Ken Mafli:
Well, hello everyone and welcome to Ranking's live virtual event where we'll be discussing how you can use programmatic ads to supercharge your lead generation efforts for your law firm. I'm Ken Mafli, the VP of Marketing here at Rankings and I'll be your host for today. All right, as folks are filtering in, we'd love to hear where you are tuning in from. So in the chat pane, let us know which city, state, province, or even country that you are tuning in from. It is fantastic to see folks from all over tuning in. It does our heart good, so make sure to say hi and let us know where you are at. All right. Before we get started, I would like to go over a few housekeeping items. Move on to the next slide.
First, today's webinar is one hour in length. We'll have approximately 45 minutes to talk through the findings before we move on to the Q&A session. Then we'll have about 10 to 15 minutes to answer any questions you may have. Make sure to put your questions in the question pane as soon as you think of them and we'll get to as many as we can at the end. Secondly, today's webinar is being recorded. An on-demand version will be made available to all registrants in two business days or less. You should receive an email as soon as it's available, so be on the lookout. Finally, as I mentioned before, questions are encouraged. We want this to be an interactive learning experience, so make sure to get those questions into the question pane as soon as you think of them. Just so you know, if you stay to the end of this webinar, a PDF version of this presentation with the answers will be made available for download. So stay to the end and be on the lookout and I'll make sure to call it out.
But before we get started, I'd like to introduce to you our speakers. First up we have Chris Dreyer. Chris is our CEO and founder here at Rankings. He's built Rankings to be an elite law firm marketing agency that works with some of the biggest PI firms in the country, enabling them of course to dominate their core markets. 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 Counsel, the Rolling Stones Culture Council, the Business Journal's Leadership Trust, Fast Company's Executive Board, and the Newsweek Expert Forum. And Chris, just so the audience gets to know you a bit better, please, why don't you tell us one little known fact about you?
Chris Dreyer:
I was a world-ranked collectible card game player and I won four state championships in college.
Ken Mafli:
Okay
Chris Dreyer:
Fun fact.
Ken Mafli:
Okay, I have a lot more questions about that, but I will not digress. Thank you, Chris. Next up we have Brianna Sudbury. Brianna is our director of paid ads here at Rankings where she leads our client's 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 strategy, audience building and growth and data-driven optimizations. She is a creative powerhouse who's passionate about leveraging innovative digital solutions and data to drive engagement and conversions for Rankings customers. Brianna, I'm also going to have to put you on the spot and ask you to tell us one little known fact about you.
Brianna Sudbury:
Fun fact, none of the women in my family have a sense of smell. I don't know. It's a weird gene deficiency.
Ken Mafli:
So you had no fear about COVID obviously, because that's just, "Wow, okay."
Brianna Sudbury:
No, I was good. Yeah.
Ken Mafli:
You're ready to go. Okay. Well, thank you. Chris, I will let you take it from here.
Chris Dreyer:
All right, let's do it. Let's get nuts on this programmatic. Here we go.
Brianna Sudbury:
Let's do it.
How to use display, video, mobile, native, audio, and connected TV (CTV/OTT) ads for maximum personal injury marketing impact
Chris Dreyer:
So guys, programmatic ad spend is set the top $180 billion. Only one in 10 PI firms are using programmatic outside of just Google Ads display, so the opportunity is massive. Next slide. But if you're like me, even though I've been doing a digital marketing for a long time, what the hell is programmatic? What is OTT? What falls under what? It's such a terrible term. Over the top television or what is it? So I guess the next slide I'm going to be also, just so you guys know, I'm going to be the dumb dumb asking questions and Brianna is the expert. I'm going to try to put on my I'm the PI attorney hat and ask the questions from your perspective, from your vantage to get the most value. But out of the gate, Brianna, what is programmatic?
