DIY PPC for Law FirmsFor consumer law firms, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns are the digital marketing holy grail of client acquisition. Get it right, and you can attract new leads with a lower cost-per-acquisition (CPA).

But with the rising cost of law-related keywords — not to mention fierce competition — generating leads through Google Ads is hard no matter what you offer.

This is why PPC is such an important channel for law firms, and also why it’s so competitive. So, how do you execute a PPC campaign that attracts your ideal leads while maintaining a healthy ROI?

In this guide, you’ll learn six crucial techniques your Google Ads campaigns must include to succeed in the competitive legal landscape, and over a dozen additional pro tips to try once you’re up and running. Once you’ve finished this guide you’ll know exactly how to target and attract the right clients for your law firm.

But first things first. Before you jump into setting up your account you’ve got to ask yourself a few questions.

1. How big of a budget do I need to get started?

Your budget is driven by your PPC goals, as well as your overall marketing budget. That’s why we don’t have a canned answer when the first question a prospective client asks us is “What budget do you recommend?” It’s a backwards question – we need to understand your goals first. The best advice we can usually give is “the bigger your budget the better”, because the faster we get data the more efficient your campaign becomes. However, you don’t want to spend it all at once. You’ll want to make sure you have enough for an extended campaign. The cliché is true “PPC marketing is a marathon not a sprint”.

For example, if you are in Chicago and you want 300 phone calls a month you’re going to need a big budget. However, if your phone call target is less aggressive then you can set a more modest budget and still hit your goals. It’s a numbers game.

Now, if your content is in good shape and you already have an established brand, this will make your budget more efficient. This is where the PPC experts come in to play. They can further increase your budget’s efficiency by optimizing every minute detail of a PPC campaign. If your optimized landing pages are converting at twice the rate of your competitors, it means their budget will need to be twice the size of yours just to get the same number of calls. In other words, your $10,000 budget will get the same number of calls as their $20,000 budget.

2. The next conversation you’ll want to have internally is “What is a good lead/phone call?”

In our experience if the caller meets these three requirements, you’re going to get new cases:

1. They are a first-time caller2. They are in your geographical practice area3. The caller ‘thinks’ they may need a lawyer like you. This is the most important (and

subjective) criteria.

Now, these three criteria may NOT lead to a case. The caller may be a premises liability call with no negligence. Or perhaps the caller is looking for a divorce lawyer, but they can’t afford your retainer. The prospect could have been hit by an uninsured motorist, but the caller doesn’t have uninsured motorist coverage. Maybe the caller lives in an area where you practice but the accident happened in another state where you are not licensed. A caller could have been injured at a nursing home, but there is no proof of negligence.

The point here is that each of these callers thought they may need a lawyer like you to help them, even though you may not be able to accept their case. You can’t eliminate callers based on their specific situations, but if you consistently hit these three points the numbers will work, and you will get new cases from PPC. But if you can’t agree on these three points first, you may get frustrated and pull the plug before your campaigns really kick into gear.

3. How much is your Average Case Value?

Based on these questions you can determine an acceptable Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA):

- How much does each click cost?- How many clicks does it take to get a call?- How many calls does it take to generate a case?

At the end of the day, what profit margins can you live with? This is why it’s really tough for us to tell you, because we don’t know each of our clients’ financial situation. If you’re a lean operation you can probably deal with lower margins. Or, if you’re case margins are really high, maybe you can live with fewer cases. It really depends on your individual financial scenario, and what types of cases you are pursuing.

Now let’s work on that PPC funnel -

1. Target the Right Regions

Targeting the right traffic is the most important step to a profitable PPC campaign. While keywords are key, law firms should start by targeting the right regions. If you’re a PPC veteran, you’ll know how basic this principle is, but many firms still fail to target the right geo locations. As a result, they appear in searches from irrelevant cities and states.

Let’s face it – even if you’re the best in the business, the perfect client won’t travel to you. To set your target regions, head to the “Settings” area from the left-hand menu in Google Ads. Then, select your campaign, followed by “Locations:”

You’ll also want to select the language of the person’s browser. Generally selecting English and Spanish covers the vast majority of browsers.

