Case Study: Law Firm Targets High Interest Audiences & Lowers CPC
August 31, 2017
Cost per click (CPC) in paid search advertising can be the bane of law firm advertising. In major urban areas, CPC can get so high that it’s difficult to get a return on the campaigns.
Often, law firms come to us struggling with PPC because their campaigns are too broad. They’re targeting broad match, general keywords (like “law firm Dallas” or “divorce attorney” targeting all of Orange County) that are so expensive they’d need Jerry Jones or one of the Kardashians as a client to get ROI on the campaign.
We had a law firm come to Marketing 360® experiencing this problem and also realizing that most of their leads weren’t well qualified for the core services.
Here are the PPC tactics we used to dramatically lower their CPC and improve the targeting of their ads.
Step 1: Target Keywords With Specific Legal Services
First, we analyzed their services and recommended that they focus in on two specific areas of legal representation. These were ERISA disability law and pension law.
This was a move from general attorney keywords they were targeting. Now the main keywords used the seed terms “disability lawyer” and “pension lawyer”.
We created specific ads like this:
This is directed to a specific landing page for the service.
The narrow focus on keywords using exact and phrase match lowered their average cost per click by 84.5%.
The real drop came when they started targeting pension law, which was far less competitive and costly than general attorney keyword targets. In fact, the first page bids were less than $2 per click, which is virtually unheard of with law firm PPC.
Step 2: Targeting the Right Audience
You might be thinking, Ya, it’s great to target specific services like pension law, but the problem is those are low volume keywords that don’t drive enough traffic.
That’s a good point. To get this to work, we had to make a strategic shift in where we targeted the ads.
This firm was simply targeting two major cities in their area. These were broad radius targets covering the entire city, similar to this:
With this general audience, the highly targeted keywords were not reaching enough potential clients.
So we made a shift. Because these services are often sought out by employees of mid to large size companies, we looked over a two state area and targeted specific urban areas primarily zoned for business, including downtown business centers and suburban business parks. We also selected residential areas that fit our main target demographics and scheduled the ads so they only ran in the evenings when people searched on their home computers.
This effectively broadened the geographic area the ads were targeted while limiting it to areas where the target audience was most likely to search.
Bonus Tactic: Bid Adjustments with RLSA Ads
One thing we realized is that many people were researching disability and pension law. That meant they’d leave the website without converting and often do multiple searches on the topics over a period of several weeks.
This was perfect for the strategy of doing bid adjustments with retargeting lists for search ads (RSLA).
With this strategy, we created a retargeting list for people who visited the site but did not convert. Then, we used bid adjustments so we could increase our keyword bids to this list when they conducted a follow-up search. This put us in the top spot for everyone in this audience doing a follow-up search.
The results have been impressive.
- Average cost per click down 84.5%
- Conversion rates up from 1.4% to 11.7%
Best of all, the traffic is far more targeted for their areas of legal representation. In fact, other law firms looking for a place to refer clients for pension law found them and starting sending referrals their way.
With pension law being an area many firms don’t want to deal with, they’re now looking at expanding their campaigns to other cities nationwide and becoming one of the main pension law legal providers in the country.
*Results are based on past client performance. Individual account performance may vary. Results are not guaranteed.
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