Why would a PPC agency put together a post that explains the challenges of PPC? Simple. We’re a fully transparent company that wants advertisers to know what they are getting into before spending any money or time.
If you’ve been considering a PPC campaign, here are 5 challenges that you are likely to encounter:
1. It’s expensive.
The legal space is particularly expensive and personal injury law is one of the most expensive campaigns you can run on Google. The good news is that there are ways to reduce the high cost a bit.
Negative Keywords: Negative keywords act as a filter to prevent your ads from showing for irrelevant searches. This dramatically reduces the number of wasted clicks which reduces the money spent.
General Keyword Phrases: While very targeted keyword phrases are usually recommended, general terms like “lawyer near me” can sometimes be useful as well. These general phrases cost significantly less and can result in good cases.
One big caveat: make sure you have a ton of negative keyword phrases in your account or you will waste a lot of money with these general keywords!
Reduce Hours that Ads Run: Limiting the hours and days that your ads run to only those that are producing leads can reduce your spend. Your ads are also more likely to show more often when you compress these hours.
Use Landing Pages: This is a big one. If you can double the number of people who call after seeing your ads, it’s like having twice the budget. Landing pages are very targeted, specific, easy to test, and have just one goal: to get your prospects to call or complete a form.
2. SEO is Owning Space. PPC is Renting it.
SEO and PPC complement each other. An advantage of SEO over PPC is that SEO doesn’t stop the moment you stop spending. It’s more of a long-term investment.
The disadvantage of SEO is that it takes a lot of time to rank and it may not be possible to rank for your best keyword phrases. Additionally, Google has pushed organic rankings further down the page – especially on mobile. This means that people will see PPC ads much more often than organic listings.
3. Unqualified Callers.
Because PPC ads rank so high on the page, they are more likely to be clicked by people searching for an area of law you don’t practice. Plus, if you’re a PI attorney you may get clicks from someone who just has property damage.
This is why we recommend focusing on the word “injury” in your ads and not the “car accident.” This way your ads are as targeted as possible.
The other way to reduce unqualified callers is lots and lots of negative keywords. Unfortunately, people are click-happy so the best way to reduce these unqualified clicks is to ensure your ads aren’t seen at all.
4. Poor Intake
Poor intake can absolutely tank your entire PPC campaign. We recommend having a dedicated intake person who is responsible for all intakes. This is someone who is empathetic with great phone skills. It seems obvious, but we hear so many poor intakes from firms all across the country.
Be empathetic and reduce hold times and transfers.
The only way you’ll know for sure if your intake is good is to listen to phone calls and provide feedback to your intake team. This is also important for your after-hours service.
5. PPC may not be for you if…
• You don’t have the stomach to go a period of time without getting any calls
• You constantly want to change things up with your account
• You don’t have the budget
• You aren’t using landing pages
• Your call intake is not on point
• Your average case value is too low
As you’re considering running a PPC campaign for your firm, you’ll want to take all of these factors into consideration. Most of these drawbacks can be mitigated by careful monitoring of your account and ongoing optimization.
