But how do you reach this audience, especially if you’re a personal injury law firm? If a person sits down at their computer or browses on their phone and begins looking for ‘personal injury lawyer near me,’ how can you stand out? Appearing in the first position in search results usually involves paying for ads, which is where your law firm digital marketing budget comes into play.

So how much does it cost to be successful with PPC advertising?

As the Paid Media Manager at Hennessey Digital, I frequently receive questions about the ideal budget to allocate toward a PPC campaign. In this article I will highlight the important things to consider that will help you make an accurate decision regarding the allocation of your firm’s marketing budget for paid search.

Budget Misconceptions in PPC for Law Firms

In my experience, I have come across two common misconceptions. First, there is often a request for achieving substantial results with a budget as low as $500 per month, with the aim of generating 5-10 personal injury cases. Second, clients sometimes express a desire to invest the maximum budget possible to dominate the entire market within their region or area of service.

Both of these scenarios are not practically feasible.

Take the first scenario, where firms want to achieve the most with the lowest budget. First, let me clarify that I’m not suggesting that PPC advertising should cost an arm and a leg. However, it’s important to understand that personal injury law stands as one of the most costly sectors within the PPC landscape. The cost-per-click (CPC) – for a single click – can range from $70 to $250, contingent upon the targeted locations and the level of competition in that geographic area. Car accident and truck accident portfolios in PPC advertising are significantly more expensive too, with CPCs ranging between $150 and $500. Given this expensive cost-per-click, it is impossible to bring in 5 to 10 cases from PPC ads with a monthly budget of only $500.

With the second scenario, putting an unlimited budget toward PPC, I always advise spending each dollar wisely instead of burning every single penny with the aim of obtaining every piece of the pie. It is impossible to dominate the entire market due to the presence of other competitors who actively bid on similar keywords. If you blindly allocate every dollar to PPC ads, you might unreasonably inflate the cost-per-click, cost-per-lead, and ultimately, the cost-per-case, without being able to capture 100% of the searches. For example, if you have an unlimited budget and allocate all available funds to PPC ads without careful consideration, you are essentially engaging in aggressive bidding on keywords with the aim of capturing every click possible. This approach intensifies competition, however, resulting in higher costs as you attempt to outbid your competitors.

Optimizing Cost-Per-Case with a Data-Driven Approach

Here at Hennessey Digital, we track every possible metric (impression, CPM, CPC, CTR, conversion rate, cost-per-conversion) for effective campaigns. And we strive for optimal cost-per-case in the market. For a lawyer, this means how many cases you’ve signed and how much money you’ve spent to get them. To reach this goal, we focus on both the quality and quantity of searches, clicks, and leads. Our PPC team has analyzed more than $2 billion dollars worth of marketing data to establish average cost-per-click, cost-per-lead, and conversion rate-related benchmarks. We apply these benchmarks to formulate strategies that result in successful PPC campaigns for the law firms that partner with us. Our depth of experience in legal marketing also enables us to know how to allocate the right amount of budget toward specific campaigns related to personal injury, car accidents, or truck accidents.

Drawing from my experience, if you’re a personal injury law firm looking to venture into PPC advertising, it’s recommended to allocate a minimum of $8,000 in media spend for the first month, with the understanding that a management fee for the campaign is usually added on top of that. When managing these campaigns, we advise allocating a larger portion of the budget to generic search terms related to personal injury keywords, and a smaller portion to safeguarding your brand through a branded campaign for your law firm. We suggest gradually increasing the budget starting from the second month, based on the results you’ve obtained and the data analysis.

It’s important to note this is the ideal budget to set your law firm up for success in generating quality leads through PPC advertising. Multiple factors will come into play including your law firm’s size, digital marketing budget, objectives, or competition in your market – all things we factor to help you determine the right PPC budget to achieve your goals.

