Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, and today we have something special for you. We're sharing a recent webinar that breaks down the 10 Essential Steps to Master your Law Firm's PPC Game. If you're looking to maximize your digital ad spend and attract more qualified leads, this session is not to miss.
So, let's jump right in as our Director of Demand Generation, Ken Mafli introduces today's session.
Ken Mafli:
Before we get started, I would like to introduce our speakers. First up we have Chris Dreyer. Chris is our CEO and Founder here at Rankings. He built Rankings to be an elite law firm marketing agency with three million in managed monthly ad budget, and works with some of the biggest PI firms in the country. He's also the host of the podcast, Personal Injury Mastermind, author of the book, Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing: from Good to GOAT, and a member of multiple leadership councils, including the Forbes Agency Council, the Rolling Stone Culture Council, the Business Journal's Leadership Trust, Fast Company's Executive Board, and the Newsweek Expert Forum.
Next up, we have Brianna Sudbury. Brianna is our Director of Paid Ads here at Rankings, where she leads our clients' paid ad strategy, analytics, and high-performing campaigns across multiple platforms. With over a decade of experience in digital marketing, Brianna has driven impactful results for brands across multiple verticals. Her expertise spans paid advertising, audience growth, and data-driven optimizations. She's a creative powerhouse. She's passionate about leveraging innovative digital solutions and data to drive engagement and conversions for Rankings' customers.
When done correctly, pay-per-click advertising has massive benefits for lawyers. The biggest benefits of PPC, the first is big results. Depending on the ad type, you can steal up to 14% of clicks from organic rankings. You also get fast results. You can start generating best-fit leads as soon as your ads go live, and you have easy control of your budget. When looking specifically at Google PPC, the ads take up a lot of real estate. Take this example in San Diego. Someone has to scroll through all those sponsored pages before getting to the organic search results. No wonder you can garner up to 14% SERP clicks, especially if you use LSA ads, but more on that in a little bit. The bottom line, if you want to be seen, PPC is a great way to do it.
But there are drawbacks to using PPC. Mainly it's capital intensive. For the law firm vertical, especially personal injury, it's a sizable budget commitment to be in the game. So, it's not for everyone, you do have to pay to play. It's also very competitive. There are handsome rewards for those that play the game to win, but it's a crowded market and you need to constantly be on guard when one of your competitors is trying to outspend you, because they will. It also requires flawless lead intake. If you aren't maximizing every lead that's generated from your ads, you're throwing money out the window. You need to capitalize on 100% of the leads that are being generated.
But with that said, let me hand this over to Chris and Brianna. Chris, Brianna, I'd love to get your take on the advantages and drawbacks, and then I'll let you take it from there.
Chris Dreyer:
You want to go first, Bri?
Brianna Sudbury:
Up to you, go ahead.
Chris Dreyer:
Okay, cool. So advantages, it's virtual real estate, it's above the fold. Like I said, you got to scroll down before you hit organic. Organic still gets a ton of volume, quick, immediate impact. I would say, some people say, "Hey, you can start getting leads like day one," you're going to go through a learning process, Google will go through a learning period before it starts really properly firing on all cylinders, but it's quick. It's a great way to capture demand. I think from an awareness perspective and a capture perspective, PPC complementing your LSA and your maps is one of the best capture components.
Brianna Sudbury:
Yeah, definitely. I'm going to be a little more conservative with the start to lead note. I tend to give all ads about a two-week test, just to make sure you're making some data-driven decisions. I'm a data nerd like that, so I let the data tell me what to do. But yeah, I think you hit all the right points.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, and guys, just so you know, I am the super bird's eye view, Brianna's in the weeds looking at the day-to-day, day in and day out, so I appreciate the pushback and I agree with that.
Brianna Sudbury:
Just trying to be transparent.
Chris Dreyer:
Cool, and I guess, I think I'm up Ken.
