Speaker 1: 0:02

How do I tactically expand my reach on Google Ads or my budget, or just spend more in general? Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen. When it comes to Google Ads, every dollar counts, especially in this industry, where we're fighting against law firms that have gigantic six-figure marketing budgets. And the reality is, look, the strategic allocation of your budget is what makes the difference between wasted spend and high value leads walking through your door. So let's break down how we do this strategically. We're getting straight into it, and the three key areas we're going to talk about today are keywords, geo-targeting and timing.

Speaker 1: 0:43

First, we want to prioritize high intent keywords because, look, not all keywords and not all clicks are created equal High intent keywords like city personal injury lawyer or divorce attorney near me. They attract users who are actively searching for your services. When I say city, you can replace that with any city out there. These are the people who are searching on these terms. These are the people who are most likely to convert into clients. Generic terms like legal advice they're going to bring in some traffic, for sure, but they're usually too broad to generate real leads. Instead, we need to allocate our budget towards specific, action-oriented keywords. This approach improves our quality score, it lowers our cost per click and it boosts our overall return on investment. But here's one of the tricks Don't forget to use negative keywords to filter out irrelevant traffic. We've talked about this on the podcast before. So if you're not handling criminal cases and you have terms like legal advice or legal tips in your keywords again I don't recommend doing this. But let's just say you do add terms to your negative keyword list like criminal defense or DUI lawyer. This ensures that your ads only appear to the right audience and doesn't appear on these other high intent searches for different areas in your practice area.

Speaker 1: 2:06

And when it comes to areas, we need to talk about location. For law firms, location is everything they say. That's for real estate, but it's really the truth for law firms too. Most potential clients, they want someone local, and that's where geo-targeting comes in when it comes to ads. So we want to start by narrowing our targeting to specific regions, zip codes even, or a radius around the office, depending on how we want to target our campaign and where our potential audience is. This may or may not work, but in general, we want to be narrow. So if our practice thrives on cases from affluent neighborhoods or areas with high car accident rates. That's where we want to focus the ads. This ensures that our budget isn't wasted on clicks that are maybe not outside our service area, but just outside the area of where our ideal clients are or live or are working. Google Ads also lets us adjust our bids by location, so not only can we just turn areas on and off, but we can prioritize the areas where our firm sees the highest ROI. So if there's a client from a targeted region that is way more likely to convert than someone that is not in that target region, then we just want to pour more money into that target region.

Speaker 1: 3:17

And that brings us to number three on this list, which is day parting. Day parting also just simply known as adjusting your ad schedule. This ensures that your ads appear at the right time. We need to use data to ask when are clients most likely to call or submit a form. For many firms, that's during business hours or the early evening, but I don't want you to guess at this. Go and analyze your historical data to identify the peak times for inquiries. Then use that data to schedule your ads to run or increase their bids during these windows and pause or decrease bids during off hours, when conversions are less likely.

Speaker 1: 3:54

This approach reduces wasted spend and it aligns your budget with your client's behavior. That's ultimately what we're always trying to do is align with their behavior so that we can capture more of them and turn them into clients. With these strategies, your Google Ads campaigns can start working harder and deliver better results without blowing through your budget immediately. Now, there's a lot more I can talk about when it comes to strategic budget allocation, but these three strategies are really good for making sure that you're focused and that your budget is going to the users you want it to go to. But let's keep going, because expanding on Google Ads this is something that, shockingly, I'm asked more and more about Getting more exposure, and the reality is that expanding our reach sure, it can mean spending more money, but it doesn't have to mean emptying our budget. By leveraging smart strategies and tools that Google gives us access to, we can attract more qualified leads while keeping costs under control.

Speaker 1: 4:49

Let's talk about how we can do this with a couple of different strategies. First on the list is smart bidding strategies. Google's automated bidding options are game changers, not just for law firms, but for anyone that's looking to get the most out of their ad spend. Options like target cost per acquisition or target CPA, and maximize conversions one of my favorites. They allow you to focus your budgets on actions that matter most Things like client inquiries, consultation, bookings, phone calls. Quickly target CPA this is a specific cost that we're willing to pay for each lead. Google's algorithm adjusts the bids for all of our keywords in real time to stay within that target while trying to maximize conversions. And there is a little bit of flex. So if we set $100 CPA, it could go up to $120 or $125, but Google's going to do its best to make sure that they get you conversions at the number that you've asked for. And then there's maximize conversions.

Speaker 1: 5:42

This strategy uses our budget to generate as many conversions as possible. It's ideal for firms that are looking to grow their client base quickly. But I like it because it doesn't tell Google to ignore a conversion if it's slightly more expensive. We're okay paying $150 for a conversion even if our target is $100, but especially when we're getting started out, we want to get as much volume in as possible. When we're getting started out, we want to get as much volume in as possible, the key to success here, and I've talked about it when it comes to bidding strategies before. The key to success with smart bidding is having enough historical data. Google needs this data to predict which clicks are the most likely to convert. If your account doesn't have sufficient data yet, just start with manual bidding or enhanced CPC to collect initial insights. Go back and listen to some of my bidding episodes Google ads episodes to learn more about this.

Speaker 1: 6:28

But next, google ads. You know it's not just about keywords. There's there's more to it. It's also about knowing your audience, and we've talked about this in a bunch of recent episodes. Enhanced audience targeting ensures that your ads reach the most people that are likely to use your services.

