list updated
- Maximize ad extensions
- Optimize landing pages for conversion
If this feels overwhelming, hiring someone with extensive experience creating and analyzing online legal marketing campaigns can make it much more manageable.