Number one, define your goals. These are metrics that it's really any campaign, it's the number of leads, your cost per lead, your cost to acquire a client or CPA. Your cost per thousand impressions, that's more on the awareness side. That's things if you're doing display, you're doing YouTube, you're doing PMax, there are situations for all these types of campaigns that can work. That's where you would measure awareness through CPMs. And then conversions per month, I would say in general, probably cost per lead, cost to acquire conversions are the big ones.
Now, secondary metrics is more leading indicators of success, more opportunity, you're going to be looking at impression share. Impression share is one that you want to look at, especially if you're doing brand campaigns and people are bidding on your name and you're already doing big TV, radio distribution campaigns. You want to be measuring impression share on a weekly basis. And then quality score is one of the most important metrics you should be looking at, because if your quality score is low, you're going to be paying more per click. It's just not going to be distributed, they're not going to show your ads as frequently. These are the main leads. I just got to say guys, those top four, that's really everything.
Brianna Sudbury:
With Google, with any digital ad, there's so much data that you can really extrapolate from your tests. These are going to be your main KPIs that you're measuring on a more regular basis to kind of judge how well or how not so great your ads are doing.
So, target audience is critical, right? Understanding where your target audience is is super important before launching any sort of paid ad. In this industry especially, you really don't want to waste your budget on people who won't convert or people who are looking for jobs in your industry, or pro bono cases, right? You can do this a couple of different ways. Obviously, location targeting. Most law firm leads come from really specific geographical areas. The larger your target audience, the cheaper your cost. Mobile leads tend to be higher, but pretty much all click to call campaigns are more effective. An example would be a personal injury lawyer from Chicago should geo-target the Chicagoland area, rather than running a national campaign or a statewide campaign.
Chris mentioned earlier, search intent, this is for Google Ads specifically. Searchers at the bottom of the funnel, so people searching best personal injury lawyer near me, right? These are more likely to convert than those that are top of funnel searching for how to file a personal injury claim. So, making sure we're bidding on the correct keywords is key too.
Two more. So, demographics is the next one. Platforms like Google, social ads too, allow you to really refine your audience by age, gender, household income, interests. An example of this would be car accidents, right? You can target people as young as 16 because those are new drivers, if they're anything like me, they're going to get in a car accident two weeks after getting their first car. PI auto people are going to be lower income, more likely to hire legal help. An example of that would be estate planning attorneys. They might target an older demographic, whereas startup lawyers might target younger people and younger entrepreneurs.
Lastly, platform selection. So, where does your audience spend your time? I spent a really long time in digital strategy before I kind of oversaw this department, so digging into those target audiences, finding out where they're at, what they're searching for, what they're interested in, are really going to play a role here too. Right? If you're looking for car accident people who are around 16, maybe they're not on Facebook, maybe they're on Instagram or TikTok. So, don't waste your money advertising on LinkedIn, right? They're not even able to join job market.
Chris Dreyer:
You can opt into search partners. In most cases, that would not be a worthwhile scenario. You're going to overload your intake with spam. It's going to mess up your metrics for cost to acquire. There are some exceptions, right? If you're going after catastrophic, if you're bidding on truck accident lawyer, there are some scenarios where maybe you want to opt in to search partners, and you're okay with getting some conversions from Ask Jeeves and sites like that. But overall, I would say opt out of search partners, that would be a big one.
Brianna Sudbury:
Agreed, yeah.
Chris Dreyer:
Cool. For Google Ads to be really effective, you've got to have a proper budget allocation. I would say, you should know a blended cost to acquire a client across all channels, you should know that. That number should be at least, your ad budget should be at least 20 times that. So let's just say as a minimum, I'm putting the asterisk there, as a minimum. So if your blended cost to acquire is 1,500 bucks, you should start with a 30K budget. If it's two, it should be 40. And there's a lot of scenarios like you're in California and we're seeing conversions at a five or 6K, and well, then you're going to need to come in stronger because Google needs the data to learn. You need to be competitive in the market, it's an auction-based system.