Maximize Law Firm PPC ROI With Strategic Bidding & Budgeting

It’s a delicate balance to strike – underinvesting in paid search campaigns can lead to lower visibility or brand recognition, but overspending can waste valuable budget resources. The real cost of PPC is about weighing financial inputs against potential outputs. Meaning, developing a thorough understanding that each click is more than a numerical value for that click. Within PPC there are bidding wars, keyword strategies, and developing an understanding of user intent.

Deciding how much money to spend on PPC campaigns can be tough from a technical perspective. Hennessey Digital has extensive experience working with law firms of various practices and sizes and provides effective SEO and PPC strategies tailored to personal injury lawyers and other practices. Our expertise allows us to offer valuable insights that help shape your overall marketing budget, and our reputation has shown that our motivation is to get you cases, not to artificially inflate your marketing budgets.

If you’re seeking to establish successful PPC campaigns, our expert team is here to assist with the setup, optimization, and management of these campaigns. Don’t let the details of campaign management derail your growth potential from PPC campaigns. Fill out the form below and begin bolstering your online visibility today.

The post What Is the Best PPC Advertising Budget for Personal Injury Law Firm Digital Marketing? appeared first on Hennessey Digital.

What can you do to stay ahead of the competition and make sure your law firm comes up first in the ads? You start by creating your own branded campaign and creating ads to boost your law firm’s visibility.

If you don’t know what a branded campaign is or how it works, no problem. Let’s break it down.

What is a branded campaign?

A branded campaign is a paid media campaign that includes bidding on keywords such as your law firm’s name and other phrases identifiable with your firm. Goals for branded campaigns include increasing the recognition and visibility of your law firm when someone searches for those terms, and driving more qualified leads to your website. Your banded campaign ensures your firm’s ad is seen by those who are searching for your firm by name, by attorney, slogan, and other related keywords. They also help to increase the return on investment (ROI) from your digital marketing since the campaign targets potential customers who are already familiar with your services.

This might seem counterintuitive to your law firm SEO strategy, and make you wonder if you’ll lose organic traffic, but that’s not the case. Branded campaigns boost your overall leads and cases. Since your law firm would be targeting individuals who are already familiar with your services, the likelihood of converting those search queries and leads into actual clients is higher.

Branded campaigns are also a good way to protect your firm’s name and reputation because you have greater control over how your branding and message appears, while working to trump other law firms that may use your name or variations of your name as keywords in their own advertising campaigns. By doing this, you are making sure that potential clients are not misled by ads that falsely claim to be associated with your firm.

Investing in branded campaigns conveys professionalism, authority, and a dedication to quality that builds client trust. Having both a branded ad and an organic position on the first page of the SERP gives you an advantage and allows you to control the message you want to show.

Law firm branded campaign cost

You may be wondering, “How much is this going to cost, and what kind of results can I expect from a branded campaign?” As law firm digital marketing experts, we recommend spending about 5% – 8% of your total Google Ads budget for it to be successful. Since this is a branded campaign, your results should be better than your non-branded campaigns. This means that you can expect a higher click-through rate, higher conversion rate, and ultimately higher ROI. After all, potential clients are looking for your firm by name.

Let’s break down what our data at Hennessey Digital has shown:

• The CTR (click-through rate) of law firm branded campaigns tends to be 3x higher compared to non-branded campaigns
• Cost-per-case is just one-tenth of the average cost-per-case for non-branded campaigns
• Cost-per-lead (CPL) is even lower; in fact, it can be up to 191% cheaper to generate a new lead through branded campaigns than the non-branded campaigns

This is why we strongly recommend incorporating branded campaigns into your law firm’s SEO strategy. It will benefit you more in the near and long term, so it is worth diverting a small portion of your total budget to do it.

Final thoughts

A branded campaign can boost your law firm’s exposure and brand recognition while generating more qualified leads that turn into actual cases. At Hennessey Digital, we incorporate branded campaigns into digital marketing strategies to ensure visibility and make sure advertisements are seen by people who are already familiar with your company or who are searching for your company’s branded terms. Your brand advertising efforts also reinforce trust, stop brand infringement and safeguard your company’s reputation.

