In PPC Ad Management: Cost-Effective Campaign Settings, Part 1 we discussed the basic Adwords campaign settings, and gave you tips on how to use them to your best advantage. We take the process a step further today and talk about two of the advanced settings, Ad Serving and Networks. Adjusting and monitoring these settings can save you a bundle on your online advertising.

PPC or pay per click is a type of advertising in which web publishers generate revenue each time a visitor clicks on an ad. In terms of searches, the first two or three ads at the top of the results page, along with the block ads down the right side of the screen, are PPC ads. The other listings are termed “natural” or “organic.”

Why are PPC listings popular when organic search is free?

• PPC campaign management is quicker and easier than SEO (search engine optimization), which is used to boost listings in organic search.
• PPC accounts are easy to set up and immediate traffic boosts are almost certain.
• PPC landing pages are easy to test.

If you are interested in creating a PPC marketing campaign, you need to understand the advanced settings on your user interface. The following are settings you can’t afford to overlook.

Ad serving:

Ad serving describes the frequency and manner in which your PPC ads are presented. The default setting is “Optimize” which means the ads within your campaign will be served up depending on their past click-through popularity. If one ad is getting more clicks, Google will serve it up more frequently. This makes is difficult for you to determine which ad is actually providing better leads for you, since one ad is generally being offered up significantly more than the others.

By changing the Ad Serving setting from “Optimize” to “Rotate” you will have a more accurate idea of which ad is the best performer in terms of generating quality leads for you. Each ad will be served up in turn, no matter its past click-through popularity.

Networks:

By default your PPC Adwords ads are set to show up not just on Google, but on its partner networks (currently including Ask and AOL, and AdSense publisher websites). Your cost-per-click setting carries over onto all these sites, again by default. A savvy PPC advertiser knows to change this setting so that the ads carry different (usually lower) cost-per-click amounts for the AdSense publisher sites and other partner search engines. Closely monitor the ad performance at these lower rates, and adjust your cost-per-click amounts as needed to get the most bang for your buck.

By adjusting these two advanced settings and then closely monitoring the results, your PPC Adwords campaigns will run more efficiently, save you money, and more than likely result in higher quality leads. Find out more about how to get the most out of your website in our SEO in 30 Days series.

Pay Per Click marketing, also referred to as PPC, is a relatively inexpensive solution for marketers to reach consumers online. While banner ads may require you to pay by impression, PPC advertising allows marketers to pay when their ad is clicked. The most common type of Pay Per Click marketing is completed on search engines. Paid Search Ads are typically displayed on the top or right hand side of a search engine result page. Most search engines require advertisers to bid on specific keywords in order to appear in the paid search results.

Paid Search Advertising has many benefits. Some of these include: the ability to see immediate results, its low budget opportunities, and the ability to measure its success. In order to have a truly successful PPC search marketing campaign, there are several “Campaign Settings” that you should take advantage of. Some of these include: Conversion Tracking, Geographic Settings, Automatic Matching, and Rotate Functions.

Tip #1
Double-check your conversion tracking settings because this can be confusing. If your campaign was created years ago, it may be out of date. Look over your conversion tracking settings very carefully, and be sure that your tracking the right thing.

Tip #2
If you have an online advertising campaign in multiple countries, regions, or states, be sure to adjust your geographic settings. There are many options to consider, so don’t rush through these. If you are working with a campaign that is being run in multiple countries or regions, it may make sense to separate each country into its own campaign or Ad Group. This will allow you to eliminate excess spend as each region often has a different cost for a keyword.

Tip #3
Be careful with “Automatic matching” settings. Seofaststart.com said it best: “Don’t fall for this.” This setting can cause you to bid on keywords unrelated to your actual campaign.

Tip #4
Test multiple ads by using the “Rotate Function.” The “Optimize” function can be helpful, but it will not allow you to get a strong picture of what ads are performing the best. Set up 4-16 ads in one Ad Group, and find out which ads are really doing the best.