And also, you need proper placement too. Just like in organic search, a lot of times when people rank at the bottom of page one and they get these leads, a lot of times they're tire kickers. They've already went to the top three or four attorneys and they've turned down the case and then you're getting the lead and the marketing agencies are all happy because they showed that, but it's just junk and your fall off rates are going to be higher. So, I would say start with proper allocation.
Now I'm going to put on my different type of hat here. I just told you the minimums, right? 20,30. That's on the search intent, you can do branded campaigns. Everyone should do a branded campaign to capture, you could start as literal as 1,000, $2,000 a month for just a branded campaign.
Now, if you're really trying to dominate a market and get the lowest CPA outside of just spreading out your TAM, your total addressable market in your geographic radius, instead of wrapping a 15-mile radius around your office, what we see, what I see is you're looking at 100K plus. This is what it is, if you're going after auto. If you're going after nursing or some of these other areas, if you're trying to hit cerebral palsy, HIE, maybe you start at a 40, 50K. But if you're going straight at auto and you want consistency and you're in a big TAM, a big market, you need to be looking at 100K. This is just like TV. Look, it is what it is because of the competition and consolidation that is occurring. I would say look at your blended cost to acquire a client and times that by 20, and that will give you a starting budget for Google Ads.
Hey guys, it's Chris. Don't miss our next webinar. Mastering SEO in the AI Era, happening this Thursday, March 27th at 12:00 PM Central Standard Time. Discover how to rank higher, drive more traffic, and stand out in today's AI-driven search landscape. Link is in the show notes. All right, let's get back to it.
Brianna Sudbury:
Some of these platforms are so pay-to-play these days, you really have to have a pretty comprehensive budget so that you can really pull some levers. So, I am of the mindset that an omnichannel approach is always going to perform better than just single channel. I'm including Meta on here, I'm also going to loop that in with programmatic too. The reason I do that is because there's some retargeting efforts that you guys can do. So, if you're paying several hundred dollars for a click on Google and you don't have retargeting ads or retargeting pixels on your website, you're going to have to pay a lot more to retain that click again, than you would if, let's say you have a retargeting pixel on your account and you can kind of chase that person around the internet. I had a vendor tell me it takes about eight to 12 times of reiteration and consistent seeing that message over and over again before you're even considered as a law partner or like a real office of choice. So, just want to loop that in too.
So Google Ads, what platform should you use? What one's best for your goals? Google Ads is going to capture that demand. It's intent-based advertising, right? So people are actively searching for legal help and this is great for that bottom of the funnel leads really close to conversion. Meta Ads, some of that social stuff is really going to be great for building awareness and retargeting again, and really nurtures those leads through social proof and validating that you're a good choice. There's a couple other platforms, right? You can do TikTok, you can do some programmatic ads, you do CTV, stuff like that.
So, how do you choose, right? So if your clients, if you need them right now, maybe you do prioritize Google Ads because you can target those high intent searchers. But if you want to have more qualified leads and maybe you've tested Google Ads and it's not converting or if it's kind of trickling off, you might need to layer in some more brand awareness through social media or programmatic to help create more visibility.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I'll just do a couple of add-ons here. So, when you're looking at Meta from an awareness perspective, if you do a reach campaign, you can get down to $2 CPMs. When you're targeting a five or $6 CPM on TV, that's very low. I would do... And that provides a trust component for an individual that sees you on those platforms and then goes to do an intent-based query, it complements the conversions. Absolutely, the retargeting aspect, particularly for the PI attorney, it's not all areas of the law are restricted, but PI is. Looking at Meta, looking at programmatic to retarget is going to help you capture those conversions. You really want to put a high frequency component behind your retargeting in those first few days, because you guys know how it is. After a week, your chances of convert going to drop significantly.