Curious to know how Hennessey Digital’s customized approach to branded campaigns can help take your law firm marketing to the next level? Contact us to increase your leads and number of cases with an effective and efficient law firm PPC strategy.

Anthony Fournier, Paid Search Specialist, contributed to this post

The post Why A Branded Paid Search Campaign Is A Must For Your Law Firm appeared first on Hennessey Digital.

Slowly rolled out in 2021, Google Performance Max campaigns allow advertisers to run Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover and Maps ads from one single campaign.

You read that right. All of the major Google Ads platforms in one, convenient package. It feels like the next evolution of Google’s push towards automated campaigns that are comparatively straightforward to set up.

What is Google Performance Max?

According to Google, “Performance Max helps you drive performance based on your specified conversion goals, delivering more conversions and value by optimizing performance in real-time and across channels using Smart Bidding.”

Essentially, you feed Google ad copy, images, videos, audiences, locations, and campaign goals and it serves all across Google ad platforms. You also feed it your conversion goals and budget and you’re off to the races.

The big question here is, is it worth running a Performance Max campaign?

Google Performance Max campaign

The Good

To be fair, there’s a whole lot to like about Google Performance Max.

According to Google, Performance Max campaigns were created to supplement your core campaigns, including search. This means that these campaigns can theoretically run without interfering with your existing campaigns.

While there is certainly cause for concern on potential cannibalization, there are signs that this isn’t a concern and they work in tandem with your existing campaigns.

Additionally, there’s a lot of appeal to the ability to hit several different ad networks with a single campaign. This can significantly decrease the time it takes to prop up campaigns as the asset groups can utilize text, images, and video across multiple platforms without having to create separate campaigns and assets.

Google Performance Max also allows use of smart bidding solutions to drive the action you want a customer to take, from max conversions to target ROAS (return on ad spend). This is great for advertisers who have specific ROAS goals that must be met or want to drive as many actions as possible.

There is also an interesting feature called URL expansion, where you can allow Google’s algorithm to select the best landing page for a customer to land on. This can theoretically help advertisers who have dozens and dozens of pages that may be a “best fit” for a user. This is an optional feature, so Google is also accommodating tighter landing page experiences.

Finally, these campaigns allow the use of audience signals, which gives Google more data on the type of people you want to target. You can use custom segments, remarketing lists, interests, and demographics to show Google the audiences you think are most likely to convert. Google will then expand the audience outside of these parameters. This is great for both hitting existing audience members and those you may be missing out on.

The Bad

So what’s the catch here?

Google Performance Max sounds great, but there are several negatives to consider before going all in.

For starters, you don’t get to select your keywords. Instead, Google will go after users based on what you supply it in terms of landing pages, custom audiences, remarketing audiences, locations, etc. This is a tremendous loss of control for advertisers, especially those with tight keyword needs. There are definitely scenarios where advertisers in niche industries could get irrelevant traffic.

There is also no way to add in negative keywords yet. Google has stated that account-level negatives will be available at some point in the future, but has not set a hard date for when to expect that capability.

One additional item to consider is that Google will automatically create video assets using your display assets if you don’t provide any video content. For brands that want to ensure specific branding, this may be a hurdle too high to clear.

Also, the reporting for Performance Max campaigns has been a bit lackluster thus far. You can’t get metrics at the asset-group level, so it can be difficult to know which asset groups perform better compared to others. This also includes a lack of reporting for audience segments, so it’s tough to pinpoint which audiences are performing and driving your traffic.

Besides the granular issues with Performance Max, it also hits at advertisers’ worst fear: automation. Obviously, Google is full steam ahead with its automation initiatives, from Responsive Search Ads to the auto-apply feature. So this may just be another step towards the dystopian, keyword-less future that gives Google Ads users nightmares.

Is Google Performance Max right for you?

