Episode 179 – Top Notch Advice On Google Pay Per Click Advertising For Lawyers | Interview With Adam Kreitman Of Words That Click

This week I spoke with a Google AdWords expert, Adam Kreitman Of Words That Click.

Adam highlighted the challenges that law firms are facing with paid search and he answered all the burning questions like, ‘Law-related keywords are expensive’, ‘Fierce Competition in Law industry’ and “Getting qualified leads is hrad’.

If you’re not getting the expected results from your PPC campaigns or if you’re confused whether to try PPC or not, listen to the podcast for a detailed take on PPC for law firms. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast and post a review.

 

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Richard Jacobs: Hi. This is Richard Jacobs with Speakeasy Authority Marketing. Today I’ve got a long term friend of mine that I have on the call. I hope he will be of interest to you. His name is Adam Kreitman. His company is called Words that Click. His specialty especially of late has been helping attorneys with Google Adwords or Google Pay per Click. I can tell you from personal experience that it is a very tough challenge. Lots of companies out there offering Pay per Click in a standardized format but it really takes specialization to do it right especially for attorneys that can pay very high amounts on a pay per click basis. So how are you doing Adam?

Adam Kreitman:  I’m doing great Rich. Appreciate you having me.

Richard Jacobs: Sure. Yeah. Thanks for being on the call. This will be brief and we are just going to talk about your experience with Adwords and how you can help attorneys? That’s why we are sending it out. I’m here to provide value to my listeners and that’s why I have you on the call. For anyone that doesn’t know, let me know first. What’s the deal with Pay per Click? Where do people see it? How does it show up in search results?

Adam Kreitman:  Yes. That is a good place to start because there is a lot of confusion about that. Google Adwords is Google’s pay per click program. Essentially when you are an attorney and you want to show up when somebody types in divorce attorney, personal injury attorney, whatever it is. In Google, there are a few ways that you can get there. There’s the map listings, there’s the organic listings and you can’t pay for placement in either of those two. But with Google Adwords, it’s basically an auction where you pay on a per click basis. So it’s pay per click where you are only paying when someone sees your ad and clicks on it. These ads are how Google makes most of it’s billions and billions of dollars. It’s no coincidence that when you do a search, the ads are what appear at the very top of this screen. It used to be the Top 3 results but now it’s Top 4 results and depending on the screen size and especially for more people searching from Mobile devices, the Google paid ads, the Google Adword ads may be the only things that somebody sees when they first land on a search results page. Essentially Google Adwords is just paid advertising on Google.

Richard Jacobs: I see now that mobile is such a predominant way that people search. On mobile, I mean people don’t even see the organic listings, you see pay per click ads covering the whole screen, right?

Adam Kreitman: Yes, that’s it.

Richard Jacobs: In your work, do you deal with laptops, mobile devices and all that or do you just stick with the laptop portion?

Adam Kreitman:  You have to do everything. When I first started out, you could ignore mobile and tablet because most people were doing searches on desktops but that’s not the case anymore. In fact, I’d say, out of the 3 mobile is the most important now and the one that we tend to see the best results from.

Richard Jacobs: That’s great. That’s what I’m seeing with SEO now, mobile is now more than laptop and desktop, so the focus has changed to that first and laptop and desktop next. That’s good to know. Adwords, Google Pay per click, it kind of has a bad rap though, extremely expensive, it’s very difficult to do. Why do you think that happens?

Adam Kreitman: I think that there is a lot of confusion and frustration out there. I think that many attorneys who have used it in the past and not have gotten good results and I don’t think that it’s undeserved in some cases. Sometimes Adwords just doesn’t work and people get frustrated and they give it a bad name. They don’t say very pleasant things about their experience with it but I think that a lot of the times where people have not gotten a good result from Adwords, it’s either because they’ve tried to do it themselves and especially as a business owner, an attorney running a firm, you just can’t get the knowledge required to manage your own Google Adwords account correctly. The concept sounds pretty easy. Write an ad, pick some keywords and start getting people to your website but it’s a lot more complex than that. So it’s just hard for a business owner to do that themselves. Then in any industry, there are the snake oil salesmen out there. I think they sow the seeds for a lot of the confusion and frustration on purpose and they are just out there to make money for themselves and don’t really take the time to do things right. I think when you combine all those things together, it just feeds into this confusion, frustration and misunderstanding and I think that’s even more of the case in the legal industry because the competition is just so great and as you said, the click costs are too high so if people don’t start seeing results soon, they kind of give up on it and it gets this bad reputation.

Richard Jacobs: In terms of complexity, how many different variables do you think there are. I mean, I’ve seen, just from location alone, you could target a city, you could exclude a city, you could target multiple cities, you could target geographic areas, you could run ads at certain times of the day and not others. You can adjust to fit on mobile vs. Laptop. How many factors are there inside of Adwords that you know of?

Adam Kreitman:  I’ve lost count. I think when you start factoring in all the potential keywords and potential adcopy and as you were saying, the days your ads run, where they run, the devices that they run on. There is clearly a limit but I haven’t reached it yet because There are just so many factors out there.