On the ad side, from an awareness perspective, I would put Google display at kind of the tail end of a budget. PMax can give you a little bit of retargeting, but it's going to really mess up your metrics and it has to be done with extreme care. It's managed, there are more levers to pull now and things you can do to optimize. But yeah, overall, what we've seen, the point of this slide is if you run just a standalone Google Ads campaign, you're going to have success. But if you do it plus Meta ads and these other channels, it will even be better. They just complement each other, I'm not sure exactly why. I think it's just the awareness, the trust signals, all those things that just complement the campaign.
Brianna Sudbury:
Yep.
Chris Dreyer:
So, keyword research for search ads. Guys, this is critical, is you have to target the right keywords. Fortunately for us, like I said, we manage over $3 million in monthly Google Ad spend. Keyword research component, google has broadened their definitions of their types of bidding, whether it's broad phrase or exact. The reality is, they can show your ad for basically anything they want that there's an association. So I know a lot of you have been frustrated when you see a competitor bidding on your name. Well, they could be bidding on personal injury, personal injury lawyer, and if Google creates an association that your firm is a personal injury firm, they can show that ad and not even be bidding on your keyword.
So, I will tell you this. Phrase and exact match are going to in general, perform significantly better. They are a little bit more targeted. And you just need to, anytime you incorporate the word lawyer, attorney, law firm, lawsuit, you're going to have more intent behind it. These long tail phrases are more specific, they're going to help with your conversions. And you need to be looking at your negative keywords. The negative keyword management is critical. So even if you designate a specific radius or target demo, you're still going to want to put negative keywords for all the main cities, all the states that you don't take, all the different practice areas. If you're a personal injury attorney, you want to be looking at those lemon law queries that people want their car fixed and those types of tire kickers. Depending upon your budget, you might want to bring in some of those, right? Because some of those could be a case, but if you're working with a narrow budget, you don't want someone typing in, no injuries, right? It's maximizing your investment from a ROAS perspective.
So, use tools like Ahrefs, SpyFu, Google Search Console, use Semrush. They can provide very valuable insights into what keywords you should be bidding on. But the key here is, and I'm not trying to just go nuts on the plug here because that's super annoying, but look, we have a ton. I kind of had to audit myself there, a ton of data and we know what keywords convert. So, instead of spending three to five months or a year guessing on what keywords are going to convert, you work with a legal marketing agency and we can really help you out there.
Brianna Sudbury:
Yeah, definitely honing in on those negative keywords. We have a whole slew of people who go in every single day and monitor that. I just want to reiterate, this is a pay-per-click campaign. So anytime you're showing up on those bad keywords and somebody clicks that campaign, you're getting charged. So really honing in, really optimizing, making sure you're spending money on best of class advice is key.
Impactful video or visuals, you're only as good as your ad. So impactful visuals and copy, totally the name of the game here with digital. Attention spans, myself included, have never been shorter and your ad needs to capture that attention super fast. We are in the age of TikTok, where if you don't have a hook in the first two seconds of a video, people are just going to scroll right past you. Your job/my job if you guys hire Rankings, is to stop them and to capture that audience and that attention. So, some best practices, especially on Google, we want to use clear benefit driven language, right? Get maximum compensation, free consultation, and you want to match that ad copy with search intent to really increase those conversions.
If you're doing some display, this is kind of an old school rule that used to be done. I don't know that they're focusing on it too much anymore, but I still employ this, is the 20% text on image rule. So again, it's not really required anymore, but keeping the text on image minimal really does improve engagement. So, why is that? If I'm on Instagram and I'm looking through all of my friends photos, right? Somebody had a baby, somebody got married, and then I see this crazy text-heavy graphic, it's very obvious that it's an ad. So, show up on these social platforms and these display platforms as you would see things natively in that platform.