Next, click on “Advanced search.” In the pop-up box, select the “Radius” option:

Here, you can enter a geographical location followed by the target radius around that location. Add multiple target locations to one campaign or create a single target radius for each. We recommend you do the latter, as it gives you more flexibility when matching your ad creative to your target audience.

Many law firms are also successful at generating calls on weekends, but as a general rule Mondays and weekdays are best. It’s critical to make sure you have your best intake people 100% available to take calls during the hours that you advertise. Because most interactions with prospective clients will come from phone calls not form submissions.

2. Focus on Search Intent

Not all keywords are created equal. Depending on what a user searches for, they may be looking for information or an immediate solution. This is called search intent.

The ads you serve for each “intent” must be adjusted – from the ad copy to the landing page you guide them to. Here’s a breakdown of the three categories of intent:

1. Navigational: The searcher is looking for a brand or specific website. These are often called “branded searches.”

2. Informational: This is where the user is looking for the answer to a specific question. They may also be looking for in-depth guides on how to overcome a challenge.

3. Transactional: It’s highly likely the searcher is looking to buy something. As a result, these keywords have high “commercial intent.”

It’s likely most of your best prospects are searching for transactional keywords, like “injury lawyer dallas.” These have a lot of competition, but this is a direct correlation to how profitable these cases are.

But what about informational keywords? Searchers within your target geo may be looking for information to a particular problem – a problem you can solve with content. For example, let’s say someone searches for the keyword “how to hire a family lawyer.” The searcher lives in your target area (e.g., “Miami”) and would make a great prospect when they’re ready to talk business.

You could serve them an ad that directs them to the bottom of the funnel, e.g. “schedule a consultation.” Or, you could create content that solves this problem. In this example, you could create a blog post or a whitepaper called “How to Choose The Right Injury Lawyer.” Using conversion techniques, like a form or content upgrade, you can subsequently capture the prospect’s contact information.

Providing educational content to clients is the best way to establish healthy relationships. The lack of client education out there provides you with a great opportunity.

However, intent is more of a concept than a setting and this is where psychology comes into play. PPC is too expensive of and advertising medium to use for folks who are just searching for information. Your PPC campaigns should be used to attract only those prospects that are intending to buy now, not just searching for information.

Intent as it relates to Ads : You probably have a good idea who your best clients are. So, you need to put yourself in their shoes and think about what is most import to them, and what will cause them to take action. The other thing is CLARITY is better than trying to be Too Cute or Too Catchy. Yes, you want to stand out, but we normally see better click rates on ads that are clear and concise. You first have to satisfy their initial search intent. If you are family law attorney you need to say that right away. Lead your ad copy with exactly what that person is looking for before you try to use any colorful marketing copy.

For example, a user may search for “family lawyer charlotte nc”. Then they first ad they see starts with “Protect What’s Important – Strong Legal Advice”, but we find it works better to start with “Family Law Attorney” then you can say “Protect What’s Important…” because this way you satisfy their first need of a family law attorney.

One exception specific to car accident injury lawyers is we recommend focusing on the injury component first, and less on the car accident itself. We do this to minimize the number of property damage type calls that come from leading with ‘car accident’ lawyer.

Intent as it relates to Keywords: The negative keywords you choose is equally import in terms of intent. For example, you want to show up for the search phrase “family law attorney near me” because that’s a high intent keyword phrase. However, you obviously don’t want to show up for “Donald Trump’s attorney”, which is just someone searching for information.

To prevent your ad from showing for this particular search you will need to use a few negative keywords. In this example you will want to add these words, and variations, as negative keywords: Trump, Trump’s, Donald

This way when Google is generating the search results it will not grab your ad since you have these as negative keywords. Also, misspellings are very common, especially when typing on mobile, so it’s smart to add misspelled variations of negative keywords.

3. Create Compelling Ad Copy

You’ve tightened your ad targeting, and you’re serving the right calls-to-action to the right searchers. Now you need to take that focused attention and drive them to your landing pages. Which brings us to the next step in the funnel: your ad creative.