Considering the pros and cons, does Performance Max have a place in your campaigns?

The short answer is yes. There are several potential uses for Google Performance Max:

• Advertisers that are looking to run ads on Google with a limited budget
• Businesses with long sale cycles that want to stay in front of potential customers
• Advertisers looking for a supplemental campaign for the main core campaigns they are running
• To expand the reach where current campaigns are not hitting their max budget
• If an advertiser doesn’t have time to juggle multiple campaigns and wants things condensed into one campaign
• For businesses who are interested in Google Ads but don’t know where to start

However, we don’t think of Google Performance Max as a replacement for your tried-and-true campaigns at this point. Instead, think of it as supplemental pieces that can hit audiences at different points in their customer journey.

What we predict for Google Performance Max

At this point, Google Performance Max is a low-risk proposition that won’t affect your current campaigns. Its features also allow you to reach people outside of your audience that you otherwise may not be able to target.

While improvements are expected, Hennessey Digital feels there is potential for Performance Max to exist in harmony alongside other campaign types. One thing to keep in mind before moving forward is a lack of control and granular reporting compared to other campaigns. And of course, we will be eagerly anticipating the addition of negative keywords.

If Google Performance Max sounds like something that may fit for your business, test it out with a small budget for a few weeks and compare its performance to your other campaigns or marketing efforts.

And if this is something you need help with, our Paid Media team has your back!

The post Google Performance Max: What You Need to Know appeared first on Hennessey Digital.

But for marketers, the search engine results page (SERP) is like prime parking at the stadium: access to the best spot (page one!) is possible—if you’re willing to pay.

In a digital marketing world where companies and merchants compete to snag the best spots, here are a few things about paid search that might surprise you.

Amazon may piggyback off your PPC success

The world’s largest e-commerce search engine has an ace up its sleeve. Did you know if you’re selling a product on Amazon that is getting notices and starts taking off—especially one with a PPC campaign on its ad platform—Amazon may start running its own PPC campaign on Google (think Google Shopping) for your listing?

We saw this happen with Jason Hennessey’s book, Law Firm SEO, which is an Amazon Best Seller and available in-store as well. When searching for the law firm SEO book, it was great to see the glossy red cover appearing in more and more places on the SERP. But how was it appearing in other listings and on unexpected sites? (Thanks, Amazon Advertising and other 3rd-party seller platforms such as Target’s Target Plus!)

For some, this nifty strategy by Amazon is good as it boosts your product’s visibility, but oftentimes that listing will rank higher than yours and outperform your campaign, leading you down an analytics rabbit hole scratching your head about a sudden change in the performance of your once-successful campaign.

It’s also not necessarily great for e-commerce companies who want traffic coming to their listing. The consumer intent is there, as is the interest in your product and potential to convert. When a user arrives via Amazon’s listing, they’re greeted with a spread of competing products, not to mention suggestions of other non-related things they like – and there goes your customer’s intention, and purchase.

Your digital marketing results can improve when paid search and SEO are run together

A few things come into play here that can work in your favor.

Traffic to your website from your PPC campaign signals Google that something about your page appeals to consumers, thus starts to improve your organic listing on the SERP, leading to increased visibility and the potential for more SEO traffic. Seeing your listing twice on the SERP, both in a paid ad and organic listing, also establishes that your company and website are legit.

And what about recall? If your paid search ad catches someone’s attention after appearing in a search on Google, but they didn’t click, they may be apt to do a branded search or another similar search to find you. (Like the display ad you swipe past and wish you could hit the back button to see again.) If your PPC ad isn’t served on the second query, but you appear in the organic listings, voilá – click.

Lastly, one of the greatest benefits rests in the ability to retarget visitors who came to your site via SEO traffic by reaching them during future online activity with PPC advertising and other paid media. This is also known as remarketing.

If budget and bandwidth allow, SEO and Paid Search strategies should co-exist. If you’re curious about which is better for your business – or both, check out this Semrush article.

