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PPC Advertising

PPC Advertising

 

Everything About PPC Advertising

Starting your PPC campaign can seem like a giant headache: how do you make sure that your PPC advertising works and doesn't cost more than you can afford?  This guide will help you sort out the basics of PPC advertising, including common pitfalls for your law firm to avoid as well as strategies to maximize your conversions and clicks.  You'll also learn how the best PPC campaign strategies can depend largely on the size of your firm and the amount that you can budget for your pay per click ads.

PPC Campaign Management: Common Pitfalls

When you begin working with PPC advertising, it can be tempting to start with just one ad group leading to a single landing page on your website.  While this is certainly the easiest way to begin your PPC campaign, it also takes many of your options for PPC campaign management away.  Without running multiple campaigns, it's very difficult to see what's working well for your firm and what is failing.  While it's possible to run a successful PPC campaign without multiple ad groups, it's very difficult—and why would you want to miss out on valuable information?

You may also want to avoid having your bids managed by the same company that is profiting from those bids.  While bid management tools from Google and Yahoo can be easy to use, they also take away some of your control, and work mostly to maximize the profit to the search engine, not to your law firm.  You may want to look into obtaining third party software to make sure that your PPC campaign is working for you, not for Google.

One of the other big mistakes made by beginners to PPC advertising is spending too much on bids.  This usually happens for one of two reasons: either your PPC campaign is not focused enough on a niche target, or your PPC campaign management strategy has involved bidding too high for keywords.  Expensive “prestige keywords” can cost a great deal of money without offering great conversion rates.  If you always have the top bid for a particular keyword, you may be overpaying for your PPC advertising without seeing the results you were hoping for.

PPC Campaign Management: Landing Pages

One of the most important aspects of your PPC advertising involves where your potential clients go when they click on one of your advertisements.  Many firms that are new to running a PPC campaign make the mistake of having advertisements go to their law firm home page.  However, especially if your firm handles several different types of cases and is using multiple ad groups, you should consider making separate landing pages to get the best conversion rates.

PPC advertising that goes just to your home page requires clients to go through multiple clicks just to find what they're looking for.  By creating targeted landing pages, your PPC campaign ad goes right to the information your client wants.  Today's internet depends on instant gratification: if your clients can't get the information they want within that first click or two, your PPC advertising is likely to fail.

PPC Campaign Management: Learning From Your Campaign

Every PPC campaign that you run can give you valuable information about how to run future campaigns.  You may want to get some third party PPC advertising tools to help you learn how an individual PPC campaign went and what you might be able to do in order to maximize future returns.  You may want to examine which niches have been generating the most clients for your firm and either strengthen your advertising for those niches or use the same PPC advertising techniques for your other niches.

Especially when you're buying very targeted, lower cost keywords, you can afford to experiment.  Remember that trying something new with your niche marketing won't always work, but you should be careful not to give up too quickly.  Sometimes a new PPC campaign strategy will take time to work, and your PPC advertising may be more effective at a certain time of day or even a certain time of year.

PPC Campaign Management Strategies

When you begin to experiment with PPC advertising, you should think of it as science.  Much like with any type of science, having a clear hypothesis in mind before you begin experimenting can help you to get the best results.  Instead of just saying “I want to try a bunch of PPC campaign strategies and see which ads stick,” think about a question that you have about PPC campaign management.  Do you want to see if “exact match” gets better results for your ads than “close match”?  Do you want to see how much your click rate increases when your bids are toward the top?

No matter what your hypothesis is, it's also important to be honest when looking at the results of your PPC advertising strategies.  If one PPC campaign didn't work, or your hypothesis was incorrect, remember that this information isn't bad—it's great!  Knowing what doesn't work can be as important as knowing what works when you're working with PPC campaign management.

Complete PPC Campaign Management Services

If your firm has a large budget for PPC advertising, you may want to look into having your PPC campaign managed by a specialized marketing firm.  Make sure that if you are using the services of one of these firms, they allow you access to any data that is generated from your PPC advertising.  Without this data, you will have to start over from scratch if you need to hire a new company to handle your PPC campaign management.

A good marketing service will be able to show you how your campaign is working and what ad groups are most profitable for your law firm.  Even if you can't afford dedicated PPC campaign management services, you may still want to purchase PPC advertising software.  This can help you to analyze the results of a PPC campaign so that you can maximize profits on future campaigns, without the costs of hiring professionals to do the analysis for you.

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