PPC for Lawyers: Campaigns aren’t just for politicians

So your law firm has researched the keywords it wants to use, and you’re ready to embark on a pay-per-click (PPC) marketing initiative. Now what? To put your keywords into action, you need to organize them into effective campaigns. In this blog, we’ll discuss key organizing tactics and how PPC for lawyers can become a productive use of your marketing dollars.

It starts with defining your ad groups. An ad group is a set of ads, keywords, and bids (the dollar amount a firm allots to pay-per-click advertising) that are relevant to a particular promotion – for example if you are trying to promote a practice group. Pay-per-click campaigns include a set of ad groups that share a budget and geographic target.

Campaigns can be a great tool to help your law firm get organized and advertise its services. They allow you to monitor activity and adjust your budget, the ad copy, target location, and distribution among search engines. Once campaigns and ad groups are created, you can measure your spend on the keywords based upon their performance, positioning and impression share. Impression share refers to the percentage of impressions that your ads receive (how often your ad is actually shown) compared to the total number of impressions that your ads could get.

Geographically targeting PPC for lawyers’ campaigns can be a huge advantage. It helps you see where your ad words are most successful, and your firm can adjust its keyword budget to maximize its pay-per-click needs.

Good2bSocial’s pay-per-click expert, Alan Schneider, explains how geographic targeting in campaigns can work. “Say there is a law firm with several offices and with clients all over the Tri-State area – New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. It could create one large campaign to target those states, or perhaps specify individual campaigns, each defined by a distance radius around each of the law firm’s offices. If the law firm determines — after measuring campaign performance statistics — that its offices in New York and New Jersey did better than its Connecticut office, the law firm could adjust its PPC allocation to lower the budget for that one location, or perhaps refine its keyword for that state.”

When creating a budget, you must take into account the different campaigns you will use. In our example above, the law firm will want to use at least three different campaigns (the more offices a firm has, the more campaigns it might consider). Creating separate ad campaigns, perhaps for different locations, allows you to also establish more specific keywords and budgets for each. The more relevant the keyword, ad and landing pages are in a given campaign, the higher the quality score  a search engine tool like Google Adwords will assign to it. A higher quality score can save the firm money: The higher the score, the better your firm’s ad will be positioned for a lower cost per click.

Campaigns provide enhanced visibility to help your law firm target the right client base and allow better control of its message and advertising budget. 

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