Pay Per Click Text Ads for Lawyers and Attorneys

<<< Continued from Part 1

To get the most out of your marketing dollars, legal offices can benefit from carefully crafting their Google AdWords approach. Simple tips such as establishing settings correctly can help so that no money is wasted. In the first part of this series, we looked at Google Banner Ads. Today we will review the best way to approach Pay Per Click Text Ads.

Define your targets and methods

First, define your audience. Determine if you want to target the population of a specific city, state or to designate by the ZIP Code. Adjust the parameters accordingly.

Additionally, you want to prevent searches made for your target market from outside of the target market. To do that, within the Advanced Settings, choose “Target customers in my target area.”

When you choose the Campaign Type, only utilize the Google Search Network. You want your banner ads running in a separate campaign, as described in the first part of this series.

Be sure to check the box to include search partners as well. You may find broadening your campaign to be fruitful. Once you have collected ample data, you will know whether or not to continue with those outside entities. The Adwords dashboard will show you separate results for direct ads on Google and ads on third-party sites, and you can optimize accordingly.

Also, allow for distribution to all devices. You will get a sense over time about whether you want to increase or decrease your mobile bid. Mobile could work for B2C (business to consumer) advertising, but it is less likely to work for B2B (business to business).

Always use Google Recommended Languages.

For your Bid Strategy, focus on clicks, opting for the manual maximum CPC bidding. There are other options, but stick to the basics and then collect historical data to change this strategy after 90 days.

For your Delivery Method, choose Standard. This delivery will space your ads out rather than focusing on specific time frames, allowing you to collect data and adjust your settings in the future to optimize your campaign.

For Ad Rotation, you want to Rotate Indefinitely. This strategy will not automatically optimize your campaign. Instead, ads that are not performing as well will get as much action as the ones that are. That tactic will allow you to collect data and make choices based on that data, optimizing manually once fuller information is available.

Consider your language itself

Now start focusing on your terms. Allow for exact and phrase match, and again designate that you only want to target the Search Network. You will need to start with some broad terms. Over time, you will learn which exact terms are being searched. Collect data, and build your campaign around the historical data. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Include plurals, misspellings, and other close variants. Like many of the above approaches, allowing those alternatives will provide more information for collecting historical data, leading to better overall campaign optimization.

As you did with the banner ads, gather your keywords and figure out what you want to target. (You can use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner to generate your list.)

Again, create ads that will give you the optimal return on investment (ROI). The best approach is to test many different ads and messages. Once you have a large bulk of data, you can figure out your best message – the one that is generating the most activity from users who are ideally prepared to become clients.

Use the most targeted keyword in the first line of your ad to bring your quality scores up. That will help to lower your cost: a higher keyword quality score translates to a lower-bidding cost. Also, make sure that your landing page shows the keyword related to the bid.

As time passes, your click-through-rate (CTR) will get better and better, and the investment you put into slow and steady optimization will further refine your angle and sharpen your marketing edge.

To get the best results for your keywords, make sure that they are being used in the ad’s headline. You also want those same words to be on your landing page. If you have many different keywords, you want to test, create additional ad groups to allow for your full catalog of keywords. To avoid bidding against yourself, add negative keywords at the level of each ad group.

Further develop & optimize

Once your campaign is live, give it a few days. Then check on the data that has been collected.

Go to Exact Searches. See what search terms generated the most clicks. If some keywords are undesirable, add them as negative keywords. Blocking the keywords that don’t make sense is a crucial aspect of maintenance to get the best ROI: you will need to do it daily to achieve genuine optimization. The Exact Searches will also tell you the best phrases to add to your list of targeted keywords.

Allow both exact and phrase matches, so you are sure to get the most highly targeted traffic. As your data accumulates, you can start adding broader terms as well.

Audience extensions are also critical. Make sure you use the Google+ extension for social optimization. Additionally, add your contact information to the location extension so that it shows your address and phone.

Beyond audience extensions, use sitelink extensions. Add many extensions with terms that are searched by your target audience, leading to unique pages of your website. As time passes, narrow down to a smaller number of sitelink extensions for the best ROI.

Your site itself

Make sure you are also hosting your website and legal data on a secure and fast Cloud Server. Atlantic.Net has been in business for 20 years. Our data center in Orlando, Florida, meets the requirements of SSAE 16, a standard established by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). You are also free to speed-test our servers, all of which run on solid-state drives (SSD’s).  Contact us for info on our award-winning VPS Hosting solutions and see our VPS hosting price.

By Moazzam Adnan