People may be skeptical of your paid search ad, then go search for you

If you’ve ever looked at a URL on the SERP and wondered if the company was legitimate, you’re not alone. There are people who see a paid ad, distrust it, and open a new tab to Google the company name, especially if they originally clicked through and were taken to a landing page with an off-domain website without consistent branding. Our clients have mentioned it, and being internet users ourselves, a few of us have done it, too.

For example, take the search for “best athletic socks.” You may see an ad for cooljumpropesocks.com and be taken to a page from a company called Feet For All. Immediately, you start wondering if your antivirus protection is up to date and who are you about to call or submit your credit card information to. So you open a new tab and Google “Feet For All,” see it’s an official company, and make your purchase there.

Disclaimer: This fictional example is based on real events and was independently created by a human author and possesses at least some degree of creativity!

It’s an interesting habit, so don’t get so lost in creativity you lose a potential customer, too.

It’s one of the few times in competition where being #1 doesn’t matter

Yes, paid search gives you immediate, relevant, and good visibility. Kind of like seeing your face on the Jumbotron at a baseball game, it feels so good seeing your company at the very top of Google, doesn’t it? But just like having that prime parking position at the stadium, having your ad park two or three spots away might save you a few dollars and give you just as good of results, if not better.

Why? The act of searching is often a starting point. A consumer is looking for information or a solution to their problem. Fast-paced online habits may result in you getting a quick click without the user fully reading your ad or putting thought into it, which could lead to waste.

Which brings me to point two: the first position is expensive, especially for highly competitive keywords. You can bid your way there, but you want to be as efficient with your campaign as possible. Data shows ranking in the top 3 yields strong paid search performance, but spots 2 and 3 might give your budget the discount it needs.

Of course, there are times where this prime position will make sense for you, and your campaign strategy, data and optimization will tell you that.

The future of paid search conversion may not happen on your site but you’ll still want to pay to play

If you’ve been around a while like I have, what paid search ads look like and where they are placed have definitely evolved. Ads once consisting of simply a headline and copy can now include images, direct links to specific pages, or transactions that can take place without the user ever leaving Google. (Not sure how Doc missed this one in Back to the Future, even if the movie came out before search engines existed. Feelin’ old?!)

It’s not hard to imagine we’re a few innovations away from more transactions, lead generation, and revenue-driving conversions happening directly on Google without the consumer ever leaving the SERP or coming to your site.

The downside? A dramatic shift in your website analytics. The plus? Conversions that affect your bottom line.

Remember, Google makes its purpose very clear: to provide the best user experience possible. They want to deliver what the consumer is looking for fast and effectively. As marketers, we’re Google’s real-time guinea pigs for research and development of their products and improving the consumer experience.

Ad products such as Google Ad Extensions already make it possible with their lead form extension, and so do MarTech companies like LockerDome with their interactive widgets for the native advertising space.

Anthony Founier, Paid Search Specialist, and Brandon Caballero, Director of Analytics & CRO, also contributed to this article.

The post 5 Things About Paid Search That Will Surprise You appeared first on Hennessey Digital.

However, the show focused only on the car’s cosmetic defects. Several owners later came out and said the show did nothing to fix the running condition of their cars. Others even had to get thousands of dollars of engine work to get their tricked-out cars to even run after appearing on the show!

Measuring keyword performance

A year after Pimp My Ride premiered, Google Ads introduced its Quality Score. Google Quality Score is a metric for how relevant a keyword is to a user’s search based on thousands of signals from past ad auctions.

Scored from 1 to 10, the idea is that the higher your ad’s Quality Score, the better the performance from that keyword and the more likely your ad will show and get clicked by the user.

For years, Quality Score has been an influential metric in the Google Ads world. Some advertisers prioritize raising their Quality Scores over any other optimizations.

But according to our data, Google Quality Score is not a true indicator of actual keyword performance.