Brianna Sudbury:
Like marketing, but with frigging lasers, remember? Just kidding. Programmatic is how your competitors aren't advertising yet. So it's your unfair advantage. It's automated, it's scalable, it's laser targeted. Basically no one is flipping through channels to find their favorite show. They aren't really turning into AM/FM radio on their commutes or at the gym. They're not really opening local papers to get headlines. But everybody is still watching, listening, reading, just in different places. So they're watching on Hulu, they're listening on Spotify, on podcasts. They are looking on mobile apps for news and games. They're watching streaming TV.
So that's kind of what it is. The ways you do it, display advertising. So these are going to be your classic banners, static ads shown across websites and apps. So think Google Display, Meta's advertising network, audience network. They're perfect for retargeting site visitors, educating your customers on some of your injury rights that you have and building just that ad frequency so that you're seeing it over and over and over again. You're staying top of mind. You have video ads. Programmatic lets us run video on platforms like Hulu and YouTube, but these are more targeted. They can be targeted by zip code, behavior. You can even target ER visits. You can get really weird with targeting. This is great for building brand awareness really quickly, especially for high value NBA cases. You have mobile ads. This is where people on the go, right? Everyone's on their phone, apps, mobile browsers, in games. This is huge for urgent cases because it's attached to you at all times.
So if somebody is Googling symptoms, injury healing times, repair shops after a car accident, that's perfect for that. Native ads, people are still reading articles, but they do it online. Native blends into that experience. So it's an educational article like in the local paper, but now you can track engagement, you can follow up with retargeting. Again, this is great for building more trust even before somebody considers calling. So this is top things that you should do after a car accident. These are kind of looking like blogs, news articles, educational content, things like that. Audio advertising. We're not shouting into the airwaves anymore. Now you can reach drivers and gym goers and commuters with targeted Spotify, Pandora, other audio placement ads just like you used to with drive time radio.
This is people specific to your zip code, to your practice area, to places close to your business. Great for top of mind recall, especially people who aren't ready to call but want to remember your name for later. Then you have CTV and OTT. That's hard to say concurrently. This is where things get really, really powerful. So we can run streaming ads on TV. We can do Roku, Amazon Fire, even Netflix is now offering some, and you're targeting these households by location. You can target them by income, you can target them by intent. Think of it more like a billboard, but in someone's living room and you're only paying when the right person sees it.
Overall, beauty of programmatic is unification. That is my favorite thing about it. All of these formats can be connected. So if somebody sees your OTT ad, here's your audio spot, gets a retargeting banner, this is all consistent messaging that has data fueling it, you're seeing all of that. You're able to track and edit on the fly. This doesn't replace what is currently working. So if you're running TV spots and it's working, keep doing that. If you have billboards up and it's working, keep doing that. This evolves your efforts, putting everything right in front of the people, you want to see it on the channels that they're actually using.
Chris Dreyer:
Amazing, thank you for that. Yeah, so let's start with the big one, display retargeting. What actually works, I know Google restricts, right? And there's certain platforms, Ad Role restricts. What can you actually do from a display retargeting perspective?
Brianna Sudbury:
Yeah, so retargeting isn't stalking people with the same ad. It's showing smarter ads that match where these people are in their decision cycle. So retargeting, you can heavy, heavy hit them within three days of an accident. You can taper that off within two weeks. You can set up retargeting pixels on all of your website pages, integrate that data with your CRM, build lookalike audiences for things like Meta. You can use static and dynamic display ads targeting specific lookalike windows. How you would use that would be taking people who are looking at your about me page and targeting a native ad for that. So maybe they are learning about your firm. They're in that information gathering section, so hit them with some trust building ads. If there's obviously there's more advanced programmatic efforts that come with higher intent pages, but you'll hit them where they're at in their decision process.
Chris Dreyer:
I guess the favorite, just from my perspective about this is there's a lot of restrictions on a lot of platforms, but some of these DSPs really open up your ability to retarget unlike, even we talked about this before we got on the show, some of the restrictions, some of the things like on Facebook and Meta. But going through a DSP, it opens up what you can do from a retargeting perspective. I think that hits it pretty good.
Brianna Sudbury:
Meta and Google, they have very specific ad policies that you have to follow. I think with programmatic, it definitely opens that up. You're more beholden to the bar association's rules and the ethical practices behind your ads.
