I love personal injury lawyers.
That’s probably not a phrase that’s said a lot, but it’s true. I love injury lawyers. They’re tough, confident, and honestly a little bit crazy. But I love working for them. Running high stakes AdWords campaigns for injury lawyers is my most intersting work, and getting these guys hundreds of cases a month is a heck of a lot of fun. It’s kind of like AdWords on steroids. More volume, more conversions, higher costs. Everything is just ramped up quite a bit in this area of the advertising game, and you can learn a lot very quickly since things move so fast in the injury lawyer space. Here are ten things I’ve learned working for injury lawyers.
1. AdWords Works
Injury lawyers are a great example proving how AdWords works. Accident victims are looking for a lawyer, lawyers advertise on Google, people click on the ad, contact the lawyer, tell them about their case, and boom, the lawyer has a new client, and the victim has a lawyer. AdWords works! And it works profitably.
I’ve been told by injury lawyers that the average value per case is $7,000 to $10,000 and of course every now and then a catastrophic six or seven figure case comes in from AdWords that skews the average case value higher. The case acquisition cost from AdWords ranges from $2,000 all the way down to $500. A lot of the cost per case is driven by how aggressive you want to be and how many cases you want, but I’ve seen accident lawyers get hundreds of cases a month from their AdWords campaign for a cost per case of $1,200.
AdWords is the number one way injury lawyers can get new clients. It’s straightforward, it works, and when done correctly, it’s extremely profitable.
2. Intapage Works
Another thing I’ve learned is that Instapage works. AdWords is only half the battle. You have to take the search user to a landing page or website, and Instapage helps solve this problem.
A few months ago an injury lawyer client wanted to get a national mass tort campaign up and running, but he didn’t have any pages on his website about this medical device. So we used Instagpage to create a landing page about this medical device, we put a nice big lead form on there, and we slapped on the phone number. We also set up conversion tracking. And then we started running traffic to the page, and it worked. We got a 15% conversion rate. And the client was able to sign up 50 new clients for this mass tort case. We also were able to split test different landing page images and layouts, and we even got some direct conversions from a keyword contextual display campaign.
Getting the mass tort campaign up and running within days of news breaking about this medical device was crucial, we had to be first. And we would not have been able to launch so quickly if it wasn’t for Instapage’s landing page software.
3. Clickthrough Rate Matters
I know that clickthrough rate (CTR) matters. Of course it does. But when you’re running a $1,000 a month moving company campaign that brings in 50 clicks a month it is easy to forget how much CTR matters. If clickthrough rate goes up 33% from 3% to 4% month over month and I go from 50 clicks to 66 clicks, that’s a good thing, but it’s not going to shock the system or make any waves. It’s just an extra 16 clicks.
But when you’re running an injury lawyer campaign, targeting a major state, getting 1,700 clicks a month at $200 a click, a 33% change in clickthrough rate not only matters, it’s seismic.
Going from a 3% CTR to 4% on an account this size means that your clicks go from 1,700 a month to 2,261, and your cost goes from $340,000 a month to over $450,000 a month. An extra $110,000 a month. And an extra 75 cases a month for the injury lawyer.
Clickthrough rate always matters, but when you’re working on super large accounts, you really get to see how increasing the clickthrough rate rockets up your volume and allows you to increase your market share.
4. Intake Matters
Nothing will expose a poor intake staff like a high-volume injury lawyer AdWords campaign. Missed calls, dropped calls, rude staff, weak staff… all that stuff lowers the almighty close rate, and a bad close rate can ruin a great AdWords campaign.
I can run the best AdWords campaign possible for you, but if your intake doesn’t know how to answer the phone, close cases, and sign up new clients, then we’re going to be out of luck. All the AdWords manager can do is get you great leads, your staff has got to close them.
The intake staff matters, and they can make or break a great injury lawyer AdWords campaign. Developing and continually improving the intake staff’s skills should be a top priority for every injury lawyer out there. With a great intake staff I can make you the biggest injury lawyer in your state with Google AdWords. With a bad intake staff I can barely get you a profitable cost per case. AdWords works, but you’ve got to have a good intake staff as well.