Richard Jacobs: It’s so complex that it really takes a dedicated person to look at it.

Adam Kreitman:  You need to know what you are doing. That’s for sure.

Richard Jacobs: When you talk about expensive click costs, what are you seeing right now as click costs and what do you recommend as a budget for an attorney to spend so they get any traction so that they ca test out Adwords?

Adam Kreitman:  The click costs vary widely. It depends on where in the country you are located and what your area of practice is. I would say, on the high end, the big cities, personal injury attorney type keywords, DUI type keywords, they can easily be over $100 a click. If you are talking about smaller cities and you are talking about less competitive niches, you could see $10 to $20 per click. The one thing I’d say about it being expensive is if you are looking at a cost per click and you say, Yeah $100 a click sure sounds expensive and it is but I would advise people to look more at the cost per lead than the cost per click meaning how much would you have to spend to get somebody to raise their hand and contact you and say yes, I’m interested in what you have to offer. I was talking to an attorney the other day and he had just put down $10,000 for a 3 month run of billboards around town. He did not get one quality lead for that $10,000. That’s expensive. I could generally get leads, again depending on the niche and location for $150 to $250 range in Adwords. So compared to his experience with Billboard advertising, like that’s cheap.

Richard Jacobs: So, a good lead is a phone call from a client that has a potential problem, one that may not be as good but still workable is an email lead. Someone emails in a question but that’s what we mean by lead.

Adam Kreitman:  Exactly. Yes.

Richard Jacobs: Then don’t forget, it’s still your job as an attorney to convert them to get them to retain you and pay your fee but with some average retainer fee for DUI, $1500 or $2000. It’s definitely workable because you can see by the numbers and the PI. I know a case won’t be taken until they can estimate your recovery to be $10,000 or more. In Family Law, you are going to have $3000 to $5000 or more. So that’s why Adwords is expensive but it’s a game that can be played and won. Are there any practice areas that should or shouldn’t deal with adwords? Under what circumstances should an attorney entertain Adwords as opposed to not?

Adam Kreitman: I think that the ones that should say away from it are if you are in a very specific niche, like if you are in a very small niche of law. Especially if you are like a B2B or in a B2B type situation where instead of trying to reach consumers, you are trying to reach business people, that can get challenging. You are probably better off trying other types of advertising. You asked me about the budget in the last question and I got a bit side tracked on that. I would say at least budget $2000 a month for clicks. If you spend less than that, it’s still workable but it takes a while to get data and that data is really important in figuring out is this working? What are the keywords? What are the ads that are actually driving the results? So you can improve the campaign and actually focus on what’s actually driving the results instead of just very slowly getting a click here and there and not really having a data set to be able to determine what is working for you or not. So if you are not willing to spend that much, I would say, you probably should avoid Adwords but as far as the types of attorneys that it works for, it’s certainly popular in terms of searches. There are a lot of people out there looking for personal injury attorneys, auto accident attorneys, divorce attorneys, family law attorneys, DUI attorneys, criminal defense attorneys. There is a lot of search traffic around those keywords and if you know what you are doing and if you know how to play the Adwords game, you can have a very profitable campaign and use it to build your practice up.

Richard Jacobs: Any other contra indications to doing that? Here is a question. How long should someone do it for so they can ascertain whether it works or not? 3 months, 6 months?

Adam Kreitman:  I would say, 3 months on the high end. If I’m working with somebody and we don’t start getting not just leads but they don’t start getting any clients out of it after 3 months, then either the campaign should be shut down or we say, okay this landing page, these keywords, these ads, they are not doing what we want them to do, let’s create a different strategy. For example, let’s say, we just want to go for the phone call on the landing page. Maybe we take a step back and say instead of the phone call, let’s offer a free guide or something just to insert another step in the process to provide value and get people to raise their hand in a way that’s not too risky. For a lot of people, actually having to call is just scary. It’s scary for them so maybe we try offering them something before that to get them to kind of notice you like a trusted source, build a relationship and then from that point, jump off from there and then go for the phone call. Offer a free consultation or something like that.

Richard Jacobs: One thing that I liked about what you said is that 3 months is the upper limit. A lot of strategies, SEO may take 6 months or an year, other strategies like big name advertising where you buy a Billboard, you have to do searching for weeks or sometimes an year. This you can test very quickly. So even though it may seem like a high monthly amount, if it does seem like that to you, you’ll know quickly. You are not locked in to do this for a long time. It’s actually not that expensive to test and figure things out.

Adam Kreitman:  Yes and just to pick up on something that you said, you should not be locked into doing this for a long time. There are companies out there that will make you sign up for 6 months or an year or whatever their contract is and I tell people when it comes to pay per click advertising, don’t do that because if you are not seeing results after 3 months, nothing is really going to change. If they have you locked in, there is just nothing they will do over the term of that remaining contract that is going to change things and you’ll just end up sinking money into Adwords which by the way feeds into the frustration and confusion and everything that we talked about before. Don’t sign a long term contract.

Richard Jacobs: Any other tips? Good things to do, bad things to avoid.