Chris Dreyer:
And we're mostly talking about, so PI firms here. So it would vary for family law and other areas of law. So yeah, I think that's good. Let's hit number two here. Yeah, so let's talk about CTV connected television. How are they reaching these high intent households in a local area?
Brianna Sudbury:
Yeah, something to remember with CTV, you're not buying Super Bowl ads, you are buying living rooms in your service area. So this is a brand talking to a family at home. Connected TV gives you billboard sized authority, but zip code precision, very, very targeted. You can use geofencing TV, again, Roku, Hulu, Tubi, hitting households in your accident zones. You can hit households, near hospitals, repair shops, doctors, you can get really cool with some targeting options. An example of this would be running some non-skippable pre-roll video ads during streaming content. And I have a fun fact. 78% of US households now stream content via CTV. Huge amount of reach, huge pool of people to try and target.
Chris Dreyer:
And I guess just really quick on the demo, for me, I don't have broadcast or any of that. I'm just streaming. So I'm one of those. From a demo perspective, is it a younger audience, is that where we're hitting more on the programmatic or is it a wide range here?
Brianna Sudbury:
Totally wide range. My grandma is 86, about 87 years old. She has a Hulu subscription, uses Hulu all the time.
Chris Dreyer:
Cool. All right, moving on. Kind of threw that one in there. So native ads, can they really help build trust for someone ever to call you? I know when I see the Outbrain ads and some of these other ads, I'm like, "Typically it looks like a weight loss drug or something of that nature." Are PI firms using these native ads or am I thinking about this differently?
Brianna Sudbury:
No, absolutely. Native ads, again, that's trust building. We have an exceptional content team here. These look like blog posts. You can use all of the things that you're doing already to impact your SEO. All of the stuff is probably already written, so using that, putting some ad dollars behind it to build trust behind your brand, it's always going to be helpful. This is also huge for providing more value for the end customer rather than your firm. I think Gary Vee talks about that a lot of give away everything that you can and you'll have a customer for life. So this could look like what to do after car accident in San Diego, and then you can retarget all of that coming from a source with a pixel and you can turn those into actual cases.
Chris Dreyer:
Amazing. So let's talk about the overall demand funnel, the top of funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, or if you're talking about creating demand and capturing demand, where does this fit in regards to the strategy?
Brianna Sudbury:
Yeah, I think this is OTT is kind of more awareness, I would say. So think of it as a billboard, but in motion with sound and again, only shown to people that you really care about reaching. So great for brand recognition, great for brand recall, and again, this could look like a 15 or 32nd ad. This is also great for repurposing some user generated content, some testimonial videos, day in the life kind of videos, and then you follow that with a clickable display ad or a retargeting ad or an audio reminder. You can really layer programmatic on top of each other and it makes it really punchy and impactful.
Chris Dreyer:
Perfect. So let's talk about the auto accident case that everyone's trying to reach. So what's the strategy when we're trying to target these individuals from an audio ad perspective?
Brianna Sudbury:
So the beauty of a car accident case is they're in the car, right? You're listening to audio literally while they're driving in most cases. So this puts your message in the ears when people are in traffic. I know if I was hurt, whether I'm at home or God forbid in the hospital, I'd be on Spotify, I'd be listening to music, I'd be watching streaming. That's just what you do in those situations. So audio specifically, you can target Spotify, you can target Pandora, iHeart, Programmatic audio, depending on your partner has a wide range of inventory. I think the beauty here is using script writing to your advantage. So if you've been hurt in an accident, call now and setting those geofence targets really close to hospitals, ERs, tow shops, heavy urban areas, heavy areas on the highway that have a lot of collisions. You can get fun with audio.
Chris Dreyer:
Great. So this is another big one for me. I'm nerding out playing Clash of Clans and I'm getting frustrated by the game ads, but at the same time, one of the first things that we do, I know from a YouTube ads perspective, especially if we're doing PMAX, like we get rid of all these gaming sites. So is this kind of the same strategy? Is this far down on the list of targeting? Do you do in-game ads or what's your thoughts on this?
