In order to succeed in the highly competitive AdWords pay-per-click (PPC) environment, you must find ways to lower your cost-per-click (CPC). The ability to lower your cost depends on a lot of variables, including the product or service you are promoting, your industry and location.
The legal industry has notoriously high CPCs. Let’s take a quick look at some examples I pulled from Google’s Keyword Planner tool.
- Keyword: “divorce attorney Miami” — Suggested bid: $21.52
- Keyword: “DUI attorney Los Angeles” — Suggested bid: $83.96
- Keyword: “Dallas car accident lawyer” — Suggested bid: $163.09
- Keyword: “Boston personal injury law firm” — Suggested bid: $250.35
Law firms spend an outrageous amount of money running PPC campaigns — I know because my agency has run several performance-based campaigns, and the cost-per-click for legal related terms are some of the highest. It’s also one of the reasons my company is building an online law firm directory, which I have started to document here. We set out to offer firms an additional lead generation option, as PPC will always be a necessity — especially to attract clients with an immediate need.
Here are seven ways you can lower your AdWords campaign’s cost-per-click, whether you are a law firm spending hundreds of dollars per click or a mom and pop shop trying to score clicks for less than a dollar.
1. Use negative keywords in your campaign.
One area that many businesses neglect is the search query report within their AdWords account. This shows you all of the search queries that trigger your ads to be displayed. Not only does this help you determine exactly how your customers are searching for your product or services, but it also helps you identify keywords that you don’t want to trigger your ads (and pay for).
For example, if a high-end luxury car dealership noticed that their ads were displaying for the search query. “Lamborghini pictures,” they would want to add that to their negative keywords list. The last thing they want to do is pay for clicks from users simply looking for pictures.
“Our Google rep suggested that constantly looking for and adding negative keywords to our campaign forces the system to optimize itself, creating more effective ads,” says James F. Sexton, Esq. of The Sexton Law Firm.
2. Constantly create new ads to test against your best-performing ads.
With PPC, especially when you are targeting keywords with high search volume, you can see results quickly. This allows for quick data gathering for split-testing purposes. “We are always creating several ad variations and testing them against our best ads for a wide variety of landing pages. You will never know if a slight change can improve your performance, and in an industry as competitive as ours, even the slightest click-through improvement makes a huge difference,” explains Jed Shaw of Shaw Defense.
Many businesses will optimize and test until they achieve a perfect quality score,…
