Google Ads Case Study

Personal Injury Law Firm

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.“– John wanamaker

John Wanamaker was wrong.

Over 80% of lawyers waste their advertising budget in efforts that do not yield results. They either have improper tracking, a poor understanding of the google search platform and/or poor marketing practices.

How many times have you ran expensive ads only to have your past clients click on your ads and waste your ad dollars?

Or maybe people calling for bankruptcy, divorce or immigration attorneys when you are a personal injury law firm.

We’ve seen it over and over again. Digital marketing “agencies” that claim to do it all.

That is why we decided to specialize in advertising for personal injury law firms.

Read to find out how we made over $2 million dollars in a single month to an unbranded and mostly unknown law firm.

Summary

This is a case study for one month of Google Ads ad spend.

This client was mostly interested in state-wide personal injury cases. We targeted cases in personal injury, car and ride-share accidents, slip and fall, medical malpractice, wrongful death and workers compensation.

We created hyper-targeted landing pages, Google ads advertising campaigns and set up comprehensive tracking with Google Tag Manager/Google Analytics and integrated all platforms with the use of 3rd-party applications.

Process

Performed a comprehensive site audit.

Identified desired case areas.

Built account structure and high converting landing pages.

Set up call-tracking and call-routing system for the intake department.

Sent live lead status and information to the partners.

Monitor traffic for lead quality, lead volume and click fraud.

Make adjustments to the messaging and the targeting as auction price fluctuates throughout the month.

Comprehensive Audit

We first performed an audit to the client’s past spend. We identified several areas of improvement, such as:

Landing pages having no clear calls to action and not designed with conversion action in mind.

Client's landing pages were also not focused by case area. Sending traffic to the main site.

Client had no tracking template or analytics implemented. They were were getting no data from their spend.

Phone calls were not being tracked - There was no way to know if advertising spend was successful or not.

No click-fraud software in place to prevent fraudulent clicks and behavior.

Google Ads account structure was overly generic and was bringing in search queries with low conversion intent signals. They were paying for lower value traffic that was not converting.

Call Tracking

Call-tracking software records information/data about a phone call. This allows the advertiser the ability to track and measure their efforts.

Call-tracking software allows for more complex case uses, some of which we will explore.

The client was facing several marketing-related and operation related challenges involving the call-intake process.

The client did not know which advertising effort brought in each particular caller (billboard, radio, TV ad, Google ad, etc..)
The client was interested in calls to be routed to a specific intake person, based on case area and language spoken.
The client always suspected that their Google Ads was bringing in repeat clients, or people who would have found them otherwise because they already knew them through word of mouth.

Here is a snapshot of the call-tracking solution we provided to the client (Personal identifying information was redacted)

Here is a quick explanation of what the columns mean:

Tracking number is the number used in the ad to know which ad brought in the lead. These phone numbers rotate automatically and they tie the ad, the click, the user experience and all the data.

Source lets us know which advertising platform the call came from.

Start Time is the time the call came in at.

Caller Includes the name of the caller and their phone number.

Agent is the phone number of the intake person receiving the call.

Green Dot Callers that have a green dot have never called us before. This means that they are considered a “First-time caller” and thus much more valuable because we know that they are not a previous caller or client. This, combined with call duration gives us a much better picture as to how valuable a lead actually is.

Our call-tracking implementation automates all of this. The partners had access to this dashboard in real-time from their smartphones. They monitored the amount of leads, the lead quality, follow-ups, case signups and case details.

This solution worked perfectly for the client. They were able to dramatically increase the speed in which the callers were speaking to the intake person who could help them, which in turn, increases the conversion rate.

Conversion Tracking

Conversion tracking is an intrinsic aspect of advertising. If you don’t track, you can’t tell what works and what doesn’t, and you are not able to optimize and grow.

The client was not familiar with conversion tracking and thus did not have any form of analytics or conversion tracking implemented on site.

Prior to us, the client would spend money on Google and other advertising efforts and were not able to tell just how effective Google Ads advertisement were.

For this client, not only did we track successful calls, we were able to pinpoint specifically which keywords, which ads, which locations the callers were reacting to, allowing us to tweak and optimize our strategy as we advertised.

Here is what we did.

We integrated our call-tracking efforts to feed into our advertising strategy, specifically in this case to our Google Ads and analytics account. This way we can properly identify which ads, keywords, audiences, locations, creative and copy are producing the highest value leads for our law firm.

Included is a snapshot of the Google Ads dashboard:

Something very important to note:

Tracking has been very carefully configured to only consider a “Conversion” the following:

First-time caller, with a call duration higher than 1 minute, and that was qualified through SalesForce as a valid lead!

This is a very important distinction to keep in mind. Most other agencies or advertising efforts do not track conversions, and the ones that do, track them improperly. We have seen agencies track things such as traffic, clicks, and/or any caller. This only serves to confuse their client and muddy their data/results.

Final Result

In one month, $83,713 were spent advertising on Google. We had established that a qualified lead was any person calling for the first time (not a repeat caller or a past client in any way) and needed a personal injury attorney for a valid, valuable case area that we serviced and were currently targeting.

Each lead was cross checked and referenced through Salesforce and Google to make sure that they qualified as a valid lead.

These leads that are being reported are not past callers, wrong numbers or wrong callers, people calling to check their case status, or different case areas. These are all vetted as first-time callers that have never interacted with the client before.