Posts Tagged ‘ppc’

As a law firm or independent lawyer, determining where to spend you online marketing budget can be a daunting task. You have so many options, and are competing in a very competitive field. Each click could possibly be a new client eventually worth thousands or hundreds of thousands to the firm. With that kind of value on the line you can bet that firms are willing to pay whatever they have to, to be seen. Is there anything you can do to get the edge?

The simple answer is to be better than your competition. Of course gaining those skills can take a PPC marketer years and a lot of money to be able to compete. Most legal firms decide to do there PPC internally. Often times someone suggested they need to start marketing online and mentioned google and everyone came to the consensus of adsense. The trouble is it doesn’t work out to be so easy, and you are wasting your firms marketing budget. This might be a solution.

Would you recommend that a defendant represent himself in court? Why not? Because no matter how smart they are, law, and being effective in a court room is something that requires years of experience and specific knowledge to become good at. A physhics professor may be smarter than you, but he does not know how to object when a prosecutor makes an unsubstantiated claim.

What your firm should be doing is getting an expert in the field of PPC to manage the campaign for you. The reason is the same reason a PPC expert should hire a lawyer for law advice. PPC marketers spend years honing their skills to stay competitive. Most likely you are competing against them right now if you are advertising online, and you are at a huge disadvantage. Normally a good PPC management firm would charge 15% of your marketing budget + an hourly rate to do the the testing, tweaking, and research. This is not set in stone and is merely an industry average of sorts. Often times other arrangements are made.

A good PPC expert can more than make up for the 15% budget fee. This is because they know what keywords to target, and which ones not to. They also know how to get higher in the rankings without paying more. They also know how to attract only those customers that you want to click on the ads.

This means several things. First, you will improve the mother of all PPC metrics, cost per conversion. The means that your ratio of clicks to conversions will most likely improve, or your cost per click will lower meaning you will have a lower cost per conversion. Usually it is both. This is very good thing. Imagine you have a budget of $10000 per month, and you are currently getting 3000 clicks to your page. That means your are paying $3.33 per click. From that you are getting 100 leads. that is $100 per lead, or 3.3% conversion. If you could make that 6.6% you will have double the leads and your cost per lead is now $50.

That means that you can pay more for successful clicks, and possible even increase your advertising budget because it is so successful. Below are several of the most important factors that effect PPC campaigns. If you are outsourcing to a firm or specialist, they should know these facts inside and out.

Optimizing your landing pages for the keywords you are targeting is extremely important. If you are targeting clients for emergency room malpractice, you want to point them to a page on your site specifically about malpractice law and not your main page. The more specific and relevant you can get the page the better.

Success is all about the testing. Few campaigns are profitable right out of the gate. The key is test every variable. Test dozens of ad variations, test small groups of keywords individually. Keep the best performer through out the others, and test the best performer against a new set of ads.

Analytics makes or breaks the campaign. You cant test properly without a solid analytics program. Without great analytics you cannot tell which words are converting to the desired result, and which ones are eating you budget.

Keyword research is how you determine which keywords to target in the first place. If you do proper keyword research before you even begin an internet marketing campaign, your success rate compared to not doing the research will be astronomical. It is the foundation of all internet marketing.

Law firms like many other businesses often make a very expensive mistake when it comes to marketing law with PPC. Firms are competing in a very competitive market place where one client can be worth thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. With that kind of money at stake, there is a lot to gain or lose. Is there anything the can give your firm the edge?

The simple answer is to be better than your competition. Of course gaining those skills can take a PPC marketer years and a lot of money to be able to compete. Most legal firms decide to do there PPC internally. Often times someone suggested they need to start marketing online and mentioned google and everyone came to the consensus of adsense. The trouble is it doesn’t work out to be so easy, and you are wasting your firms marketing budget. This might be a solution.

Would you recommend that a defendant represent himself in court? Why not? Because no matter how smart they are, law, and being effective in a court room is something that requires years of experience and specific knowledge to become good at. A physhics professor may be smarter than you, but he does not know how to object when a prosecutor makes an unsubstaintiated claim.

If by now you have not figured out what I am trying to tell you, here it is. Let a specialist manage your online marketing! The reason why is that it works. Some people devote years to becoming masters at PPC. That is all they do. This makes them much better at it than you. The industry standard is to charge 15% of your budget, and a hourly rate for set up and management. This isnt how it is always done, but it gives you a starting point.

A good PPC expert can more than make up for the 15% budget fee. This is because they know what keywords to target, and which ones not to. They also know how to get higher in the rankings without paying more. They also know how to attract only those customers that you want to click on the ads.