Speaker 1: 6:44

So we've got two different areas of this. First is custom intent audiences. These allow us to create audience segments based on specific online behaviors, so we could target users who have searched for your competitors or for legal queries, like best personal injury lawyer near me and this ensures that our ads are appearing to people who are actively seeking legal help with those high intent keywords. And we can use remarketing lists. Now, not every firm is going to have access to this. There are a bunch of regulations on Google about which firms can use remarketing, but it's really effective, and that's because not every website visitor converts immediately. Remarketing keeps your firm top of mind by showing ads to past visitors of your website as they browse other pages on the web. And if we pair this with a strong call to action like still need help, book a free consultation today, to re-engage these potential clients, it's really something, and it doesn't have to stop there.

Speaker 1: 7:38

One of the most powerful tactics I've seen is combining the remarketing stuff with similar audiences. Google identifies users that have similar online behavior to the people in your remarketing lists and it gives you an entirely new audience to reach. Google is getting really good at some of this stuff. That actually makes a lot of sense, and that's definitely become true with our next topic, which is RSAs responsive search ads. Gone are the days of creating static ad copy and then just hoping it resonates, or creating three versions of an ad with one punctuation mark. Changed RSAs, let us test multiple headlines and descriptions simultaneously and they dynamically adjust based on the user behavior, based on the data that they're getting back. Here's how it works we provide up to 15 headlines and four longer descriptions, and Google uses machine learning to mix and match these elements, displaying the best performing combinations to users. So one user might see top city divorce lawyer free case evaluation, while another sees need legal help talk to an experienced attorney today. This flexibility allows our ads to adapt to different search intents and drive higher engagement, and it allows us to use really cool features like dynamic keyword insertion and stuff that Google allows us to do to resonate even more with users on the search engine results page. Check out my other Google ads episodes for that.

Speaker 1: 8:57

Rsas also really, really help when it comes to this ad relevance. Dki is a big part of that, but RSAs are great because they improve our quality score and they ultimately just end up increasing our CTRs, reducing our costs. All of that good stuff. But here's the thing To get the most out of these RSAs include variations that highlight your unique selling points, kind of like how you'd use call-out extensions or some of the other extensions that Google offers. Examples like 24-7 client support, millions recovered for our clients. All of these are really interesting and they align with your audience's needs. Now we bring it all together and combine the smart bidding, precise audience targeting and dynamic ad copy and we're going to significantly expand our reach without even increasing our budget. Now, if you are trying to increase your budget and you're trying to increase the overall number of people, these strategies will still work for you. You can turn up that number and know that the conversions that are coming in are going to be highly relevant and that you're going to spend less per conversion because you're targeting the right people at the right time.

Speaker 1: 10:02

Now, as I've talked about on the podcast, I have Chad GPT helped me a lot with these scripts and I've had Chad GPT write me a section about leveraging technology and tools when it comes to Google Ads campaigns and automating tasks and streamlining processes and, ultimately, just improving decision making, and I'm not going to go through all of these in this episode. I'll go through some of this at a later date and I've already gone through some of it, but I just want to quickly skim through and read off to you what Chad GPT thinks are the most important tools for leveraging technology within Google Ads, and first up is automated rules and scripts. I've talked a little bit about these automated rules. We can use these to set specific conditions that trigger actions, things like pausing ads with a low CTR so that we prevent wasted spend, or automatically increasing bids on high performance keywords during peak hours or even sending notifications when campaigns are approaching their budget cap. These automated rules are really helpful on these repetitive tasks and for these small things that we just want to make sure we know they happened. They're pretty cool and I'm going to go through them in more detail at a later date, but that's tool number one.

Speaker 1: 11:09

Number two is the scripts. These are a little bit more complicated. They do involve some coding with the AdWords query language as a derivative of JavaScript, and they're cool because they're a lot more advanced. But they are a lot more advanced so we can use scripts to do similar things where we have low CTR stuff bid adjustments, report generation but we can also have it connect to external information. So if it starts raining, then we can have the script tell the ads to change the bidding. In some this is much more useful if you're selling umbrell more useful if you're selling umbrellas than if you're selling legal services when it comes to rain. But there are things like that that we can do with scripts that are much more advanced and really really cool. For most law firms this isn't critical anymore.

Speaker 1: 11:54

Automated rules give us really good coverage with most of the basic stuff we want to do, and scripts at this point are a little bit overkill, but I do want to mention these because these tools save time and they help make sure that your campaigns are staying optimized even when you're focusing on something else. So if you are personally managing your Google ads you don't have a campaign manager like me in there Rules and scripts are really effective for making sure that things happen in the account, even if you can't be looking at it every day. And when it comes to the creative side of things, I know 15 headlines and four descriptions can sound kind of overwhelming. So AI tools like Chad GPT are incredibly effective in that role. Give Chad GPT some information about your practice, your key selling points, maybe about you or your audience, and it'll produce some headlines for you. And on top of this, you can feed the data from Google Ads back into Chad GPT and ask it to help you make decisions on what to change in your ads for the next variation in your ads. It's a really interesting tool. We're seeing just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Chad GPT and Google Ads, but that's a quick way you can use it. But look, leveraging these technologies isn't just about working smarter so you can work less. The overall thing here is that we're making data-driven decisions that deliver better results without a lot of guesswork. These rules and scripts they save time. Ai and machine learning they give us a lot of creative potential, and all the cool analytics stuff we can track gives us a lot of insight into what our campaigns are doing and what we can change and do to move forward.

Speaker 1: 13:26

Here's what I would say for this week. Take one or two of the strategies we've discussed today and implement them into your campaigns this week. You're going to be incredibly surprised by how even these little changes are going to lead to big wins. We'll be back next Monday with more on marketing in the legal industry and the legal universe. As always, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to visit my website, ask a question. I'll be happy to follow up either here on the podcast or directly with you via email if that's what's needed. But for today, that's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out RosenAdvertisingcom for more Thanks.