Strong images and strong visuals really, really matter here, right? Image quality matters. Just like on video, you really want high production value. That's going to be those high contrasted images, that's going to be client testimonials, that's going to be really impactful videos, again with a super quick compelling CTA, right at the top, right? Book your free consultation today. Some examples, right? So, hurt in an accident? Speak with an attorney now. Let's fight for you. Things like that, really compelling CTAs, that's going to convert a lot better. And then obviously, driving those people to targeted landing pages or things that really matter and relate to the ad that they're clicking on.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, a couple follow-ups real quick on that, lightning fast. So, there's ad copy for social proof, so that would be like in this example, over $50 million recovered. You could talk about years of experience. You could talk about depending upon your jurisdiction, let me put a little asterisk there, there's some states, Florida, that you can't really do as much. But if you're in Nevada, say, you can claim top-rated and like I said, check with advertising ethics. And then there's, you want to make action oriented copy too. So call now, click now, contact us. And the last thing too, is you want to utilize all of the available headlines. So don't leave any blank, let Google do its incremental testing to choose which one's going to perform best.
Brianna Sudbury:
Totally.
Chris Dreyer:
Landing pages, this is just, look, I use... you guys see Morgan & Morgan, for the people, right? They're spending a ton on ads. They spent what, $200 million in advertising, something crazy. I think they're a great example of a landing page. Look at their mobile, they have a strong statement. There's social proof with the ads seen in, the forms above the field, there's multiple contact options. The landing pages should be split test every single month on a Google Ads campaign. Every single month you should be split testing the headlines, the call to action buttons, the placement of different things, the colors. It sounds like it doesn't matter, but it absolutely matters and your campaign will perform better. I personally like to segregate landing pages. I like them on a subdomain and because you can kind of really segment the data and it eliminates errors. Sometimes when you put them on an internal page, even if you do a no index or if it's on a subdomain, people will make errors and they'll internally link to that page, and those are just things that you want to avoid.
But in general, snappy headline, social proof above the fold, form above the fold, clear, concise language, and that's the name of the game. The more specific you are too, so if you're running multiple campaigns and you're running one in Tampa and one in Philly and you're talking to Tampa residents, you're talking to Philadelphia or practice area specific, the better you're going to do. And then just monitor those quality scores because if your landing pages aren't up to snuff, it's kind of, in addition to your ad copy, the keywords you're bidding on, that could be an issue. So, definitely be split testing your landing pages on a monthly basis.
Brianna Sudbury:
Yeah, the digital space is so forgiving in that sense, where you can really AB test just a ton of stuff and you can take all of the subjectivity out of it. Just let the numbers tell you what to do and let your audience tell you what to do. Experimentation is the name of the game, right? Why should you test? I just let numbers tell me what to do. So, different audiences are going to respond to different formats, and AB testing really paints a really clear picture of that for you.
So, types of ad to text, especially on Google, you can AB test the crud out of copy, your text ads. This is the easiest one to do in my opinion. You can use, as Chris mentioned earlier, multiple different headlines, multiple different descriptions. You can have them be responsive, so that's a data informed way of letting Google tell you and show the best ad combination to your audience. Video, I think this is great for people just in a space like personal injury, where maybe you're getting car accidents, maybe you're getting truck accidents. People respond to different things. Maybe I might respond to car accidents and Chris might respond to truck accidents. So, using video to just quickly make that one or two word difference, could be the change for you guys that could help convert some stuff.
Images, this is always going to be a quick one too, especially if you can have some text on there. Minimal text on there. High quality visuals, strong CTAs. You can A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-N-O-P test this. The one caveat to that, I'm just going to say, I said it again in the beginning. Give it like a solid two weeks to test. Some of these platforms, Google's included, have like a learning phase like Chris mentioned, where you really have to let your audience load in there before it'll show the ad to your full audience. So, just keep that in mind.
Chris Dreyer:
One big tip that I can't recommend enough is, you need to keep the Google ad campaign running, because otherwise you have to go through the learning phase again. So, if your budget's 40 grand a month and you want to take a pause, should you should still not pause it entirely, you should keep it running at a very low rate. Otherwise, you're in that two week period again, it's just not going to perform.