This results in several effects. The most important effect is that you will decrease your cost per conversion. Cost per conversion is the amount of money it costs you to get whatever you determine is the metric to use. If it is a contact form you are after, than that is the conversion. If it is the sale of a traffic ticket defense package, then that is your conversion. It can be lowered in two ways, less cost per click, or better targeted click. Imagine if you will that you had a marketing budget of $4000 for the month. If you could get 50 leads out of that your cost per lead is $40. If if you could get 100 leads with the same marketing budget, your cost per lead drops to $20.

The implications of this is that your can pay more for your clicks if you have to. Up to double what you would have paid before and still have the same or better results. You may even be able to increase the advertising budget because of its effectiveness. We have comprised a list of several of the most important factors that effect PPC campaigns.

Optimizing your landing pages for the keywords you are targeting is extremely important. If you are targeting clients for emergency room malpractice, you want to point them to a page on your site specifically about malpractice law and not your main page. The more specific and relevent you can get the page the better.

Success is all about the testing. Few campaigns are profitable right out of the gate. The key is test every variable. Test dozens of ad variations, test small groups of keywords individually. Keep the best performer through out the others, and test the best performer against a new set of ads.

Analytics makes or breaks the campaign. You cant test properly without a solid analytics program. Without great analytics you cannot tell which words are converting to the desired result, and which ones are eating you budget.

Keyword Research: You want to find out what your target market is searching for, and how much competition there is. You also want to know the strength of the keywords commercial intent. This means is the person using that word in the discovery phase of the decision cycle, the comparison phase, or the action phase. Start by marketing to the action phased words first. That way you can save on clicks from 15 year old mesothelioma research reports.

As a law firm or independent lawyer, determining where to spend you online marketing budget can be a daunting task. You have so many options, and are competing in a very competitive field. Each click could possibly be a new client eventually worth thousands or hundreds of thousands to the firm. With that kind of value on the line you can bet that firms are willing to pay whatever they have to, to be seen. Is there anything you can do to get the edge?

The simple answer is to be better than your competition. Of course gaining those skills can take a PPC marketer years and a lot of money to be able to compete. Most legal firms decide to do there PPC internally. Often times someone suggested they need to start marketing online and mentioned google and everyone came to the consensus of adsense. The trouble is it doesn’t work out to be so easy, and you are wasting your firms marketing budget. This might be a solution.

Would you ever even consider telling a client to represent themselves in a court of law? Of course not. Forget about the fact the your law firm would not get paid and focus simply on the fact that they do not know what they are doing. When they go up against an experienced prosecutor, they do not stand a chance. Even a Neurosurgeon, as smart as they are, does not have the necessary skills or experience to compete in the at realm.

By now I am sure you have figured out the important point that I am getting at. You need to have someone on your team that specializes in Pay Per Click advertising running you campaign. The reason is that it works. Specialist devote years perfecting strategies to get the maximum return and effectiveness out of a Pay Per Click campaign. While you were in law school, they were in PPC school, or the school of hard knocks learn by trial. The industry standard for a service such as PPC management is about 15% of your total ad budget, and a set hourly fee to create, manage, and tweak the campaign. It is not always structured like this, but this gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect when looking for Law PPC help.

Is it worth 15% You bet. If you get a good firm, the increased effectiveness in your campaign could easily double, if not triple. They know how to make your campaign larger, more targeted, and more effective on the same budget. They can even get the people that see your ads who are not potential clients to not click them and cost you money.

This means several things. First, you will improve the mother of all PPC metrics, cost per conversion. The means that your ratio of clicks to conversions will most likely improve, or your cost per click will lower meaning you will have a lower cost per conversion. Usually it is both. This is very good thing. Imagine you have a budget of $10000 per month, and you are currently getting 3000 clicks to your page. That means your are paying $3.33 per click. From that you are getting 100 leads. that is $100 per lead, or 3.3% conversion. If you could make that 6.6% you will have double the leads and your cost per lead is now $50.

That means that you can pay more for successfull clicks, and possible even increase your advertising budget because it is so successful. Below are several of the most important factors that effect PPC campaigns. If you are outsourcing to a firm or specialist, they should know these facts inside and out.

Optimizing your landing pages for the keywords you are targeting is extremely important. If you are targeting clients for emergency room malpractice, you want to point them to a page on your site specifically about malpractice law and not your main page. The more specific and relevent you can get the page the better.

Success is all about the testing. Few campaigns are profitable right out of the gate. The key is test every variable. Test dozens of ad variations, test small groups of keywords individually. Keep the best performer through out the others, and test the best performer against a new set of ads.

Analytics makes or breaks the campaign. You cant test properly without a solid analytics program. Without great analytics you cannot tell which words are converting to the desired result, and which ones are eating you budget.

Keyword research is essential to let you know several things. What your target market is searching for, how much it will cost, and what the commercial intent is of each keyword. You want to go after the people that are in action mode, not research mode. It will save you from expensive clicks from a 15 year old student researching class action lawsuit.