By paying attention to the details of your ad campaigns and being mindful of your campaign settings, pay-per-click advertising can be a cost-effective and financially rewarding experience. Stayed tuned for Part 2, a discussion of more advanced PPC campaign settings and how to leverage them to the benefit of your business.

In PPC Landing Pages, Part 1 we defined pay-per-click advertising and discussed the importance of landing pages. In Part 2 we’ll cover the elements of an effective PPC landing page.

A well-designed landing page is important to the success of any law firm pay-per-click advertising campaign. These pages engage your visitors and prompt them to take immediate action, increasing your conversions.

What is a well-designed PPC landing page? It’s one that visitors can immediately identify as related to the ad they clicked. Web surfers have a very short attention span, so without that initial recognition, they are likely to leave without trying too hard to find what they are looking for.

Successful PPC landing pages tend to have:

• A headline that mirrors the ad: If your PPC ad promotes your services as a Napa family lawyer, the first thing your visitor should see, at the top left of the page, is the words “family law,” not something about, say, incorporating a business. Many law firms practice more than one area of law. Keep your landing pages focused on just the area highlighted in the PPC ad.
• Bullet points: Visitors who click on your PPC ad are busy and want to quickly figure out what you can do for them. Instead of long, tedious paragraphs, use short, snappy phrases presented as bullet points to draw the eye and get your point across efficiently.
• A prominent call to action: Place it “above the fold,” that is, make sure it is visible without having to scroll down the page. Present it as a big button or bold, oversized words that grab your visitors’ attention and tell them what to do next, whether it’s “Ask us now” or “Request your free consultation.” Avoid the generic “click here,” which is boring and unclear.
• Graphics: A page of plain text is dull, even with ample use of bullet points. Graphics can create a more pleasing presentation, just don’t overdo it. Keep images small and related to your service: happy people signing a contract, for example.
• Limited off-page navigation: Visitors click a PPC ad for a specific reason, so don’t encourage them to browse your site at this point. Other than the call to action, include links only to a privacy policy and either an About Us page or a Contact Us page, for people who need more information before committing. These links should be significantly smaller than the call to action, but still easy to find.

Remember to keep each ad campaign tightly focused to a single message. Since lawyers often provide multiple services, PPC for law firms might involve several ad campaigns, each spotlighting a different service.

On February 7, 2010 an explosion ripped through the Kleen Energy power plant in Middletown, Connecticut, killing five workers and injuring a dozen more. The blast, determined to have occurred while workers were purging a natural gas pipeline, caused property damage to the surrounding communities, and was heard as far as 20 miles away from Middletown, a southern suburb of Hartford.

Local police, fire fighters, search and rescue teams, and emergency crews were the first to respond, followed by forensic scientists, OSHA and other groups. This is fairly standard. But another, now-standard response also began – the response by some Hartford-area personal injury and workers compensation lawyers.

While more traditional methods of speaking with the families of victims and the injured were employed by the local attorneys, two Connecticut firms utilized online marketing to reach out to potential clients. How?

A search on Google for “Middletown explosion” brings up a local firm’s ad via Google’s “pay per click” keyword-driven advertising system. The ad headline: “Gas Explosion Cases – CT.” Clicking on this ad brings you to the personal injury law firm’s website.

Another firm created a series of eight videos about the explosion and posted them on YouTube. The videos are set up like news interviews, with the law firm partner answering questions on filing workers compensation claims and other related topics. Links to the law firm’s website are next to each video.

Without being able to see the number of click-throughs the ad is getting or knowing how many clients (if any) each firm has acquired as a result of these activities, we can’t know the specific outcomes of these firms’ online marketing efforts. The number of views of the videos on YouTube is not all that high, but, according to a Small Firm Business article, the firm does claim to have gotten one client via the videos.

Regardless, these attorneys have the right idea: a powerful way to reach the maximum number of people around a specific topic is under your fingers. Millions of searches are performed daily. For the cost of a few videos, or a modest budget for a pay-per-click ad, you can get your firm’s message out to hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of people. Even if it doesn’t result in a client right away, it does give you and your firm exposure, and a stronger online presence.

