August was a great month for our personal injury program. The cost per case system-wide was $4,245. That is on goal and right where we want to be in the $4,000 to $5,000 cost per case range. Additionally, the case volume was high and our highest total cases since May. It was a good month.
How did we achieve this? Straightforward tactics. Good conversion data, strong intake, common sense bidding strategies based on the math, and giving the campaigns room to run and not over-managing with dumb “do something” changes when we had a bad day or a few in a row. You’ve got to believe in your strategy, trust the math, and give the campaigns room to run, and that’s what we did. And overall, it worked out to be a very good month.
Our two biggest case types were motor vehicle accidents coming in at 74% and premises liability coming in at 23%.
So all smooth sailing, right? Of course not.
The final week of the month was very challenging. It’s very difficult for me to tell if it was just random, if it had to do with the August 17th changes, or if it was because one of our major clients made a significant change with their intake system.
It could have just been random, always have to factor that in. And I actually believe I know the reason that random bad results could come in during the last week of August. So keeping an eye on that.
Also, intake is super important, and I’m watching the performance of one major client’s new intake system very closely.
But there were also real updates to the bidding system in Google Ads on August 17th. You can read more about that here. I don’t believe those updates affected my clients, but I was talking to another Google Ads manager yesterday, and he was saying he believes the changes affected both his clients as well as his clients’ competitors. And if your competitors start making a bunch of weird adjustments, it could affect your results for a while. So I’m going to study up on those changes and think through how it could be affecting my clients.
Overall, we’re now two months in a row comfortably in or very close to our $4,000 to $5,000 cost per case range, so there’s no reason to think that won’t continue into September. It’s just always tough dealing with a bad week like we had last week, but that’s the name of the game, dealing with bad temporary periods of performance, staying disciplined and sticking to a strategy that works, and then enjoying the profitable results that occur over the long run. That’s what I’ll be doing in September, sticking to the plan, being patient, judging the month as a whole, and then determining if the strategy needs an update.
