Most injury attorneys that I meet don’t get it. They don’t realize the large amount of cases that they can generate from Google Ads every month. And the product is only getting better. It used to be that all leads came through search, but now with AI getting so good, when run correctly, Performance Max can also bring in great car accident leads and new personal injury clients.
Let’s look at last month’s Google Ads results for one of my injury attorney clients as an example. And then reflect on what’s working and some ideas I have for further growth.
The Numbers
355 MVA Leads
32 signed cases overall
Of these 32 new cases, the breakdown was:
24 car accident cases
3 premises liability cases
3 dog bites
1 pedestrian hit by vehicles
1 pedestrian hit by vehicle on scooter
What Worked
One severe but lucrative move I made last month was to just flat out cut off certain locations within our overall targeting area. I’ve been working with this law firm for a long time, and we have lots of data. A few weeks ago our campaigns were struggling to hit our cost per case goal, so I did a deep dive on our location data and there were three locations that had just really underperformed over the last six months.
We’re currently spending our full budget, so I decided to just cut off these three difficult locations and use the budget in our best areas. And that strategy worked in May. The cost per case improved and we ended the month closer to our cost per case goal, and so far this month we’re hitting our numbers.
Cutting off three locations is definitely a severe decision, but I like the move. They struggled for six months, they hurt our cost per case profitability, and historically they’ve been tougher areas to get good results from. And if we’re able to spend the full budget in the other areas and get the cost per case we want, why not do that?
I also like the move from a focus perspective. There’s so much going on with these campaigns and all the data that they generate, I like to focus and simplify when possible and basically I made a caveman move these locations good, these locations bad, turn off bad. But you know, it worked, and everyone’s happy and making a lot of money. So caveman strategy it is.
The thing that allows for caveman thinking to be correct here, is that we’re able to still spend the full budget in our better-performing areas. That’s why this was an asymmetric move with only upside. And we can always go back to those underperforming areas later on. If the client wants to raise the budget and grow the lead volume, we turn those locations back on and try to improve them at that point.
Another thing that worked well last month was just standard search terms review. I was able to catch a weird, but popular search that one of our accident phrase match keywords had us showing on that just wasn’t relevant to the type of traffic that performs for us. So I caught that and added a negative keyword that will prevent our ads from showing on that search term across all campaigns.
Priorities for June
I have two priorities for this month.
- Stay focused on search terms.
- Bid the right amount and be patient if volume is slow.
Search terms are going to be my focus this month. Every good looking search term that has some volume with it and has good conversion data, I’m going to make sure we’re targeting that as a keyword across all relevant campaigns. And I’m going to make sure I catch the bad search terms early and add negative keywords to block them.
And as far as being patient goes, I’m just going to bid the correct amount to hit our goals, and if the volume comes in light for a few days or even during a part of the month, oh well, we have to hit our goals and usually the volume will show up sooner or later. You can bid the right amount, have everything running good, and some days are just slow. But when you zoom out and look at the month as a whole, usually the volume shows up. I get pushed on volume, and sometimes I make the mistake of overbidding and we hurt our cost per case and then we’re playing catch up for the rest of the month, trying to get it down. That’s no fun. So this month I’m going to bid the right amount, be patient, and view results over the course of the full month. And if I do that, I think we’re going to crush it.