The other thing, I'm going to do two other things. Text ads is going to be 80%, that's going to be your high intents, that's going to be 80% of the campaign. Unless you're going ham on YouTube ads, which YouTube just announced today that they're going to be making an update to their mid roll ads, May 21st this year. The reason why I call it that date, and you guys should all calendar this, is because anytime they introduce a change or a new ad format or a new way of bidding, they typically give you lower costs and a benefit. They want to help from an organic perspective to get more adoption. Just like on social channels in the beginning when you did TikTok, you could get a lot of organic reach and then it went to pay-to-play. So, just pay particular attention to any of these platforms and on the Google side, YouTube specifically in May this year, they're going to make a big change.
This one's critical. Depending upon your CRM, if it's like HubSpot, you can have a direct connect, right? But I would say most of the legal CRMs don't direct connect. You're either going to have to manually feed your data from an Excel sheet or a Google sheet, or you're going to have to zap it in with a combination of both. But it is absolutely essential to feed offline conversion data into your Google Ads campaign. Meaning, you need to mark what was a qualified lead and what was a conversion, and feed that back into Google. We have a ton of evidence to support this that makes it better. Yeah, so Salesforce, Litify, they probably have those direct connects. I know Lead Docket, I think it has a direct connect. I'm not positive there, I could be wrong, hopefully Clio has it, but there's many in the legal side that don't have the direct connect. But you got to feed in the offline conversion data.
I like to do it on a daily basis if I can. However, if you're doing it manually, I would suggest weekly at a minimum. You definitely don't want to get into the monthly game, but I would look at weekly, and it's just going to make the campaign perform better. You're going to get lower cost per conversions, Google's going to use its AI to try to use look-alike audiences and send that data to similar people that have converted off that data. There's just, just from what we've seen, a significant improvement when you feed offline conversion data.
Brianna Sudbury:
There's also tools like Zapier that can help with some of those API connections too. So if your platform specifically doesn't have that, there's a little bit of a workaround.
Monitor and adjusting your campaigns, this is where you're really going to need to loop in with a strategist or somebody who can have the bandwidth to go in there and optimize on a daily basis. You also need to know your KPIs and set those before even launching your ads, right? Get really clear on what data you're monitoring. I know Chris mentioned some at the top of this webinar, if you want to go back and refresh those. The ones that I tend to look at to test the health and effectiveness of your ad, that's going to be the click-through rate, or CTR. This really measures engagement. So, how many people are clicking on your ad? What's that cost? Has that spiked up? Has that really decreased week over week, month over month? What's your seven-day rolling average? What's your 30-day rolling average? And you can kind of see trends from there.
Conversion rate, same thing, right? So this is the percentage of users who take action. How many people are hitting your page and submitting a form through that ad? Cost per acquisition, this one's huge, especially when trying to figure out how much you want to spend on advertising in general. So CPA, how much are you spending to acquire that client? CPM is another great one, cost per thousand impressions. This is how much you're spending to just even be shown. Can you even get 1,000 people? Some of these smaller audiences, it takes a lot of money because the geo is not there.
So, how do you use this all to improve performance? If your click-through rate is low, try a better hook in your copy. If your conversion rates are low, you got to really refine that landing page or your call to action. CPA is too high? Try adjusting those bidding strategies or excluding some irrelevant audiences. Maybe you have a Spanish keyword that's sucking up all of your budget that you can turn off at least for a couple weeks, see what other ones are playing well with each other. Another one, just like Chris said earlier, a pro tip. Use offline conversion tracking. Google's maximize conversion bid strategy really does work best if you feed it offline conversion data. And these are all so intent based, that if somebody is searching, I need to hire a lawyer or traffic lawyer near me or something, you want to make sure your ad is shown immediately and not 3, 5, 7, 10 days later when they might have already made a decision.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. Look, I'll say a couple things. Like in the learning phase you can maximize clicks, do your just standard go heavy on the click bidding, cost per click bidding to get through the learning phase. After a period of time, like Bri said, a couple weeks or longer, you could wait longer, you want to flip over to maximize conversions as soon as you can. For most PI attorneys listening, there are some exceptions that where you can do target ROAS and be really effective in different areas of law. But we've played around with the target ROAS and with PI and we've still seen maximize conversions perform better and I just wanted to throw that out there.
