THE DETAILS OF THE CASE: A LOOK AT MALMAN LAW AND ITS GOALS
The Law Offices of Malman Law, PC is a Chicago personal injury law firm with 11 associate and senior associate attorneys alongside president and founder Steven J. Malman. The firm handles everything from auto accidents and worker’s compensation claims to slip and fall, nursing home abuse, medical malpractice, and beyond.
Since opening in 1994, Malman Law has handled over 15,000 cases and has a slew of successful settlements and verdicts to its credit — including several over $5 million each.
Still, despite its success, Malman knows well the scope of competition in the Chicago market. As in every major city — and many of the smaller ones — there are more attorneys than the market really needs, and they’re all battling it out for the same four PPC slots at the top of the Google results page.
Goal: Get leads consistently under $300 and increase monthly leads.
OUR RESULTS: MALMAN LAW
We started working on the campaign in February 2018. The client wanted to get leads under $300 to begin with.
The next step was to then start growing the campaign to see how many leads per month they could consistently get while maintaining their Cost Per Case/Acquisition (CPA) targets . They were struggling getting consistency with their campaign. After a full month of implementing our strategy, we were able to get costs down. We then began testing various ways to slowly grow their campaign and increase their monthly lead volume.
HOW DID WE DO IT?
STEP 1:
TARGETED TERMS AND OPTIMIZED COPY
So much of a successful attorney PPC campaign comes down to two kinds of word choice:
The keywords you target
The words you use in your ad copy
Because legal terms are some of the costliest in all of PPC, picking the right terms is critical. It’s a value game: which terms will get results for this specific firm in this specific market without spending more than they’re worth?
To find out, we conducted extensive keyword research. Which terms go for the most money? Which relevant key terms and phrases work best? What are their competitors in the market currently paying for?
Armed with that info, we started to bid competitively on “best opportunity” terms for Malman — and started winning the auctions we wanted.
But Cost Per Click (CPC) is only half the equation (literally).
Generally speaking, Google’s formula for serving PPC ads to users looks like this:
CPC Bid x Quality Score = Ad Rank
At ACL, we like to think we run quality PPC campaigns for lawyers, so we pride ourselves on high Quality Scores… and that takes us to Step 2.
HOW DID WE DO IT?
STEP 2:
HIGHER QUALITY SCORES
Google is absolutely obsessed with getting its users the best, most relevant content possible. That goal drives everything the company does. In fact, an advertiser with a sky-high quality score can win a Google ad auction with a smaller CPC bid. So what is a Quality Score and how do we boost it?
A number of factors influence your ad’s Quality Score, including:
- Relevance of the ad copy to the keyword it’s bidding on
- The quality of your landing page
- The relevance of your landing page
- Your AdWords account’s performance over time
- The ad’s click-through rate
No one knows exactly how much weight Google assigns to each factor, but through careful (read: fanatical) monitoring, we were able to fine-tune Malman’s ads so that they earned optimal Quality Scores for each targeted key term.
This is where our expert copywriting comes in. By choosing words that work — both for the ad itself and for its landing page — we’re able to give Google the gold-standard relevance it’s looking for.
HOW DID WE DO IT?
STEP 3:
THE BIGGER PICTURE (MULTIPLE PPC PLATFORMS)
To some extent, this is a “chicken and the egg” proposition. As Quality Scores improved, Malman’s Ad Ranks continued to rise. This, in turn, improved click-through rate, which would then lead to an even higher Quality Score.
It’s easy to get caught up in that cycle and lose sight of anything that isn’t AdWords. But the truth is that while Google’s service is still leader of the pack, there are many other sophisticated PPC platforms out there that can drive substantial and highly relevant traffic to a law firm online. We wanted to make sure Malman wouldn’t miss out on those opportunities.
PPC platforms aren’t created equal, though, and what makes sense for one firm might not for another. LinkedIn’s PPC program, for instance, works well for business and transactional attorneys. Not so much for personal injury lawyers, who will generally get more bang for their bucks at Google, Facebook, Yahoo! Bing, and YouTube. So that’s where we concentrated our energy.