Brianna Sudbury:
My suggestion would be test it. My audience is going to look a lot different than your audience, depending on geo, depending on user behavior, depending even on what types of cases I'm trying to get. I think if your audience watches Hulu, listens to podcasts, and plays Candy Crush, wherever they're playing Candy Crush, your ads should follow them. PI isn't just for daytime TV. People who are playing on their phones can also be injured drivers. So reaching new audiences? Of course if it's done right. I think casual gaming has totally exploded in people like 30 plus in the last couple years. So again, I don't know that this is going to be a direct response type of ad. You're not going to get necessarily cases from it, but if you changed your name or you're going through a rebrand on your website, this could be a really cool awareness play for you.
Chris Dreyer:
Perfect. Yeah, that answered my question. So how do you keep all the programmatic traffic feeding to the same retargeting system? I mean this is a big one. We don't want to duplicate efforts, we don't want to create redundancy. So what's the strategy here?
Brianna Sudbury:
Totally. Biggest strategy, biggest tip is don't silo your channels. Retarget everybody across your platform, so make all of your touch points talk to each other. Think one pixel to rule them all, if you will.
Chris Dreyer:
So I guess just really quick question on that, I guess the DSP can kind of control that that's all handled through the DSP. What happens when you start using multiple DSPs?
Brianna Sudbury:
I mean having just a unified pixel strategy, so you can use Google Tag Manager and have all of those pixels feeding into a singular place. Tying that with a CRM or like a customer data platform, you can get granular in the sense you can UTM tag all of your ads so you can see performance for OTT and native in display and have everything flowing into Google Analytics, including your organic stuff. Just having a singular home for everything is the best you could do.
How to set realistic programmatic advertising budgets, CPM goals, and balance premium vs. remnant inventory for law firms
Chris Dreyer:
Perfect. Yeah, so I guess this is the big one is like how do you scale this because there are, it's hard. Attribution, it's kind of murky, right? Because people go to multiple different sites, channels, devices, et cetera. So that's the biggest one. I had a big client in Colorado with a massive budget and it's like, "Well how do we attribute this?"
Brianna Sudbury:
Yeah, I think again, just having a unified pixel like Google Tag Manager, that'll help with your attribution. In terms of scale and where it would start, I start small, win your local market, and then use what's working from the data to expand. You don't want to let your campaigns scale and have these huge bloated campaigns and these huge budgets if you don't even know that they're working it. So I would stage it out maybe stage one looks like some retargeting ads only. That can be really, really powerful, especially if you're retargeting on a bunch of different places all in once. Phase two you can add in some geotargets, some CTV, some audio. Phase three would be expanding to way bigger efforts and audiences.
So starting small is probably look like five to 15 K, probably for one or two case types and one or two practice areas. And then within platforms or within your agency, hopefully Rankings, we can set up rules to automatically increase spends when it hits a specific click-through rate or it's performing under a benchmark, we can scale that automatically. The flip side of that, we can also automatically use those two pause underperforming ads. So if it's going for two, three days and you're not seeing metrics where they need to be, you can turn those off so you're not bleeding spend.
Chris Dreyer:
Fantastic. Yeah. So let's talk about the visuals. This is big. How important are they? I know on our Meta ads I've got literally in some scenarios 20 active, I've had up to 200 different ad types and visuals working on meta because of their AI, the AI components. What are we looking at from a visual perspective to really succeed here?
Brianna Sudbury:
Yeah, I mean all digital platforms are expanding into more and more AI, so I think you are going to see that more and more. I consider generic general ads to kind of fade into the background, kind of be like wallpaper. You shine when you're using local relevant images, that's how your firm gets remembered. So maybe this looks like a skyline. I would say that's probably the most broad you should go. I'll use Dallas as a great example just I spent a lot of time there. If I'm a PI attorney in Dallas, I'm going to go and do the backgrounds with the murals in Deep Ellum. I'm going to have some cool new buildings in Knox Henderson, like hyper-hyper local visuals are going to be how you stand out and how you tie yourself to being that local PI firm. And then in terms of like MBA type stuff, without dramatization because that's bar regulations, but showing accidents, showing rear end collisions, front end collisions, side, T-bone, I don't know. I've done them all. Yeah, they typically outperform regular generic content by about 200%.