Yeah, the hard pitch. So guys, the pitch for us is, we have the data. And one other thing too, I just want to mention on the previous slide. When you're monitoring things, you also want to be monitoring your competitors, and because that can, it's an auction based system. And so you need to use tools like SpyFu, ad Fina, Semrush, Ahrefs. You need to be using all of those to measure your competitors, especially those competitors that are doing search impression share on your brand name. You can send them some cease and desist letters, you can send them that polite email or call first, but do that.
We've got a ton of experience, a ton of data, probably I would argue outside I like Scorpion, which is doing pay-per-click for a long time. I would say in the legal space we have a tremendous amount of data. We also are subscribed to Vivvix and Kantar, that feeds us data on all these other platforms. I would say that's the number one reason, is we kind of accelerate your ability to get results because we're not guessing. A lot of times you'll hire somebody not in a legal vertical and they'll have to go do keyword research and guess, or they'll have to think about these different bid strategies or what budget to come in at.
I mean, quite frankly, we won't let prospects or clients come in with a low budget if it's just not going to work, and it just is what it is. We don't want you to waste your money, we don't want you to fire us if you don't have sufficient budget. So, that's the biggest reason is look, when we're spending $3 million a month and we're 11 years in the game, just think about how beneficial that is from a targeting and maximizing, everything we just talked about. Audience demographics, keywords, etc.
Ken Mafli:
All right, fantastic. Cool, well, we have had the questions rolling in. We've got a question come in and say, any way around Google's restrictions of retargeting for the PI audience? Any third-party tools we can use?
Brianna Sudbury:
I haven't directly seen a way to get around that specifically on Google. I tend to get a little bit creative and use the secondary platform entirely. That's going to be your social media ads. My favorite thing right now is programmatic, so you're going to hear me talk about programmatic native and display ads. You can get so much more granular with interest-based targeting, and so I think if you can use interest-based targeting to inform your intent-based targeting ads, they're going to perform a lot better. They're going to be richer connections, those are going to be more likely to convert.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, PI ad role, unless you've got lucky. I'm not saying there's... I will say this, we have slipped in some ad roll retargeting campaigns. I think, I can't remember who asked that. Kevin, in the past they allowed it, but they really put the nicks on the PI campaign so we haven't been able to use that. Even Meta's starting to put some restrictions on the PI attorneys. In terms of the DSPs for programmatic, StackAdapt, Simplify, there's the trade desk. Those are a few of the most popular that can really help you out from that retargeting perspective.
Brianna Sudbury:
Yep.
Ken Mafli:
Regarding your slide on landing pages. How do we feel about trying to cram an image in for an attorney as well? It seems like there are two design styles out there. One is to show the attorney and jump up to the form with a button, the other is to use headlines and a form in the header, but typically doesn't leave room for an attorney image. What are your thoughts there?
Chris Dreyer:
It's a really good question. Typically, I like to say typically because not always, we will have it below the fold. So typically it's form, a lot of headline copy above the fold, and then we'll have the image of the attorney right below the fold on a scroll. We don't scroll too long like a parallax style where it's just endless scroll, but typically below the fold. I put the caveat, because some of attorneys have a brand themselves, right? They are the brand and they're very recognized in the community, and you might want to put someone above the fold like an Alexander Shunnarah that's very widely recognized in his community, above the fold versus maybe a new firm that doesn't have that brand recognition.
Brianna Sudbury:
Yeah, I'm going to go data on that one. I'm going to just say, AB test it. That's a quick easy AB test too, right? Keep all of your headline copy the same on your actual ad, and just drive to two different landing page versions and see what one converts the most.
Ken Mafli:
Brianna, this question is for you, it looks like this came when you were talking about experimenting with ad formats. How much budget should we use for those two-week experiments? The thought was $50 a day, more? What would you suggest?