To drive traffic, you need to compel prospects to click on your ad. This means standing out in a sea of competitors – especially in an industry as competitive as law.

Funny thing is, other than needing the message to be clear, it’s sometimes not as important as you would think. We’ve listened to thousands of calls over the years, and, especially if you’re on a mobile device, which most are, you can almost guarantee you’ll get clicks regardless of your ad content (this is not always a good thing). Especially in the personal injury world, most folks have an urgency around their search, and reading every word of your ad isn’t going to happen.

This is again why we emphasize ad CLARITY above all else. In some of our ads we may even repeat the word ‘injury’ five or six times because we know people generally SCAN AND DON’T READ, so we need the word ‘injury’ to appear throughout the ad.

Even then you will still get non-injury calls, but each of these strategies helps reduce the number of bad calls. All you’re doing here is mitigating the issue – there is no one solution to eliminate poor calls.

It's also important for you to stay up to date on changes occurring to Google’s ad format changes. Recently, Google made significant upgrades by adding a third headline and a second description. If you’re not using these and your competitors are, your ads are going to be smaller and have less information than your competitor who stayed up to date.

Another change that Google recently released is a new Responsive Ad Format which allows you to set variables like multi-Headlines and multi-Descriptions. Just like you can do with A/B testing on landing pages, Google will do what’s called Multi-Variant Testing and show different headlines and descriptions in combination with each other to determine the most effective combination to increase click-through-rate.

Here are five copywriting principles to apply to your PPC campaigns immediately.

Copywriting Tip #1: Get the Basics Right First

Get the basics first, use the clarity concept above. Clarity is usually more important than ‘salesy’ and persuasive copy. If you’re only going to get one thing right – get the clarity right. Be clear first. In almost every ad test, having the clearest headline beats any other headline type that we try.

Having said that, writing copy for Google Ads is a delicate art. Unlike landing pages, you’ve got a very limited amount of space to work with. However, you’ve got to keep basic copywriting principles in mind. Remember to check these boxes when writing your ad copy:

Relevancy: A good QS comes from relevancy. Your ad copy must match the target keyword and the messaging of your landing page.

Talk about them: If you’re using “we” more than “you,” go back to the drawing board. You must make your ad copy about the prospect and their pains.

Focus on benefits: Again, forget about what makes your service great. Why do clients decide to do business with you? Focus on these benefits.

Copywriting Tip #2: Use Numbers

People love numbers. Have you generated impressive results for your clients? How many cases have you won in the last month or so?

Using numbers in your copy not only grabs attention, but it can also boost social proof. In fact, according to research by Conductor, headlines that contain numbers are more effective than any other headline format:

Here are some ways you can use numbers in your ad copy:

Your average win-rate Number of clients Years in business Number of won cases

Copywriting Tip #3: Ask Questions

How does the ad flow? Does a question make more sense than a statement? Use it.

As I mentioned earlier, searchers are often on the hunt for answers to their questions, and solutions to their challenges. Show them that you get them by rephrasing these questions in your headline. In our family law example from earlier, these headlines would work well:

“Looking For a Family Law Expert?” “Need Help Choosing a Family Lawyer?” “Choosing a Family Lawyer? Our Guide Will Help.”

These headlines fit within the “informational” searcher intent. Grab your prospect’s attention by using the same questions they’re already asking in their head.

Copywriting Tip #4: Use Emotional Triggers

You don’t have much room to play with when writing Google Ads copy. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use the limited space to spike emotions using triggers and grab attention. Get to the heart of your prospect’s pain by spiking a feeling relevant to the problem they’re looking to solve.

Emotional triggers include:

Trust: Your prospects need to know they can rely on you and that you’re a credible lawyer. How can you reinforce trust in your PPC ads (and your landing pages)?

Value: Buyers are more price-savvy than ever. They’re aware of buyer’s remorse and will avoid it at all costs. Can you add a guarantee or make comparative offers from your competitors?

Instant Gratification: The law is a long game. But people want instant gratification, and in the world of law, this can simply come in the form of easing their immediate woes. Use your copy to make prospects feel like they’re in safe hands.