Adam Kreitman:  Yes. I would say, probably the top 2 things is that whatever type of advertising you do, you really want to measure the results as closely as you can. Know what you are getting in return. When you are running an adwords campaign, you’re really trying to drive phone calls in most cases. There is a technology out there that is called dynamic call tracking. What that does is it allows you to tie the phone calls that you are getting in your office back to the specific keywords and ads that made the phone ring. So if you end up in a situation and I’ve seen situations like this in the past where an attorney is spending thousands of dollars on this keyword that you would think is this obvious keyword, then they are getting a lot of traffic and the metrics that you have about the keyword all look good but then when you use dynamic call tracking, you start seeing that for all the clicks and all the money that you are spending for that ad, it’s not making your phone ring. Having that information is absolutely critical because when you have dynamic call tracking, you can see precisely the keywords and the ads that are making the phone ring and you can adjust your budget accordingly so that you are spending your money on the ones that are driving up results and backing off the ones that you may be spending money on but really, are not helping move your business forward.  The other big thing I would say, is using a dedicated landing page for your adwords campaign. Most pages on your website are better focused for your SEO. There is a lot of content on them, there are a lot of links, all these things that are good for search engine optimization. With pay per click, people who click on the ads tend to be really focused on what they want. If you start providing too much content or too many links where they start clicking and get distracted and go down this rabbit hole, the chances of them raising their hand or calling your office get lower and lower. So we always set up dedicated landing pages for the Adwords campaigns. We have few, if any links, we have one very clear call to action. This is what we want you to do. Sign up for this free consultation or whatever it is and we just focus on a very concise message on why someone should pick up the phone and call you. Those types of landing pages tend to perform the best for pay per click.

Richard Jacobs: From what I’ve seen, most people will just send everyone to the homepage. What’s wrong with doing that?

Adam Kreitman:  That’s probably the worst thing you could do because everybody tries to cram so much information in their webpage especially attorneys who have multiple practice areas. If somebody is looking for a personal injury attorney and they go to a landing page that talks about family law and personal injury and whatever else, it’s not talking to that person. We can’t be all things to all people. So the more tightly formed your message is around the keywords that the people type in before going to your website, the more likely you are to get that person to raise their hand and say I’m interested in this. I was in an auto accident. I want an auto accident attorney and I see that this attorney helps people who are in auto accidents. Follow that train of thought all the way through from the initial thought process going on and the prospect’s bringing the fees and go to Google and type that keyword and they see that ad that is relevant to that keyword and then they go to the landing page and that’s again relevant to the keyword and the ad. That’s how you gather people.

Richard Jacobs: Just so it’s very clear. The path is someone sees an ad when they put in a keyword, they click on that ad, it goes to what we are calling a landing page. They land on your website, on a specific page that you’ve geared to get them to call or email you. That’s the path

Adam Kreitman:  Yes. That is the path.

Richard Jacobs: Okay, I have a couple of wrap up questions. I don’t know if you want to disclose it but you spoke to me about a kind of unusual strategy that you were using with one of your PI attorney clients to get clicks at an affordable cost. Do you want to talk about that?

Adam Kreitman:  Yeah. I don’t want to like totally unveil our special sauce and actually we are using it for a couple of PI attorneys right now. As I said before, personal injury is one of the most competitive markets out there and you could easily be paying $100 or so per click in this market. We have this counter intuitive strategy where instead of focusing on the most obvious keywords, we take a step back and we focus on some keywords that are still relevant but not quite as obvious, that get a lot of traffic. The way that we structure or target a campaign leads to a situation for our clients where we are getting leads for less than what most personal injury attorneys are paying per click. Not all the leads are perfect leads or highly targeted leads but it’s a numbers game and so far the numbers are working. I have one client in one of the Top 10 markets in the US and within the first 2 weeks of turning this campaign on, he got 2 new clients. I have another one in one of the Top 2 markets in the US and he just settled on a case that was worth $30,000 to his firm which covered all the costs for advertising for this campaign that he spent here to date. That wasn’t the only one that he’s closed, so he’s well ahead of the game. It’s a counter intuitive strategy that seems to be working and I hope it keeps working for my clients.

Richard Jacobs: Okay. Well, you’ve been doing it for a while, so far so good. For attorneys listening that want to get in contact with you and work with you on their pay per click. How do they do that? Wat’s the best way to reach you?

Adam Kreitman:  The best way to reach me is always email. My email address is adam@wordsthatclick.com. That is the best way. If you want to call me my phone number is (314) 329-1422. Those are the 2 best ways to reach me.

Richard Jacobs: Do you have capacity right now to take on a few more attorney clients?

Adam Kreitman:  I do. Especially on the strategy that I just mentioned. It’s working well and we’ve got a good system in place so I’d be excited to help other attorneys benefit from that strategy.

Richard Jacobs: Okay. Very Good. I guess we’ll call it a day. It’s a short call but thanks for being on it and anyone that needs help contact Adam. Let him know that you heard about it on the Speakeasy Authority Marketing podcasts so he knows, not that he will treat you any good, but he knows where you came from.  Thanks a lot Adam, I appreciate you being on the call.

Adam Kreitman:  Thanks. Rich.

 

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