Finding profitable keywords is the key to a money-making PPC campaign. To find these types of keywords, you will need to use some sort of PPC tracking script. In this article, we will discuss a script named Prosper202.

Prosper202 is the self hosted version of Tracking202, a real-time PPC analytics script. It is completely free to use and you need to install it on your own web host. Keep in mind that if you send a lot of traffic through Prosper202, that it is quite load intensive. I recommend that you install it on a VPS or dedicated server if you are a high volume user.

Once you have everything installed, you will first want to setup your campaigns. Under the setup tab, there is a submenu that displays the various setup steps. You will first need to add in your PPC accounts (ie. Google Adwords, MSN Adcenter, etc) and then input any affiliate networks you are using (Hydra, NeverblueAds, etc).

Next, you will want to enter in the campaign info for the offer or product you are trying to promote. The key part here is the affiliate url. You can get this by logging into the CPA network itself and grabbing the link from the offer page. It is important to make sure the subid parameter is included, as it is different for each CPA network.

You also have the option here of cloaking your tracking link. You should normally do this as you never want anyone to see where your traffic is coming from. Your affiliate manager can figure this out by just checking your referrer. By cloaking your link, the referrer will show up as the domain name of where you installed Prosper202 on, and not the landing page itself.

For PPC campaigns, you can normally direct link to an offer, or send the visitor to a landing page. If you use a landing page, then you will need to put it in as well. Once you have done that, you will get a piece of javascript to install onto your landing page. You will also have to change any links to your offer to the one the Prosper202 gives you as well.

Finally the last required step is to get your link. This is what you will input into your PPC account when setting up your campaign. Depending on the PPC platform you are using, you also may need to add an extra parameter to dynamically track the keyword associated with each click.

If you want to have real-time tracking of the leads you get, you will also need to send the global tracking pixel that Prosper202 gives you to your affiliate manager. They should install it on the offer’s confirmation page and whenever you get a lead, the pixel will fire and it will notify Prosper and update the stats. This is an optional step, but if you don’t do this you will have to manually enter in the converting subids into prosper202 yourself.

With everything setup properly, you should now be able to see exactly which keywords are leading to sales. By removing all the money-losing keywords from your PPC campaign, you should start to see your campaigns start making more and more money. As you can see, having a tracking system like Prosper202 is one of the keys to a successful PPC campaign.

The key to a money making PPC campaign is figuring out which of your keywords convert into leads, and which do not. So how do you figure out which keywords are the profitable ones? Enter Prosper202.

Prosper202 was developed by Wes Mahler of Tracking202, and is free tracking script that offers real-time tracking of your PPC campaigns. You can download the script from their website, and you will need to host it on your own web server. However, it is recommended that if you are planning on sending a large amount of clicks through the script that you make sure and put it on its own dedicated server.

Once you have everything installed, you will first want to setup your campaigns. Under the setup tab, there is a submenu that displays the different setup steps. You will first need to add in your PPC accounts (ie. Google Adwords, MSN Adcenter, etc) and then input any affiliate networks you are using (Hydra, NeverblueAds, etc).

Next, you will want to insert in the necessary info for the particular offer you are planning to send traffic to. The important part here is to enter the correct affiliate url. You can get this from the CPA network you are currently using. Just make sure to include the subid parameter in the url so Prosper202 can pass along the subids correctly.

The campaign page also has the options to rotate urls and cloak your links. Rotating urls can be very useful as it allows you to test multiple offers and figure out which ones convert the best. Cloaking links is necessary because you never want to show your Affiliate Managers your traffic sources. When someone clicks on your cloaked link, the referrer will show up as the domain you have installed Prosper202 on and not your actual landing page.

For PPC campaigns, you can normally direct link to an offer, or send the visitor to a landing page. If you use a landing page, then you will need to enter it in as well. Once you have done that, you will get a snippet of javascript to install onto your landing page. You will also have to change any links to your offer to the one the Prosper202 gives you as well.

Finally the last required step is to get your link. This is what you will input into your PPC account when setting up your campaign. Depending on the PPC platform you are using, you also may need to add an extra parameter to dynamically track the keyword associated with each click.

To enable real-time tracking of your conversions, you can also get the global tracking pixel from Prosper202 and give it to your Affiliate Manager for placement. This pixel should get placed on the confirmation page of the offer you are promoting and will alert the tracking script whenever a lead or sale has been made. This is an optional step, but if you don’t do it, you will have to manually enter in the subids of the converting sales into Prosper202 yourself.

Once you have gotten everything setup, Prosper202 will do the rest. You can see your clicks and leads in real-time using the Spy View, and you can see all the individual stats for each campaign in the overview page. Now you can figure out exactly which keywords are leading to sales and which ones are not. By having this information at your fingertips, you can take out those non converting keywords and start getting your PPC campaign profitable.