Hope: This is the emotion that drives us forward in hard times. Paint a picture of a brighter future, even when times are bleak.

Fear: Is the emotion that drives the decision making in the process. If fear is a motivating factor, then all you need to do is show how your service is the right action for prospects to take.

Copywriting Tip #5: Always Be Testing

Of course, you won’t be able to fit all these elements into the same ad.

Which is why it’s important to test different ad variations against each other. To do this, head to the “Ads & extensions” section in your campaign. Click the “pencil” icon next to your highest performing ad copy and select “Copy and edit:”

From here, it’s simply a matter of changing certain elements of your ad. Using the Ad Variations feature, you can quickly test different ads against each other. To set them up, head to the bottom of the left-hand menu and select “Drafts & experiments:”

Under the “Ad Variations” tab, click “New Ad Variation.” From here, follow the wizard and apply the new variation to your selected campaign. With this powerful feature, you can replace specific text, swap headlines, and update entire sections of your copy with ease.

Test only one element at a time. Whether that’s the headline or call-to-action, it’s important to pick one. Otherwise, you’ll never know what improved performance in the first place.

4. The Anatomy of High-Converting Landing Pages

It’s an import concept to recognize and to understand - try not to view landing pages as mini web sites, or part of your website. Instead view them as an extension of your Google Ads. You want your ad to continue the same message that got them to click in the first place. You want the landing page to continue the same message.

You want your message to be consistent. You may have a situation where you want to include copy on your landing page, but not in the ad. For example, a lot of law firms ads will say “Free Consultation”. You might not want to use the word “Free” in your ad, because you’ll end up getting more calls from folks that can’t afford your fees. But once they click your ad, then you can use the word “Free” as in “Free Consultation” on the call-to-action button. A subtle change that can prevent unwanted calls.

The Google Ad The Landing Page

For most consumer law firms, the majority of your prospects will be using their phones to search for you. Make sure you build your landing pages with a “Mobile First” design strategy. Simply put, this means spending the majority of time and effort making sure your mobile page is as readable, user friendly, and always have your primary call to action visible on the screen as they scroll up and down. You should use ‘sticky buttons’ or something similar, so the Tap to Call button is on the screen.

You now know how to create compelling ad copy that prospects can’t help but click. Once clicked, your prospects will be taken to your landing page. And the job of the landing page is to convince prospects to take action. If your landing page isn’t designed for conversions, you’re going to waste money. There’s no point driving traffic to a landing page that doesn’t convert.

Landing Page Element #1: Remove Navigation

Your landing page must guide prospects toward a specific action. This means removing all elements that distract from this objective. The navigation pane is the first distraction your prospect will see. Allowing them to browse the website will hurt conversions.

Landing Page Element #2: Use a Hero Shot

In the example below, we’ve included a large image of a scooter for visual impact. This is known as “the hero shot.” When used effectively the hero shot can instantly communicate an emotion and can quickly affirm the prospect has found a relevant ad. Also, design is really important. Clean and crisp beats busy and wordy every time. Pro tip - use a high res image!

Landing Page Element #3: Single Call-to-Action

Remember, you want your prospects to take one action, and one action only. Traditionally, this action is calling your firm. Nobody wants to fill out a form on their phone, so just give them a Tap-to-Call button on the mobile version of your ad. Leave the longer forms for your desktop campaigns where it’s easier to type in the fields.

Form-friction is a term describing when prospects abandon a form due to its length. So, find the right form length for your practice. Ask for only the most critical information to begin a relationship with your new leads. The fewer fields the better.

Landing Page Element #4: Social Proof

Building trust is one of the biggest hurdles to generating new law firm leads. Get over this by including testimonials from happy clients. When acquiring them, ask your clients to be as specific as possible. Include the results, and why they loved working with you.

Anything less than a 5-Star review can be a problem. These days there are software tools you can use to manage your user reviews, including dealing with reputation management.

5. Streamline Inquiries with Call Extensions

When targeting the right keywords, those with commercial intent are your money makers. And sometimes your prospects are desperate and want to speak with someone right away. Give them this option by including call extensions in your ads.

