Speaker 1: 0:05

How can I lower my cost per click on Google ads? Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen, and today we are talking about everyone's favorite subject saving money. And it's really not just saving money, because what we are talking about today is optimization, and while, yes, that does save us some money, the real reason we do this is so that we can free up more budget in our marketing to generate more leads and then, more importantly, more revenue. And I know we've been through a couple of subjects that aren't the most on the nose marketing subjects in the last few months. So today we are jumping straight back into it and talking about four ways you can lower your cost per click.

Speaker 1: 0:46

Number one we are talking about adjusting your geo-targeting, and I want to talk about your geo-targeting because it's something that's so often overlooked, even today. You would not believe the number of accounts I see where they've been targeting the entire state that the practice is in, even if this practice is really only a local practice and they're only focused on their local market, and I still even see campaigns where a neglectful manager has targeted wait for it all of the US. It's pretty impressive. Honestly, you really have to get out of bed pretty early to make mistakes like this more than every now and again. It's crazy. So here's what I recommend Instead of casting this big wide net, use your existing client data to pinpoint the most lucrative areas. Look at where your best clients are coming from and focus your efforts there. It's simple, and if you don't feel you have enough client data to make these decisions confidently, you can still leverage publicly available income data to refine your targeting. And if you decide to do both well, even better. By narrowing down your target areas, you're not only going to reduce your costs, but you're also going to increase the likelihood of attracting high quality leads. This is about being strategic with your resources, so that we can maximize efficiency with every dollar we spend on Google. And yes, when it comes to your cost per click, this is going to matter.

Speaker 1: 2:08

But number two use negative keywords, and honestly, I really shouldn't have to say this, but I do. Negative keywords at this point are crucial to performance for any legal services business. Advertising on Google. It's just sort of the reality of where we are. There are too many searches in your area and many of them are not going to be good for you. This is true for all law firms, regardless of your size, your practice area, etc. It's true for everyone. But let's be specific. Negative keywords are powerful for you because they help you avoid people who aren't searching for the thing that you sell. If you're very high-end, you should be excluding words like cheap or free or pro bono or legal aid there's a long list of these and if you're in a market where there are other law firms which is, I'm pretty sure, everywhere all of the markets, just all of them then you likely want to be excluding at least your competitors' names from what you're bidding on, because if they're searching for your competitors, they're not searching for you. And again, I really shouldn't have to explain why this is important, but it's really twofold here. We are reducing the amount of money we're spending on irrelevant searches that are never going to convert into clients, and we're actually improving our click-through and conversion rates because we're no longer showing ads to users who are never going to click or convert anyways. So, in a particularly perverse analogy, instead of two birds, one stone, it's kind of one bird, one stone, but we got the bird twice. Anyways, let's move on. Before I have to hire a script editor to take things like this out of my podcast Number three focus on quality score and A-B testing.

Speaker 1: 3:52

When it comes to lowering your cost per click specifically, there is a lot that is in our control. There's a lot in the system that we can change. Pretty much everything in the system is something we can change, but there is one thing that can seem out of our control and it is seemingly out of reach that just little fact of it just seeming like it's right there but we can't change it. It's one of the most frustrating things about trying to do anything you want to do when it comes to quality score, and that's because improving your quality score is pretty simple in theory, but in practice it's like being graded on a test where we're not told what the questions are, and that's why 0.3 here is sort a two-parter, because focusing on and improving your quality score is monumentally important when it comes to how much you're paying for your ads.

Speaker 1: 4:39

Google wants to serve great content to its users, and they built a pretty good reputation on knowing what is and isn't the right content for a search result. But they are also motivated by the amount advertisers are willing to spend to appear on a particular search, and so because of capitalism or market dynamics or some other economics nerd thing that I don't really care about. They have to have some sort of mechanism by which they can fairly rate the value of the content advertisers want to display above or alongside organic results. At least they have to have that mechanism if they want to seem fair. And then that value that they're giving it that tells Google how much to charge you, and et cetera, et cetera. If you need more info on quality score, check out the episode I did on it.

Speaker 1: 5:23

So, because that quality score mechanism is a little bit of a black box, but a very important black box, that's why I'm working so hard on effectively becoming the pope of A-B testing. I extol its values, I preach the importance of single variable tests and I comfort the marketers whose tests produce results that aren't statistically significant enough to decide which of their variants is actually the one true winner. So, yes, you need to focus on improving your quality score. If you want to bring down your cost per click, you do need to focus on improving your quality score. If you want to bring down your cost per click, you do need to focus on this. But this is a two-parter. Because you need to do this with A-B testing, because the odds of getting things exactly right the first time when it comes to this type of marketing are near zero, and when I say near zero, I mean really damn near and the odds of doing it the absolute best way possible on your first try are just actually zero. But I promise that if you're religious in your testing, in your recording of results and your adherence to the principles of true A-B testing, then by the power vested in me and the behemoth that is Google, I declare that you will eventually succeed here. Okay, that was kind of worse than the bird thing, I think. So we're moving on.

Speaker 1: 6:33

Number four promote special offers. This is really one of the things that people overlook a lot, and this is our last, but it's not our least, because promoting special offers what we're talking about here, in the context of law firms and legal services businesses specifically, is usually free consultations or some kind of discount, and today we're not going to get into the economics of this or price psychology, anything like that. I'm just going to talk about how this works and why it works on the search engine results page. But just understand that when I say special offers free consults, discounts, ebooks that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot you can do here to engage people.

Speaker 1: 7:12

Okay, and the short answer for why does this work, why does having an offer work? Is that, essentially, people like free stuff. Even potential clients who aren't particularly cost sensitive like free stuff. You like free stuff. This podcast is free right now and I'm sure half of you will be all up in arms when parts of it are no longer free. And that's because everyone likes things that are free and at least if they aren't excited by a free offer, everyone who doesn't appreciate something free. They appreciate a good deal, and good clients generally appreciate a good deal, and appreciating can be a stretch when I'm talking about everyone.

Speaker 1: 7:49

But look, you get the point here. So, right off the bat, having an offer like this in your ad improves click-through rates. And you may be thinking more clicks just means I spend more money, toby, and that's kind of antithetical to the title of this episode. But ha ha, that's where there's a trick. Sure, more clicks does mean more spend in theory, but a higher click-through rate specifically actually means more preferential treatment from Google.

Speaker 1: 8:18

When Google gives us that quality score we talked about in point number three, they're using a lot of different data to create that number.

Speaker 1: 8:25

Part of that is how your ad is actually performing on that page and part of it is their own analysis of the ad to determine how it compares to historical ads and currently running ads on similar and the exact same keyword.

Speaker 1: 8:38

And frankly, they're really good at this and while I do bash them from time to time, slash a lot and I get frustrated with this particular element of Google ads pretty frequently because clients ask about it and I can't explain it the reality is that Google can always point to the scoreboard and tell me that I'm wrong, because they do do this well. So if we can get users to like what we're offering on the search engine results page and if we can get Google to like what we're offering, this is going to lead to a drop in our cost per click. If Google thinks we're highly relevant, they will reduce our prices in hopes that we will then turn around and increase our budget and scale up even further. Now I may opine in many scenarios that our interests are not aligned with Google all the time, but in this particular case, they absolutely have our backs. That's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out RosenAdvertisingcom for more Thanks.