Why tracking calls over clicks improves personal injury case attribution in programmatic advertising campaigns
Chris Dreyer:
Great. Awesome. So why should we be tracking these calls instead of clicks? And I guess to stamp the point here too, it's like again, how do you attribute that it's programmatic and not another channel? And even with your tag manager and things like that, they come in direct, they come in different manners.
Brianna Sudbury:
Yeah, I mean making sure your attribution is really tightened up is going to be first and foremost, and I would make a little asterisk on this, that you should be tracking everything, but you should be optimizing for calls instead of clicks. If not, you're going to be missing a lot of your leads. I think a study from CallRail showed that 75 to 85% of PI cases start via phone. So if you're not optimizing for calls, you are missing out. So this could look like setting up call tracking, syncing that with your intake CRM integration for every single ad campaign you're doing, and then using that first party data to build some audiences and hopefully turn those into retained clients.
Staying compliant with legal advertising rules while pushing creative boundaries in personal injury marketing campaigns
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, makes sense. Again, I'll just say this, I just want to add just one little note for myself. I think everybody listening should be looking at a blended CAC and a blended value and return because of how murky attribution is between first touch, last touch, and the buyer behavior. So I just want to put a little stamp there.
Let's talk about compliance. So that's the big one. So for me personally, it's a no-brainer for programmatic on the retargeting side because you're so restricted on Meta, on Google and it's like you have so many capabilities to literally just follow people around everywhere on programmatic. So how do you keep them compliant? What's some of the things you got to deal with on this side?
Brianna Sudbury:
Yeah, again, every platform has ad policies that you have to adhere to. Bar rules are the biggest one, so I would say comply first and perform second. Programmatic can be really, really powerful, but only if it's ethical and compliant. So this looks like no promises or guarantees, no saying, "We're going to win your case." That's probably going to get you a fine or have your ads disapproved. You need to include your firm name and contact info on all creatives. You need to avoid emotional manipulation or simulated injury visuals. So no showing people hurt or using exacerbated emotional manipulation to get your point across. And then there's some fun state specific rules too. California, Florida, Texas are by far the strictest. This just means you have to adhere, check with your local bar compliance or your agency. We have a compliance tracker we built and just always include disclaimers for OTT display and your landing pages too.
Chris Dreyer:
I'll add one here guys. If you say the word injury, even in your visuals, that's trickier than some of the other words that you could use to mean the same thing. That's why Google has strict policies against the use of injury. You'll see even some of your ads will be throttled even if you've got your copywriting, even if they are allowed. So just be careful with the word injury. Also, if your DBA includes the word injury, just be cognizant of that too. That's another reason why not to do it. And you should be using the word accident, but continuing on.
Brianna Sudbury:
Yeah.
Geofencing strategies for personal injury lawyers — targeting accident hot spots to generate qualified leads
Chris Dreyer:
All right, so we hit this. I want to do a double thing here. So we'll hit the bonus here. Let's talk about how are firms geofencing trigger ads. Let's talk about the HIPAA and some of the HIPAA related concerns and just geofencing. Talk to me about geofencing.
