LAW FIRM

OVERVIEW & CHALLENGES

This law office focuses primarily on vehicle accident and personal injury in the Chicago area. The client has a history of success on the local level, but in spite of efforts, their online presence was lacking. Their tracking was almost non-existent, and their PPC campaigns ineffective. They wanted to get a larger market share of the Chicago area injury law business, which composes one of the most competitive DMAs in the nation for the legal profession. This is complicated by the fact that law related keywords are among the most expensive terms in Pay Per Click advertising, regularly averaging between $20 and $60 per click.

STRATEGY

Knowing that a direct bidding war would be far too expensive for our client, we made an early decision to spread our coverage as far as possible, using multiple search engines and long-tailed keywords. Using
over 2000 variations on Chicago legal keywords, we proceeded to push this client into every available nook of the internet. Our strategy consisted of capturing as many variations as possible of keywords relevant to the business, sometimes comprising rarely used 3 to 4 word phrases. While such keyword spread may seem like lackluster detail work, we knew that every single opportunity for a conversion was important to this client. Moreover, Google Adwords tends to give low quality scores to the most competitive keywords, with “low historical keyword performance.” Our long-tailed variations were so tightly matched to relevant ad copy that we were able to improve quality scores almost across the board. We re-worked the client's ad copy to point out just how strong his professional record is, which helped us not just in terms of click thru rates, but even in conversion rates.

After our initial success, we implemented advanced tracking methods, with Calltrax Plus being the most notable of these. In particular, this was helpful in identifying the relative performance of different PPC
vehicles. The client was eager to launch a Superpages.com campaign, since he had tried it before and seen very affordable traffic. This campaign drove an immense amount of traffic to the website, had a respectable bounce rate, and had far and away the lowest CPC of any search engine. We tracked it using our CallTrax system, however, and discovered that the money spent there was almost completely wasted. This ended up saving the client several hundred dollars per month.

That money was reinvested in more effective search engines. In particular, we found a small niche in Search Alliance that was very cost effective and generated calls for minimal investment. This was particularly helpful, as the client's fluctuated seasonally from $10,000 down to $5000 per month. This budget adjusting was accomplished by selectively trimming traffic using both Adwords information on effective keywords and ad groups, and also analytics information about days, times, and regions that worked better than others. We were able to adapt to these changes because we were able to gain insights into their performance beyond anything the client ever expected.

RESULTS

As a result of our efforts, compared to website traffic before contracting us, pages per visit went up by exactly 100%, time on site by 106%, and bounce rates dropped by 28.54 percentage points. While this was a somewhat arduous process, it wasn't long until we began to see the fruit of our labors. After only a month, the client's traffic had increased, his cost had fallen by 27%, and his lead count had more than doubled, coming in at 9 over his prior average of 4.3. Our success only continued to improve, and we regularly deliver 12-20 conversions per week between online and phone leads. As the client put it: “You have done a great job bringing the numbers in line with the budget. Thanks again. I think the campaign is going really well.” These leads are not due to growing traffic, rather better targeting. Online conversions rose even in the face of fewer clicks due to tighter budgets.

Most importantly, the lead quality improved, and we were able to generate exactly the types of leads that the client wanted while reducing the budget. We are very proud that we landed the third largest settlement in the firm's history, a multimillion-dollar case, through our PPC efforts. This is just one example of how persistence and detailed tracking can be a windfall for our clients.

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