5. Don’t Forget About Cross Country Calls
I used to be a hardcore only “people in my targeted location” advanced location settings kind of guy. If you listen to old podcast episodes, you’ll hear me talking about the benefits of locking down your location targeting. But I’ve evolved on this issue. Running large Google AdWords campaigns for injury lawyers who want to get every case possible has shown me the value of the “people in, or who show interest in my targeted location” location setting.
Injury lawyers deal with things like nursing home abuse, car accidents, slip and falls, etc. And when these life-altering events happen, often family members will call from across the country looking for a local lawyer to help them with their case.
For example, if a college student in Nashville gets rear-ended and is in the hospital banged up pretty badly, the parents in Los Angeles could easily be online doing searches for a Nashville injury lawyer. And if you have your campaign settings locked down to just Nashville, your ad is not going to show up when the parents in Los Angeles do their search. But if you’re targeting Nashville and have your location settings opened up to “people in, or who show interest in…” then you’re going to be there and you’re going to have a chance to get that case.
In the injury lawyer world it’s always the more cases the better, and cross country search traffic can help bring in more cases. I estimate at least 10% of the cases I get for my injury lawyer clients originate from searches done outside the targeted area.
6. Go Beyond The Keyword
It’s an AdWords tragedy when some searches for a high-cost, high-value keyword like “car accident lawyer” and ends up being the at-fault driver, and therefore doesn’t have a case that we can sign up. So the call was no good, even though the caller searched for a great keyword that often is good.
Situations like this force me to try and think past the keyword, what is in the search user’s head? What is their intent? And that kind of thinking can lead to finding better, though lower volume, keywords like “lawyer for being rear ended” or “rear ended how much should I settle for.”
Yes, I want to get every “car accident lawyer” keyword click that I can, but I’d rather first max out the budget on truly epic keywords like “lawyer for being rear ended” or “rear ended how much should I settle for,” where the odds of the person having a good case are higher.
Go beyond the keywords themselves, always consider the intent of the search user.
7. People Like Money
Duh. But no, really, people like money! I try over and over to come up with great, compelling ad copy, but nothing works like just talking about the money. People are calling injury lawyers because they want someone to give them money for their injuries. It’s about the money. And it’s not that complicated. Keep it simple, focus on the money, and your ad clickthrough rates will skyrocket.
8. Lawyers Know About The Law, But Not About Google
As someone who is in the depths of the AdWords and Google world on a daily basis, I constantly forget how little other, everyday people know about online marketing and Google.
Yesterday I had a lawyer tell me it was a bad idea to send AdWords traffic to his website because he also gets organic and Facebook traffic to the site, so how would we know what leads came in from AdWords traffic? Really?! It’s called Google Analytics. I explained to the lawyer that Google Analytics can keep track of how traffic from various sources performs on the website. I thought everyone knew this, but they don’t! Lawyers still have a lot to learn about online marketing, and they still make a lot of mistakes.
9. You’re Going To Have Bad Days
Injury lawyer campaigns are going to have bad days on AdWords. It’s just the nature of the business. Some days you’ll over-perform in the short, artificial time period of one day, other days you’ll under-perform. It hurts spending thousands of dollars in a day and not getting much for it. But you’ve got to be able to get over it, get some good sleep, and come back rested for another battle the next day.
Having the ability to healthily handle and deal with variance and bad days is a must for injury lawyer campaign managers. If you panic, you’ll ruin your strategy, hurt your results, and make things even worse. You’ve just got to be able to deal with it. I don’t know if this is a natural trait or something that can be learned, but I’m lucky that I have a great, natural ability to handle variance and keep my cool.
10. Target CPA Bidding Works
Injury lawyer campaigns are often high volume, and high volume can mean lots of conversions. And accounts that get lots of conversion data can be great candidates for target CPA bidding. I’m great at managing AdWords bids, but sometimes the machines are better. And on a lot of my injury lawyer accounts I let the machines do their thing with target CPA bidding.
Recently I turned on target CPA bidding for one of my injury lawyer clients and we were able to get the clickthrough rate up by 29%, the conversion rate up by 51% and the cost per conversion down by 47%. All well keeping the average position and impression share high. Target CPA bidding is often a great option for injury lawyer campaigns.
Need help?
If you’re an injury lawyer out there looking to get more cases from Google Ads, I can help. I’m getting multiple injury law firms hundreds of cases a month from Google Ads, and I can do the same for you. Contact me here.