Brianna Sudbury:
Yeah, accidents don't happen online. They happen in real streets. Geofencing is the reason I got into digital ads. I think it is such a cool, creepy and way to target people. So geofencing lets you be there first. I would, if I'm shooting from the hip, if I have unlimited budgets, do whatever I want, build radius targeting around ERs, urgent cares, body shops, tow yards, police stations, and high accident places on the highway. And then again, just you can use cross device pixel tracking. And so if you're driving and you have your phone, when you come to your computer, you go to your TV to watch YouTube ads, it will know that you are the same person and you can see your ads in multiple places. Again, kind of creepy fun way of using geofencing.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, let me ask another question. It wasn't on here, so that's great. Geofencing, there's some restrictions, some of the states, we've got it down on disclaimer around the hospital. But here's the thing about geofencing, literally just do a radius and you get around it and you put the hospital in the radius. So the HIPPA thing's kind of bullshit as long as you're not doing it like a complete imbecile. But talk to me about pricing. So we're all trying to buy attention. Just from what you're seeing a cost CPMs cost per thousand on TV is you can get them down to six to $15 per thousand. Radio is lower and you can get higher frequency. I've seen the reach ads, the awareness ads on Facebook are $2 CPMs. Where is the range? I guess this is a very loaded question because there's so many different ways to do programmatic, but give me lay of the land or just your general thoughts here on pricing.
Brianna Sudbury:
Yeah, I mean I think you kind of hit the nail on the head. Your inventory is going to scale that dramatically using premium inventory like HBO Max versus Tubi are going to be very different. I've seen CPMs for some of the more premium inventory reach like 30, 35 bucks, but you're getting, again, premium content. You're having, how many ads have you seen on HBO? It's far and few between. You're paying a premium to get those premium viewers.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, that makes sense. And I guess the display ads are going to be like nickels, right? Is that where the cost comes in? What about the audio side?
Brianna Sudbury:
Yeah, I think again, there's premium there too. Spotify and Pandora, those are more premium. iHeartRadio, any of the branded platforms are going to have higher CPMs. I've seen audio anywhere from seven to 14 bucks CPM. So again, it just depends on what inventory you're going for.
Chris Dreyer:
Perfect. Yeah, see if you want to get that junk remnant stuff, I guess you can go the low dollar to get the most impressions, but maybe it's not the highest quality channel. Maybe you're getting bombarded with ads, so awesome.
Brianna Sudbury:
And mixing it is great too. So I'm a huge fan of testing. You don't know until you have data to inform your decisions. So have 10%, 20% of whatever your ad spend is set aside for testing and that's not impacting the bulk of your budget. That's not impacting the bulk of your performance, but you're able to kind of play around, do these new fun audio tests, video tests in-game tests, and maybe something will pop off.
Chris Dreyer:
Cool. I don't know if I'm supposed to go or Ken, but I just want to say something before we get into the Q&A. The one thing that we do a little different at Rankings, and I'm going to do the little plug here, is we do not charge a percentage fee on the management of ads. So if you spend a thousand dollars on ads or you spend a hundred thousand dollars on ads, we do a fixed fee. I can guarantee you that your media agency or whoever you're working with does not do that. We're incentivized for you to drive cases, not to just increase your spend, just to increase your spend. That's the only thing I'm going to say. If you guys have questions about this, you want an audit, please email Brianna because she's the expert, not me, but I'm happy to get you in touch and answer your questions as well. There's the emails down below. Ken, take it away.
Ken Mafli:
Awesome. Okay, well thank you both. We did have quite a few questions come in and Seth, I see your question on what is the fee. We do have a nice clean tier structure that either Chris or Brianna or a member of our sales team would be happy to talk that through. But we did have a few questions that came through that I want to throw out to either one of you and I'll let it just be a grab bag as to who wants to answer which. But first one that came in was, how competitive is CTV for personal injury or medical malpractice?
Brianna Sudbury:
Not hugely competitive. So I think we said it before, only one in 10 are even doing programmatic right now. I think there's a lot of space and a lot of room for PI.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I think on the medical malpractice side, I mean specifically if you're trying to get birth injury cases, cerebral palsy, I think there's a big opportunity there. I also think there's a big opportunity for mass torts depending upon the tort. That gives you a little bit more specific targeting options. Think of Camp Lejeune and North Carolina and where those users were impacted and just how specific you can get from a programmatic perspective. So those are just some things to think about.
Ken Mafli:
Oh, that's great. Okay, so this one might be a little bit tough to answer, but I'll throw it out there. How can I tell which ads are actually bringing in the cases? Is there a way for me to know?