To us, Google Quality Score is exactly like Pimp My Ride.

Yes, Quality Score is a great vanity metric that can indicate that the overall account is healthy. Yes, the exteriors of the cars on Pimp My Ride looked cool (for the time!)

But the show ignored the actual performance of the car. Just because it looks pretty on the outside doesn’t mean that what’s under the hood is running properly.

How a Quality Score is determined

What exactly goes into a Quality Score? According to Google, three variables are used to calculate the quality score of a keyword:

1. Expected click-through rate (CTR), or how likely an ad will be clicked by a user;
2. Ad relevance, or how well an ad answers the intent of a user’s search;
3. Landing page experience, or how relevant the landing page is to the user.

At a high level, it sounds like Google Quality Score should be the perfect metric. It takes these major factors into account as to whether or not a user will ultimately turn into a lead or sale.

But there are several issues with using Google Quality Score as a predictive metric. For starters, it is just that: a prediction. It isn’t a real world measure of your keyword’s performance (more on this later.)

Myths about Google Quality Score

Even Google acknowledges the pitfalls of focusing solely on Quality Score. According to Google, its Quality Score “is not a key performance indicator and should not be optimized or aggregated with the rest of your data,” indicating that Google is reluctant to recommend focusing on Quality Score as a performance metric.

More than a little suspect for a metric that some advertisers tout as their secret sauce!

For advertisers who rely on YouTube and display ads, you’re out of luck as Quality Score is only featured on search ads. (That is, if Quality Score were truly the most important metric. If it were, why wouldn’t Google feature it on display or YouTube where engaging ads are arguably more important than search ads?)

Excluding YouTube and display ads from Google Quality Score feels like a missed opportunity, especially when the audience for these ad types is colder than on search.

Another huge myth about Quality Score is that it factors into the ad auction. This is FALSE. I’ve heard several advertisers say that a high quality score can make your ads cheaper, and this is simply not true. Quality Score is only an anticipated outcome, not the actual outcome. And it is not an input in the ad auction.

Finally, our data tells us that Quality Score is not a good indicator of real-world performance.

What the data shows us about Quality Score

Take a look at these metrics from one of our clients:

Several things stand out here. The elephant in the room is that no Quality Score for these keywords is over 5, with one as low as 3! Our best-converting keyword is sitting at a 5 Quality Score with a below-average expected clickthrough rate. But as the actual metrics show, a 9.9% click-through rate isn’t exactly below average.

Another interesting wrinkle is that our lowest Quality Score keyword also happens to be our lowest cost per conversion in the group. This client’s conversion rate has improved by over 50% compared to their previous paid media partner. The client’s overall lead volume also increased.

Here’s another example from a different client:

This time, we have mostly 5s across the board, with one 7 for good measure. Our highest-volume keywords are sitting at a 5 Quality Score but all have click-through rates over 4. One is as high as 5.32%, above industry standard for this client’s vertical.

What else stands out here is that our 7 has the third-highest cost per conversion of the bunch.  Our cost per conversion has gone down for this client and our cost per sign-up is 30% lower than their previous vendor.

So what does Hennessey Digital advise our clients when it comes to Quality Score?

Our Paid Media team’s recommendation

For pay-per-click campaign success, we ensure that keywords are relevant, the ads are compelling and answer the query of the user, and the landing page is easy to navigate and designed with the conversion in mind.

Our team has observed disconnects between Google Quality Score and actual keyword performance. Because of this, we’ve shifted away from using it as a key metric.

Rather than focus on Quality Score, we pursue the outcome that matters most to our clients: leads. At a basic level, the metrics that matter most are the same metrics we emphasize: conversion rate, click-through rate, etc.

To conclude, Google Quality Score isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. I know I’d rather have a well-running Toyota Camry than a Lamborghini with an engine that won’t start.

(And you probably shouldn’t hire Xzibit to run your Google Ads.)

The post Is Google Quality Score Important? appeared first on Hennessey Digital.