While doing a webinar on Advanced SEM, some SEO & PPC questions were asked that I thought deserved to be answered here on this public forum. These will be published in part or in whole on the LexisNexis site at some point, I believe, but here’s a sneak peek at this SEM Q&A session:

D.D.
What are the most important metrics to track using web analytics software?

1. Unique visitors per day or per month
2. Page Views per visitor
3. Time on Site per visitor
4. Conversions
5. Referring URLs
6. Referring Keywords

D.P.
Why do you recommend a 300-word per-page max. for content? If I have a 4000 word article, I must break it up into 15 pages will people read it?

300 words per page is a general recommendation for keeping the content to a length that’s able to be digested by viewers and the search engines. It’s not a hard and fast rule, though. If you have a 4000 word article, I would likely break it up into 4-8 pages OR, better yet, break it up into pages according to the sub-topics within that 4000 word article.

Another way to look at it: you’ll have better luck targeting 10 keywords with 10 pages about each of those topics than 10 keywords against 1 page of content.

D.P.
Does subscription to an article publishing service who post links back, constitute buying or selling links that pass PageRank?

Without knowing more, it’s difficult to say – they could be distributing your work to hundreds of websites in a spammy way or they could be simply distributing your article to a select few publishers, which would be fine. Either way, article publishing services wouldn’t really be viewed as a paid link but it might fall under scrutiny because of a propensity to post to too many places too quickly.

D. G-H
re. link building, would link referrals to other atty that practice other practice areas be o.k.? what about having a reciprical link from that atty?

As part of a larger link development strategy, reciprocal linking between quality websites is just fine and will help rankings a bit. Reciprocal links aren’t as valuable as 1 way links and make sure the sites you’re linking to are reputable.

D.D.
Is it better to have an independent blog that links to your website or integrate the blog on your website?

Depending on the circumstances of the firm, either approach can help drive clients to the law firm. But my short answer is, ultimately, the best place to have a blog is as a directory within your larger website. (www.firmname.com/blog/) This is because that blog’s posts will grow your larger site’s breadth and, importantly, your main URL will be the one people cite when they talk about your blog.

B. W.
Any suggestions for the best approach to obtaining links from EDU sites such as local law schools? My experience is they are fairly resistant to requests from local law firms.

EDU links are tough to get, so I don’t have a great answer for you. Leverage relationships you may still have with professors for a backlink. Develop content that’s useful to a group of professors and let them know about it in hopes that they’ll link to it. Look for EDU blogs that allow comments or post trackbacks.

D. Y.
I work for a large family law firm that focuses on clientele with large assets and complex financial matters – what is the best way to market to this demographic when typical people online do not represent our intended client. Should we avoid PPC?

Given the description of your clientele, it’s likely that referrals, networking and word of mouth advertising generate the most business for your firm. Many “B2B” firms are in a similar position. For niches like this, I’d first suggest that you continue to build those personal networks that have proven to work in the past. Consider B2B tools like Martindale.com to improve your referrals. Perhaps social networking through LinkedIn can help extend your contacts to new clients. Of course local advertising and face to face communication are great ideas too. But don’t forget about PPC quite yet.

The great thing about PPC is that you only pay for the visitors that click on your ad. Let’s say you bid on a keyword that only gets searched a few times a month and costs almost nothing per click… but it’s something your firm does extremely well and at a high margin. Let’s say “million dollar estate settlement lawyer” is that phrase. PPC would make sense for your firm to use so they can make sure that IF a potential client for that “rich” keyword does do an Internet search, they see your firm’s ad. If it rakes in the clients, great, if not, you’re not paying for much anyway. The only mistake would be to bid on too-general keywords or keywords for services that don’t yield much profit.