Brianna Sudbury:
Yeah, I mean that's all going to be your attribution. That's going to be your UTM strategy. That's going to be how clean all of your Google Analytics data is. And then tying that to your CRM so you can actually see the campaign names. Is there a consistent naming structure? Here at Rankings, we have that. We try and make it really, really clear for you to see point A to point B.
Chris Dreyer:
There's a couple things here I want to add. So you can do incremental tests on a different DMAs. Say you you're on a TV or radio or an ad strategy in one market, you could target a different DMA so that you're isolating it from an incremental testing perspective. The other thing that you can do, and Brianna, you can explain, everyone knows how to use a QR code now. Post COVID, everybody knows. And I'm not saying every consumer in the household is going to scan this QR code, but can you talk about the QR codes and their use as it relates to programmatic?
Brianna Sudbury:
Yeah. So you get data by the device that you're watching these CTV ads or your video ads on, but if you can have a QR code up on your screen and somebody can scan that, that's a validating metric that you can use. Much more impactful than a click, it's basically a click. It tags it with additional pixels, you can retarget. It's a much more engaged audience than just a viewer. So I'm not not a fan of QR codes, but if done correctly, they're really powerful.
Ken Mafli:
Great. Well, if you ever want to hear a slight tirade, just ask Chris what he thinks about QR codes.
Brianna Sudbury:
Chris has feelings about QR codes.
Ken Mafli:
Well, yes, but it is funny. QR codes can be a little bit polarizing because either people like to use them or they don't. But on the whole, they can be a useful tactic. So this one actually came in and it's kind of interesting. I'll read the raw script and then maybe we can riff a little bit, but why do my ads keep getting disapproved or flagged? I know that's probably a multi-tier answer, but I'll just throw that out. Is there any common reasons why you both have seen why these get flagged?
Chris Dreyer:
For me, first of all, for me, if you have the word injury on your ad, I mean you're fucked. Sorry, I'd probably just lost some viewership there. But Brianna, I'll let you expound on that.
Brianna Sudbury:
Yeah, bar compliance is extremely picky. This would be an awesome use case. Shoot us over an email, we'll do an audit on your ads. We'll tell you what's going on. We would love to run them for you and hopefully get them approved. It's kind hard to do that in general.
Chris Dreyer:
Size, too much text, there's a lot of different, the actual words and phrases.
Brianna Sudbury:
Disclaimers, yeah. Sorry.
Ken Mafli:
Yeah, I was going to say, I know a lot of times even just being a pixel off on the size can sometimes kick it back. Okay, so why is my click-through rates so low compared to Google Ads?
Brianna Sudbury:
Is this specific to programmatic I'm assuming?
Ken Mafli:
I am assuming display ads. I'm assuming.
Brianna Sudbury:
It's probably because they're being shown on things where you can't click on them. So a lot of them, yeah, Chris's point, intent versus non-intent, how it's being phrased, how it's being worded, where it's being placed, that all plays a huge role in attributing CTR.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, a lot of times the display ads and the sidebar people aren't actively seeking to click those or scroll into the bottom of an article to click an Outbrain ad. Even the native ads in the body content, people aren't just going to click through it's their condition to skip those, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't see the ad and they don't brand reinforcement. So there's a lot of reasons. And then just the intent, like the search ads when someone types in car accent lawyer and the best virtual real estate on Google is above the fold, the Google Ads, I mean, they're just more likely to be clicked, so they're more specific. And so there's a lot of reasons to it, but that's typical of display in general is this low CTR. If you look at PMAX, you look at all of these, your YouTube ads, they're going to be lower.
Ken Mafli:
Yeah, I was going to say, I know just using display ads across the web, a decent click-through rate was 0.08, whereas Google, you're definitely north of one, two, 3%. So just magnitudes better. But to your point, Chris, and I'll throw this out, doing audience lift studies of doing a control group versus those that have seen display ads, typically you see a bigger rise with those that have seen the display ad, even though they didn't click, they still eventually come around to your website. Have you seen that using control groups and things like that?
