In this continuing series for specific industries, I’m covering Google Ads for legal services.
This includes lawyers and legal firms that offer a variety services for both businesses and consumers. As with the other niches I’m writing about, we work with quite a few legal services clients.
DISCLOSURE: Some of the products mentioned in this post may contain affiliate links that at no additional cost to you, we may earn a small commission. Importantly, we only promote products that we use ourselves.
Scope & Constraints
The strategies and tactics outlined broadly apply to most advertisers offering legal services. However, every business is unique, so every Google Ads implementation needs to be as well. This article alone shouldn’t be the basis for building and optimizing your Google Ads campaigns. You should always work with an experienced Google Ads expert or take comprehensive training before making this type of investment.
Industry Description
The legal services industry is absolutely massive. The post relates to companies that offer the following services:
- corporate law, e.g. contracts and incorporation
- tax law
- family law
- civil litigation
- criminal litigation
- real estate law, e.g. property closing
- intellectual property law
- estate planning law
Google Ads Eccentricities
In this section, I’ll cover some specific things you need to be aware of when running Google Ads for legal services.
Very High Average CPCs
High value legal services such as civil litigation come with similarly high average CPCs. This means that advertisers need to spend fairly high monthly budgets to generate a healthy volume of conversions. Not doing so can make getting consistent results, using automated bidding, and optimizing campaigns nearly impossible.
One obvious trick here is to use portfolio bidding so that you can set a hard max CPC you’re willing to pay. This can help avoid paying sky-high CPCs that spend your daily budget with a single click. Of course getting this number right will take some time if you don’t have experience or haven’t run campaigns for this legal offer before.
Restricted Tax Services
If you’re a tax attorney, you may fall into Google’s “debt services” category. And, if you’re not a licensed insolvency trustee you’re going to get stuck with disapproved ads and seemingly no way to resolve it. We work with a number of clients that fall into this gap and have the secret sauce to get ads approved. Feel free to reach out to us directly if you’re dealing with this specific problem.
Search Campaigns
The vast majority of ad spend for legal services advertisers should be invested into search ads.
Ensure you have enough budget per campaign to ideally drive 25+ conversions per month. I would include campaigns for branded and topical search. We generally don’t run ads targeting competitors for our legal clients. Often most of those clicks are from people that have already engaged with the competitor and will eat up your budget really quickly.
If you don’t think you can achieve at least 15 conversions per month you should be using manual or ECPC bidding to start. Both max clicks and max conversions bidding will eat your budget really quickly. If you believe you can achieve at least 15 conversions per month I recommend setting up a portfolio tCPA strategy along with a max CPC limit. If you’re not sure where to set this I would start with your daily campaign budget divided by 5. This means worst case scenario you should aways be able to purchase at least 5 clicks and probably a lot more each day. If you start and aren’t spending, however, you might have to ratchet your max CPC up quite a bit and/or raise your budget in the process.
To make life easier I recommend including an appointment scheduler, contact form, and direct phone number on your landing page. This will maximize your opportunities for conversions and help drive up your volume. Also, rather than blocking unqualified prospects or not tracking them, I recommend tracking them but using a lower conversion value and implementing value-based bidding.
Always keep your keyword themes tight and start with phrase-match keywords. Once you’re making your numbers you can scale your budget and experiment with broad match. Just keep in mind that with a very high potential CPC to do this slowly adding a few broad match keywords at a time and monitoring your search terms reports frequently for negative keyword opportunities.
Remarketing Campaigns
Once you’ve got your search campaign(s) dialed in you should build out remarketing. While display can still work okay we generally go with Google’s new Demand Gen campaign types. This runs on Google’s own higher quality inventory (newsfeed, gmail, and youtube) rather on 3rd party sites. As such the CPC is much higher on average but the click quality is substantially better, the network is mostly free of click fraud, and conversion tracking is much more robust.
For legal services you should run to all previous website visitors that didn’t convert. Testing different membership lengths from 10-days up to 180-days is a good place to start. If you have a fairly high volume of visitors you might also segment based on time on site or number of pages visited.
You don’t need to get fancy here, just repeat your offer and try to bring them back with responsive display and/or video ads. Start running with Max conversions and consider setting a tCPA once you’re getting a good volume of conversions from the campaign, at least 10+ per month.
Also, don’t forget to exclude everybody that has already contacted you, (a) to eliminate unnecessary spend and (b) to avoid annoying prospects that have already probably booked or had a call with you.
Normally, budgets for remarketing are small compared to search, particularly when you pay a high average CPC. I would start at no more than 5% of your account budget but at least $10/day. Ramp up when you’re easily spending your budget and getting a reasonable CPA.
Performance-Max Campaigns
If you’re already getting around 50 conversions per month with paid search and remarketing you may consider adding P-Max into the mix. P-Max will automatically find additional keywords that drive incremental conversions and work up the funnel to raise awareness too. Over time, this can help drive higher CTRs and CVRs through your other Google Ads campaigns and channels like organic search.
Aim for 25 conversions/month. Any less, and you might find big performance swings from one week to the next. I’ve written a guide on how to set up P-Max, which is applicable here.
For optimal performance, consider these two Google Ads strategies:
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Separate Branded Search Campaigns: Run your brand-related keywords in a dedicated search campaign. This allows for more control and potentially lower costs compared to including them in Performance Max campaigns. You can block branded terms from P-Max using brand exclusions.
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Account-Level Negative Keywords: Add your main list of negative keywords (up to 1,000) to the account-level negative keyword list. This prevents your ads from showing on irrelevant searches and placements across all campaign types, including P-Max, display, search, and video campaigns.
In short, this keeps your campaigns focused and cost-effective.
Other Campaign Types
If your account budget is substantial (approximately $25,000/month or more), you might consider running video, targeted display such as Demand Gen, and display campaigns independently of the P-Max campaign. Remember that although this approach will provide you with enhanced insights and greater campaign control, you could notice a potential decrease in overall performance. These campaigns should be oriented more towards pure branding and influencing decision-making. It’s important not to gauge their success solely based on CPA (Cost Per Acquisition).
Campaign Optimization Notes
The search terms report is your friend when you’re paying a high average CPC. Include a summary review every time you perform optimization and a take a deep dive slicing and dicing the report with filters at least once a month. Add back any winners and block any losers with negatives.
Offers from your competitors will often be fairly similar to yours. You main competitive advantage will be great creative. Never stop working to improve your ads, work with ad variations to test different headlines and descriptions at scale. And I strongly recommend A/B testing for your landing page which could be done with Unbounce or a similar landing page solution.
Tools and Other Tips
As explained above, I strongly recommend tracking your paid sign-ups and values as additional conversions. If so, you should use some tracking solution that will facilitate this. CallRail can be a decent option, noting that you’d still need to upload offline conversions manually.
Using Unbounce to optimize your landing page(s) can slowly improve your conversion rates over time thus stretching your budget to drive more leads at a more efficient cost. And the larger conversion dataset will further unlock campaign optimization opportunities and facilitate better bidding.
Summary
Google Ads for Legal Services can be challenging with very high average CPCs due the competitive nature of the niche. A well-designed initial campaign build and optimization execution are paramount for success with Google Ads. You can take your campaign performance to the next level by introducing value-based bidding and scoring your leads on the back-end.
In addition, developing an effective landing page and implementing A/B testing and help you improve campaign performance over time.