J. M.
How can you prevent ‘phantom’ clicking on a PPC campaign? I once knew a guy whose full time job was to surf the web and click on websites to trigger ‘PPC’ entries. He was paid for each one he found (from a list) – is this still being done?

There are always going to be scammers who set out to defraud the PPC systems by clicking on ads with no intent to buy/transact. Some click fraud is from organized crime, other simply from over-zealous competitors. The major pay per click systems (like Google, Yahoo and Bing) are the group doing the most to fight this sort of activity by tracking clicks per IP address and “hundreds of different factors”. A great resource to give in-depth answers about click fraud prevention can be found here: http://www.google.com/adwords/adtrafficquality/. You can also report suspected click fraud if you supply the PPC ad system with details of the suspicious activity.

D. F.
how do you find out they are bouncing?

Defined, “bounce rate” measures the percentage of web site visitors who arrive at a web site entry page, then leave without going any deeper into the site. This is a metric that’s available on the front page of the Google Analytics reporting panel. For systems that don’t specifically report “bounce rate”, an effective metric for judging visitor engagement is number of page views per visitor.

B. W.
What is the cost/benefit analysis for pay for click? How much can you expect to spend to make pay for click worthwhile?

I’m afraid the answer is… it depends by industry, by competitiveness of the keywords and by the quality of the website to which you’re sending the PPC traffic. Of course, the margin on the product or service you sell also comes into play when you’re talking profitability.

Let me paint a typical scenario, though.

1. I’m a widget manufacturer.
2. My widget average sale value is $500 and, on that, I make $350 profit.
3. I can use PPC to pay $5.00 per click to my website.
4. My website typically can turn every 100 clicks/visitors into 1 sale.

Q: Is this PPC campaign worthwhile?
A: you paid $500 for those 100 clicks. At a 1% conversion rate (1 sale out of 100 clicks), you’ve only made $350.00. No, the PPC campaign wasn’t worthwhile, unless you start to work to increase your conversion rate and reduce your keyword costs. If you could just change it so 2 customers out of every 100 made a purchase, you’d make $700 on your $500 PPC investment.

Most lawyers have a low visitor-to-client conversion rate but a very, very high conversion value per client. As a lawyer, you have to know the value of the average new client and balance that against your PPC spend. If each new client was worth $1,000 to you and your website gets %0.25 conversion, the PPC campaign is still worth while if you’re able to drive 40 visitors for under $1,000.

S. T.
Do people really like contact forms? It seems to be impersonal to me.

We’ve found that three to four times more people tend to pick up the phone and call a law firm from their website rather than fill out a web contact form. That’s why we stress the importance of using a unique call tracking number on our SEO clients’ websites: to enable firms to track the phone as well as web contact form submissions.

D. Y.
Our web developer raised concerns about Google Analytics visitor privacy and accuracy. Is this something that we should be concerned about?

I haven’t heard anything major about Google Analytics privacy concerns beyond the standard: they aggregate data from Analytics, the Google Toolbar, your sign-in history, etc. With all of those things, they can paint a pretty accurate picture of a user by their behavior. (But then again, doesn’t your grocery store “savers club” card invade privacy more???)

One thread I did read about Google Analytics, its use and relation to a site’s privacy policy is here: http://eric.openflows.com/node/25. In that article, the author posits, “If your privacy statement says that “we log hits to our website by IP number and use that data to better understand how people use our site. No private information about our users is stored and no private data is shared with any company” AND you are using Google Analytics, you are breaking the law. You have violated your privacy statement.” So there is a need to review your privacy policy if using Google Analytics.

As far as accuracy: their system is as accurate as web analytics is able to be. There may be differences in how they count a “unique visitor” as opposed to how WebTrends counts them but I haven’t read anything about Google Analytics being inherently inaccurate.

B. W.
How many blog posts per day are recommended?

I’ve seen blogs gain readership and SEO rankings by blogging as little as once a month but I’d recommend once a week posts. Once a day posting is a great goal, but probably not attainable given many lawyers’ schedule.

