It is estimated that over €6 billion euros go to waste every year in useless ads. The buyer pays for ads that are simply never spotted by any real human being and are clicked on by robots and special programs.
If you are a law firm, PPC strategies, video ads, banners ads, and other kinds of ads may sound familiar to you but do they really work or are they a waste of money? You may succeed in getting some temporary results but are these viable and successful long-term? NOT necessarily.
Here is why you shouldn’t rely on PPC methods alone:
- Visitors use special ad-blockers. Sadly, most people will get very annoyed once an ad pops up in the screen. This is why special blockers and filtering programs are so widely used to prevent such ads from popping and they are free and dead-on easy to install in a browser.
- The ads appear underneath the fold. Unless visitors scroll down the page, they won’t be able to see you ad.
- Many websites play tricks with the ads they display. Some so-called ad publishers will simply take your ads and serve them in useless and bad sites just for the sake of keeping the numbers high.
- Mobile screens don’t display ads the same way. Since mobile devices are widely used nowadays, if your ad is not optimized for mobile devices, it won’t display properly.
Additionally, you should also understand as a law firm that these things may happen when you solely use PPC advertising:
- Competitors will click on you ads to “steal” from you cost. Unfortunately, there is no current way to stop them. Some competitors are so ruthless that they will consistently click on your ads in an effort to drain your ad budget. Imagine if you have hundreds of competitors like that what a damage that would be.
- Marketers are also clicking on your ads. If you have already displayed ads for your website, chances are sole cold-calling marketers will get in touch with you to get you to choose them instead, after clicking your ad. This equals to at least one click cost lost.
Buying ads online shouldn’t be a complex task and if you just are careful enough, you will reduce the risk of wasting your ad spending and even get a good ROI for it. But the type of ad targeting you use is of great importance.
Many law firms and attorneys fall into the easy trap of purchasing ads that are based on too broad keywords like “Lawyers” “Good lawyers”, “Cheap lawyers” and so on. The problem with these keyword targeting is that search engines will automatically match them to display inappropriate keyword combos in ad search results like: “Worse lawyers in town” in place of the single word “lawyers”.
It may look funny but it actually happens often. The only solution to this kind of problem is by using targeted ads and specific keywords combos for attracting quality traffic—instead of inappropriate searches.
Additionally make sure that you:
- Own and manage all your ad accounts without letting anyone creeping in and doing something bad.
- Set your paid ad searches to display only in certain geographical locations where you operate/work.
- Think of what your clients maybe specifically searching for and give it to them by using these specific terms
- Make sure that you have a targeted copy in your hands that is relevant to the keywords you use for each ad.
- Include specific land pages that communicate with separate searches.
The point of the article here is, PPC advertising is only useful when used appropriately and only as one of the methods for promoting your website and business—not the other way round. Done right, you ad spending will more likely yield a ROI without any mishaps.