Call extensions are simply calls-to-action that appear under your ad when searched for on a mobile device. When a user clicks on the extension, their device automatically dials the number you provide them with.

To set up an extension, head over to “Ads & extensions” in Google Ads and click the “Extensions” tab. Then, click on the “plus” button, followed by “Call extension”:

Ad Extensions are features search advertising platforms give as options to enhance your ads. When used effectively they can both improve your ad performance and provide a faster method for your prospect and clients to reach you.

Sitelinks (“client testimonial” link shown above): additional website links that allow you to send users to different areas of your site

Call extensions: adding a phone number to your ad. These calls can also be tracked as conversions in your performance metrics.

Location extensions: adds your business address pulled from Google My Business

There are a number of other extensions, but these are the most common ones for localized businesses like law.

So why use ad extensions?

1. The use of ad extensions has shown to increase ad performance because it gives your potential clients more options and drives them further down the lead funnel. On average, use of ad extensions lifts click-through rate by 10-15%. More clicks can mean more opportunities for clients.

2. The more extensions you show the more search real estate your ad takes up. In competitive spaces like law, driving a competitor down the page can make a big difference in the long run. In some cases, Google Ads even ranks you higher in results if you include ad extensions, because they view this as a better experience for users.

6. Analytics & Call Tracking

You should now have a robust Google Ads campaign set up for your law firm. But the work doesn’t end there. You must continuously measure and optimize your PPC efforts to ensure you’re generating the best ROI possible.

It’s likely that many of your inquiries will come in the form of phone calls. Which is why it’s imperative to track calls.

Out of the 205 conversions in this screenshot, 183 of them were phone calls.

Then there’s call tracking. This technology allows you to measure where your calls come from, as well as the duration and overall quality. Although there are several solutions, we prefer CallRail.

Here’s a quick summary of how it works:

1. A “dynamic” phone number is added to your website. This phone number changes for each visitor, provided from a “pool” of available numbers.

2. When a user dials the number, it goes through the call tracking system.3. The platform then records where the call came from (PPC, organic search, etc.), the duration,

and can record the call. Call recording allows call intake managers to measure the performance of their teams.

With this technology in place, you can measure and optimize your Google Ads efforts on an ongoing basis. Do this by testing new ad copy, creating ad groups for each of your highest performing keywords, and optimizing your landing pages for higher conversion rates.

PPC Pro Tips

We’ve covered the basics of creating and executing a successful law firm PPC strategy. To end this guide, I’ll share two advanced techniques with you. These simple approaches will lead you towards better, more optimized Google Ads campaigns and a greater ROI.

Pro Tip 1: Use Negative Keywords

You may not realize it, but Google doesn’t always get it right. A search query somebody typed may not be the same keywords you are bidding on.

For example, let’s assume somebody searches “pro bono divorce lawyer”. If you are bidding on the keywords “Divorce Lawyer”, Google shows your ad, and you pay for it, then you get a call from somebody looking for a free service. After all, they clicked your ad after typing “pro bono”, why won’t you help them?

So, how do you prevent this from happening? By using negative keywords.

First, let’s explain what they are. Negative keywords serve as a filter to prevent your ads from showing for irrelevant searches. We mentioned the Trump example earlier, and there are many more negative keywords that you should use. We add tens of thousands of negative keywords to our clients’ campaigns from our library that we’ve built over time. You’re trying to eliminate all the wrong/bad searches. Negative keywords are added daily from reviewing search terms.

Adding negative keywords doesn’t stop – ever. You want to add negative keywords on a regular basis. The way to do this is to look at the actual search terms that were typed in Google Ads, identify the irrelevant ones, then add them as negative keywords so your ads don’t show for those search terms again in the future. This is an important part of optimizing your account to continue make it more efficient.

For example, we were able to save one of our law clients over $20,000 per month in wasted ad spend by adding negative new keywords to their account. That’s real money.