Brianna Sudbury:
Yeah, I mean the more times you can see your ad, the better you're going to be. I think it used to be seven times for your brand or your company to make a mark. Now it's up to 13. So users are fragmented, audiences attention spans are fragmented and more is more.
Ken Mafli:
Okay. Should I be using different creatives for different platforms?
Brianna Sudbury:
Absolutely.
Chris Dreyer:
Yes.
Brianna Sudbury:
I would say the same theme, don't make one blue, one orange. But if it's an audio ad, it's going to look and sound a lot different than a TV ad. It's going to look and sound and feel a lot different than a native ad. It's going to look sound and feel a lot different than a display ad. So obviously sizing plays a huge role. I would say messaging also plays a huge role.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. Look, let's talk about audio specific, right? Are you targeting urban or are you targeting country? And the type of content that the consumers would want on each of those platforms and the demos, you got to be cognizant of that and create content specific to that audience group.
Brianna Sudbury:
Yeah, the coolest part about programmatic is just the targeting that you can do. And so this is a total playground to flex where you can be really creative. You can do only female-based creative. You could do male, you could do gender splits, you can do visually what you're seeing, have that be different. Maybe it's a person, maybe it's an animal, maybe it's an accident, test everything and see what works.
Ken Mafli:
Okay, great. Well, last question. This is kind of a fun one, but why do I see ads from my own firm when I'm outside the target area?
Brianna Sudbury:
Probably retargeting.
Ken Mafli:
There you go. Okay.
Brianna Sudbury:
You're also probably clicking on a bunch of ads that shows that you're engaged, it shows that you're interested. It shows that you have intent, so don't click on your ads.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I know I'm in southern Illinois and I took a trip to San Antonio and there a period, there was about a month where I get retargeting ads from Texas-based PI firms. So that occurs. Also, I think there's one more question here. If people are conditioned to skip ads, ignore QR codes, especially when streaming, what's the value add? Well, you see it, it's the brand recognition. It's more top of funnel awareness, like this awareness piece. Just like for the same purposes of view, investing in a billboard or a TV advertisement, it's just general awareness so that when, especially on the injury victims, you don't know when an accident's going to occur and you need to be top of mind for the choice and not a choice when that accident occurs.
Ken Mafli:
Yep. Awesome. Well, perfect. Thank you both Chris and Brianna for coming on in and giving us this presentation and the Q&A time. I know it has been a jam-packed session, so thank you very much. And as Chris mentioned before, we are always here to answer questions. So if anything comes up, you want to talk to us further, we are just an email away. Okay. So last but not least, we did promise that we would get the PDF of this presentation to you. It's just hit now in the chat pane, so please feel free to download it. It has the presentation and the nice condensed answers that you have it. Also, as mentioned, the on-demand version of this will be made available in two business days or less. So be on the lookout in your email inbox for that as well. And as the slide mentioned here on the screen, we're going to keep bringing you the freshest insights on how you can continue to be at the top of your marketing game. So be on the lookout for next month's webinar in your email inbox.
But as we wrap things up, I want to close with what Chris said at the top of the hour. US programmatic display ad spend is set to top $180 billion, but only one in 10 law firms are using it beyond Google Ads today. The legal industry is more competitive than ever. If you are in a saturated market, as most of you are, standing out requires precision, data-driven decisions, and innovative marketing strategies. Programmatic advertising offers you a smarter, more scalable way for your firms to attract and retain high quality leads. All that said, finding the right marketing partner to supercharge your programmatic efforts is essential. They can help outline your goals, construct the right strategy, build the right ad content, and make sure you are hitting your intake goals. As always, Rankings is here to help you get the most out of your lead generation efforts. Our expertise and understanding of the legal market puts you, our clients, in the winning position. So, contact us today to see how you can get the most out of your marketing campaigns. You won't be disappointed. Bye for now.
Chris Dreyer:
Bye. Thank you.
Brianna Sudbury:
Thanks, everybody.