Brianna Sudbury:
So for those, I would say whatever you're comfortable spending monthly, and divvy that up on a daily basis. I don't necessarily know that budget really plays a role there, outside of like, you can't do much with 10K, right? So if you're spending 30K, let the full budget go, test it for two weeks, and then pause the one that's not converting or not performing well, and it'll auto spend the rest of your budget for the rest of the month. I don't know that you have to have a dedicated test budget.
Ken Mafli:
Okay.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, you always want a winner and a challenger for all these, right? So it's not a winner, we're done. It's, there's a restaurant in St. Louis where they have two burgers that compete and if one wins enough, it stays on the menu. I mean, that's the kind of deal that you're working with, right? Is, you want to test all of this.
Brianna Sudbury:
Yeah, and have a third ad ready to go, right? So maybe ad B beat ad A, but will it beat ad C or D or E? Constantly just change your stuff, constantly just keep testing, especially on text and headline stuff. That's so easy to do, so.
Ken Mafli:
Chris, I'll start with you and then I'll let Brianna finish up. How can I stay competitive in high cost keyword markets like PI?
Chris Dreyer:
Well, you got to have operational excellence, you got to have good average fees. Look, this is just a general rule. If your average fees are $10,000 or less, it depends on the jurisdiction, that's going to be more challenging than... The general rule is, zero to 10, you're doing okay, 10 to 15, you're doing better. 15 to 20 is the target, anything above 20 is even better. There's some exceptions like Maryland and other states like that, but it's really going to come down to operational excellence. So there's a number of factors. Your intake, all those things more than just say a Google Ads campaign and what they're paying per click. Because if you have operational excellence, if you could extend your value of a case, then you can pay more to acquire it. I'm going to rapid fire because I'm overachiever here. CRMs, if you're a new attorney, small attorney, Clio Grow or Lead Docket. If you're a big, big time attorney, go Salesforce. I personally wouldn't use Litify, I would go directly with Salesforce, do some Amazon Connect stuff.
What advice would you have for PI large player that lacks brand recognition? TV's still your game, broadcast television, 5, $6 CPMs is still the best. Today, it's still the best. You need to come in with at least 10% of the market spenders, at least 10%. So the threshold for saturation. And what do you suggest referring for organic referral network to integrate ads? The firm has never done very basic minimum SEO. Belly-to-belly marketing, grassroots marketing, networking. Get some referrals, get some of those cases that other people don't work, get that case settled, and then come in strong with capital.
Ken Mafli:
I love it. And I do want to let everyone know, this is going to become a monthly occurrence. We are going to be having folks from Rankings, maybe sometimes other folks joining us, but this is going to be a monthly event. So, make sure to watch your inboxes for the next invite.
As we wrap things up, I do want to close on two final thoughts. One, a successful PPC strategy is a vital tool for you to use to reach your ideal clients, but your results are only as good as the strategy you deploy and the people deploying it. If you're going to be successful, you need a rock solid plan and the resources needed to make it happen. Second thing, PPC works well in conjunction with a complete marketing plan that also includes SEO, let's not forget that. After all, organic traffic gives you the long-term results you need to keep your lead generation going strong month over month.
That all said, finding the right marketing partner is essential. We'll go on to that next slide. They can help you outline your goals and set your budget and track your outcomes. The best part is, you get to focus on what you do best, winning cases for your clients. Obviously, Rankings helps you get the most out of your PPC and SEO efforts. Our expertise and understanding in the legal market puts you, our clients, in a winning position. So, make sure to use the QR code today to contact us to see how you can get the most out of your marketing campaigns. Bye for now.
Chris Dreyer:
If you want more cutting-edge marketing strategies, join us for our next live webinar. Mastering SEO in the AI Era, on March 27th at 12:00 PM Central Standard Time. You'll discover how to optimize for both organic search and AI driven results to drive more traffic and future-proof your digital presence. The link to register is in the show notes. See you there.