R. M.
Any thoughts about using Facebook & Twitter in a SEM/SEO campaign?

I’ve personally never seen Facebook do much for anyone but sports, music and entertainment lawyers. As far as Twitter goes: it’s a large investment in time, but can pay off very well. See http://legalblogwatch.typepad.com/legal_blog_watch/2009/09/im-a-fan-of-twitter-and-have-been-using-the-service-since-early-this-year-both-personally-brucecarton-and-as-a-news-feed.html

R. K.
How is a “blog” different than what we used to call a bulletin board?

Ah! I remember the old BBS days. They were the greatest: a place where a network of users could post files, programs, etc. I suppose they’re similar in that they both encourage two way conversations (post/reply) and they both operate with the idea of a “community” behind them. The same could be said of the best phpBB “discussion forums” today.

But blogs differ significantly in that i) they’re available with little/no barrier to entry, so a wider audience can create blogs and/or participate; ii) blogs are focused more on topical articles than on single ideas or items; iii) blogs carry better META information than BBS systems did so they’re more accessible and iv) RSS feeds, trackbacks, pings, plugins, etc. all make the functionality of blogs far more extend-able than BBS or phpBB systems. It’s a great topic for further consideration, though.

J. M.
is a 60% a reasonable bounce rate?

Short answer: as an overall number, for “organic” traffic, yes, 60% is reasonable. 70% or more would indicate poorly targeted traffic. Bounce rates in the 40-60% range usually indicate that tweaking your content, layout or load time would make for a better experience.

For PPC traffic (where you’re paying for every click and directly determine the targeting, ad copy and landing page of the campaign) I’d expect my bounce rate to be in the 40% range or less.

D. M.
I was approached by a marketing/advertising company last week regarding” Google Top Ten List” – Provided information that to maintain a position on the first page of a Google search, $2500 yr. Is this a new market for Google? I am assuming that this is not accurate; however, is there a possibility in the future?

Easy answer, do not trust any company guaranteeing you top results in Google, particularly for “organic” or natural traffic. Sure, they can pay to get top spots in PPC listings and perhaps take payment to optimize your website and Google Local profile but their guarantee to attain, if not maintain, those rankings inevitably will have an “out” for the firm. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291
“Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google.”

Hope these questions and answers helped any do-it-yourself lawyers or CMOs out there who are weighing your time investment versus return. SEO and PPC Questions are always welcome through comments on this post!

Pay per click (or “PPC“) advertising is familiar to most people as those tiny ads that show up along the top and right column of Google and Yahoo sponsored search results. As little as 2 years ago, money ruled the paid advertising marketplace – he who had the most $ got the number one spot. More recently, Google AdWords has added a Quality Score or “QS” to how paid ads are ranked. This makes sure the ad and landing page both talk about the keyword being bid upon. Money + Quality = better placement within the sponsored results. So, what are the top PPC management tips in this new age of “QS” if you’re going to maximize traffic and minimize cost?

1. Base your paid advertising keywords on your website’s copy – if you don’t talk about it on your site, don’t bid on it. Conversely, if you want to break into a new area of practice, add content to your site first.
2. Segment your ad groups based upon your site’s available landing pages. The search engines like to see that you’re delivering visitors to a page appropriate for their query.
3. Make sure you use your target geography and as many keywords as reasonably possible in your advertisement itself. State that you are Ft Lauderdale lawyers or an Ohio criminal lawyer
4. Create multiple ads per ad group. Hey, let the search engine test and choose the best copy.
5. Turn off Content Match. Too often, this is nothing but a moneypit.

These five things alone can significantly improve the performance of most legal, paid advertising campaigns. Of course, if the website you’ve built to receive these visitors is of poor quality or without clear contact methods, even a huge volume of traffic will result in little business for your firm. These recommendations assume your website is able to convert PPC traffic to leads.

See Also:

• AdWords help center
• Yahoo! Sponsored Search guidelines
• SpyFu.com – find out what the competition is doing

[tags]PPC Management[/tags]