Pro Tip 2: Use Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGs)

First let’s explain how Google Ads accounts are structured:

Top level is the Account

Second level is the Campaign level

Third are Ad Groups

Ads and keywords are placed within ad groups. A lot of people throw a bunch of negative keywords and ads into one ad group. We don’t recommend you do this because a) it’s sloppy b) you’re not going to be able to be as consistent with your message from keyword to ad.

For example, you may end of showing a slip-and-fall ad to somebody searching for a car accident lawyer. We use SKAGs so that there is only one keyword phrase in each ad group. This has three benefits:

1. We can more clearly id underperforming keyword phrases2. We can ensure that our ad and kw phrase match each other3. We use ‘dynamic keyword insertion’ to even further improve our landing page

relevancy to the ad

Pro Tip 3: Dynamic Keyword Insertion

This a technique where we include the keyword phrase in the URL of the ad. When clicked, a script on the landing page recognizes this keyword phrase and swaps out pre-determined text on the landing page to match the keyword phrase exactly. Two main reasons we do this:

1. It improves the relevance of the page for the prospect2. It helps improve Google Quality Score which is a quality rating that Google assigns to

each kw and directly effects how much you pay for each click.

Pro Tip 4: Use Sitelinks

Sitelinks are the additional clickable links that sometimes show up under ads (Google decides which links to show and when to show them). Sitelinks are great for several reasons:

1. They take up a tremendous amount of real estate on mobile devices, particularly when you are in one of the higher positions on the page.

2. They allow you to increase your relevance to the individual prospect, which Google likes. Most advertisers will just add links back to pages on their website like “About Us, Contact Us, etc.”. However, we take a different approach and gear our sitelinks to the user’s specific situation and develop landing pages for those specific situations. For example, for family law firms you can create custom divorce categories like ‘Divorce for Dads’, ‘Divorce for Moms’, ‘High Net Worth’, ‘No Kids’.

These serve a couple of purposes: (1) it creates a larger ad for you and pushes down your competitor’s ad, and (2) it creates an emotional connection with the prospect that “this firm must be better because they have custom options just for me”.

Pro Tip 5: Mobile Only vs. Desktop Only

If the account is large enough, split campaigns into Mobile Only and Desktop Only. Depending on your market odds are cost per conversion on desktop is quite about higher than cost per conversion on mobile. By splitting the campaigns separately, you can set a different budget

allocation for mobile than desktop and you can set lower bids on desktop than on mobile. This helps bring down your cost per conversion on desktop.

Pro Tip 6: Day-Parting Strategy

There are certain times of days and times of the week you’ll find you have a higher call volume and conversion rate than others. During these times you want to make bid adjustments which increases the amount you’re willing to pay per click by a certain percentage. This allows your ad to show higher on the page. For example, if your ads are running at night but no one calls because they’re just researching, you may want to set bids to a negative 30%. If set at $10, this will adjust you max cost per click down to $7 at night. You can also do the opposite. If you know Monday at 1PM is a time when you get more conversions, you may adjust it up 30% which makes your maximum jump from $10 to $13.

Another type of bid adjustment is Location Bid Adjustments. If you have particular geographic areas where more of your cases come from, you may want to target this area specifically and set a positive bid adjustment of 30%, knowing you’ll pay more per click because you know you’ll get more cases from the area. On the other hand, there may be an area that doesn’t perform very well but you don’t want to completely shut if off, so you set a negative bid adjustment which reduces the maximum you’re willing to pay per click.

In some cases, we’ll do this as a radius from your firm’s office. You can look at it like establishing bands around your office location. At 5 mile radius you might pay +5%, from 5 to 19 mile radius you might have no adjustments, and from 10-15 miles radius you may set a negative 10% adjustment, and from 15-20 miles out you might set it to a negative 30%.

Pro Tip 7: Demographic Targeting

For a campaign targeted to people who have been sexually harassed at work, knowing that 90% of harassment victims are female, we’re able to target by gender so that our ads don’t show to people looking for a criminal defense lawyer because they have been ACCUSED, but more likely to show to female VICTIMS looking to protect their rights.

This is not perfect science, because Google doesn’t always know a person’s gender, and this can dramatically limit the number of people who see your ads. We advise caution and close monitoring when using this technique.

Pro Tip 8: Call Tracking & Monitoring

Often times it is not enough just to track the number of calls received from a campaign. You can use dynamic number tracking and ad tracking parameters to identify which keywords drove the call. We also create different rules to route calls to different numbers at different times of the day as necessary. For example, during the day you may want calls to go to your office, but after hours to go to your cell phone. Or you may want the call to ring more than one phone at the same time.

Here’s another really important thing you’re going to need to do. Record and listen to the calls coming in from your PPC campaign. We’ve seen far too many firms rely too heavily on raw data in making decisions. For example, a particular keyword may show that it’s converting very high and bringing in lots of calls. But if you listen to those calls and hear that very few of them were remotely qualified callers, you may want to pause the keyword despite what the analytics tell you.

You also may find issues with your intake system or your staff/after hour service. Again, data will not give you this part of the picture.

Pro Tip 9: Landing Page A/B Testing

As mentioned, increasing landing page conversion rates can have a huge positive performance on your campaign’s ROI. Your landing page strategy should include split testing multiple landing pages at the same time (champion vs. challenger).

For example, Prospect 1 clicks your ad and is taken to landing page A. 10 minutes later Prospect 2 clicks the same ad and receives landing page B. Prospect 1 ‘converts’ by calling your firm. This conversion is recorded and assigned to landing page A. This process continues over a period of time until you have enough statistical data to tell you which landing page converts at a higher rate “the champion” and should be the one shown to all prospects (until a new champion emerges). This ongoing optimization never ends and will be a key component of your success.

Nearly everything can be tested. Some things will make a big difference, other things will not. Headlines, body copy, photos, buttons, colors, videos, page length, can and should be tested.

Pro Tip 10: Use Dynamic Image Swapping

Some firms serve large geographic areas that contain cities and towns with very different demographics. Instead of creating a unique landing page for each area we will utilize dynamic

image swapping. This allows images on the page to change based on the person’s location, and can be photos, testimonials, maps, etc.

There are 3 reasons to use dynamic image swapping:

1. Less potential for mistakes because you’re only dealing with one page.2. Fewer pages for you to update. For example, if you have an industry badge you want to

update because it’s now 2019 instead of 2018, you can just replace one image on one landing page rather than several landing pages.

3. This goes back to A/B testing - if you have too many landing pages it’s unlikely any single page will get enough traffic to give you statistically significant data to tell which landing page version is working better.

Pro Tip 11: Use Promotion and Price Extensions

Primarily developed for retail, you can use P&E promotions in your ads. This another trick to increase to size of your ad and push down your competitors’ ads even further. Again, however, Google determines when and if these extensions appear on your ad.

Pro Tip 12: Create Shared Budgets

You can create a single budget and Google will distribute the funds across several different campaigns, making it easier to hit your overall daily budget. For example, you may have one campaign that is really active one day and you reach your budget by noon, yet another campaign is running slow that same day and is way under budget. Google will borrower from one and give to the other in order to keep the better performing ad running until the overall daily budget is met.

Pro Tip 13: (Not) Bidding on Competitor’s Keywords

Unless you have a huge budget and don’t mind getting calls intended for a different lawyer, you’re probably wasting money. Our experience is callers think they are calling the lawyer they searched for and just want an update on their case. You just paid for that call, and it wasn’t cheap. Don’t try to get cute here.

Pro Tip 14: Advanced Location Settings

There’s also a second step where you want to select ‘Advanced’ and you want to target people IN your location not necessarily people targeting FOR your location. For the most part people

searching for law firms are going to be IN your geographic service location. It’s uncommon for someone to be outside of your area searching for your law firm. This tip cuts out wasted clicks.

You can also exclude certain parts of a city. You can exclude places that have the same name in a different area to eliminate any confusion. Select a large area, then exclude a smaller area, then create a campaign just for that smaller area.

Now it’s Your Turn -

These techniques will help you create more profitable Google Ads campaigns and generate more clients for your law firm. As you can see, everything taught in this guide fits into this six stage funnel. You must create a journey that guides your prospects to becoming a client. Do this by focusing on their challenges, building trust, and educating them.