See in this video how we generate over 300 enquiries per month for a law firm. This is a completely free Google Ads PPC Case Study.
Screenshots from the video:
(351 enquiries for under £20 each)
(most enquiries are telephone calls which are much higher quality)
Summary
This guide is mainly on how to get high quality enquiries.
You can use it for any type of service based offer, such as a tradesman, lawyers, or B2B services like accountants.
Getting Quality Enquiries
We are using Google Ads, there’s a lot you can do within ads to target higher quality enquiries. If you know how.
Google tries to pressure you to use automated bidding, but for the typical service based account there are a lot of things Google won’t consider. Things that are important for quality.
For instance we know from past data that:
- Desktop / laptop based enquiries are more than twice as likely to become a paying client.
- Calls are much better quality than form submissions
- Enquiries during office hours are better quality
- Certain search terms that relate to more serious offenses are better quality e.g “drink driving” is more serious than most speeding offenses.
By using the manual bidding option instead we are able to apply a heavy focus to all of the above using options within Google Ads. To make sure our ad appears high up for users with better enquiries.
Landing Page
Using a specially designed landing instead of your normal site can greatly increase the number of enquiries you get.
The page should have:
- a title tailored to what they are looking for
- a list of benefits at the top
- indicators of credibility
- a “call to action” specifically asking the visitor to get in touch with a reason why such as “for a free consultation”
The copy should be short and simple, two sentences per paragraph at most, using mostly positive wording.
For example: “Protect Your Licence” is much better than “Don’t Lose Your Licence”.
Transcript From Case Study Video
Hello there,
This is a quick video I’ve made for you to show you how we get more than 300 enquiries per month for one of our clients. It’s a driving offence solicitor, so I’ll give you a behind-the-scenes peek at exactly how we do that.
Okay, here we go. Let’s look into their account. We’re using Google Ads for this client. As you can see here, I’ve set the last 30 days, and they’ve generated 351 enquiries in the last 30 days. The 0.29 is just to do with Google’s attribution modelling, so if someone visits the site twice, we only get a little bit of the credit for it.
But yes, it’s probably actually more than 351 once you work it all out, and it’s cost, on average, under £20 per enquiry as well. If we show you the types of enquiry, you can see most of them, 267, are phone calls, and only 80 are from forms. So that’s a sign that they are really high-quality enquiries.
Most people want to pick up the phone and talk to somebody instead of just filling in a form and waiting. The calls are more than twice as likely to actually go on to become paying legal clients compared to the forms. Forms tend to come in sometimes at night and evenings, making it hard to get in touch with the enquirers, who also tend to be less keen in the first place. Otherwise, they would have called.
So the quality is very good, and the trick we use for this is we run the campaigns with what’s called manual bidding. Normally, Google will try and pressure you into using Google Smart Bidding or automated bidding. As far as Google is concerned, an enquiry is an enquiry. Google won’t know, based on the data it normally has, if it’s a good enquiry or a bad enquiry. By doing things manually, we’re able to pick out the really high-quality stuff.
It works on a bidding system. You can target specific devices, so you would target desktop users more—they’re usually a lot more keen. That means desktop and laptop. When someone sits down at a proper computer, it means they’re quite keen, whereas on a mobile phone, that’s more of an order-a-pizza type mentality. Someone with a serious issue is more likely to sit at a computer. By default, the system would try and just pay the same amount—£20 for a mobile enquiry, £20 for a desktop enquiry. In reality, it’s worth paying £30 for desktop and £15 for mobile, for example.
Another thing we can control with manual bidding is the time of day we show up and how competitively we bid at different times of day. Serious people normally look during the daytime when they know a law firm’s office is open. People who tend to look in the evenings or weekends are the ones who don’t call up and are less keen. They know they weren’t actually thinking about making an enquiry; otherwise, they would have done it in the daytime when they know you’re open.
Another factor is what they actually search for. You have the most serious offences like drink driving and drug driving versus very light offences like speeding. If you just leave it to Google, it will fill your funnel with low-quality stuff, whereas you will be competing against people like my clients who use manual bidding to capture all the good enquiries. We bid high on the serious offences, where they are more likely to have to go to court and need representation. For speeding and similar offences, we place a very low bid so anything that comes in is cheap. With manual bidding, we can control different things from the account. You can see here it’s split out by daytime, outside of hours, and weekends.
We have a lot of control over how we bid at different times of day and what page we send them to. This gives us more control, basically. Another big thing that enables us to get this much volume and high quality is the page that we send them to. I’ll show you a page. This isn’t the actual client’s page. You’ll see it’s me, but it’s just a mock-up to give you an idea. I didn’t want to share the actual client’s page, but this is what works.
As you’ll see, it’s a standalone page. We don’t send people to a normal website with home, about us, and ten other services across the top. It’s proven, and tested many times, that having those links at the top lowers your conversion rate. It’s like putting a bunch of holes in your funnel. It distracts people, and there are other reasons why it may have a big negative impact as well. The copy at the top of the page is seen as important, but if you’re saying home and about us at the top of the page, it’s just a distraction. There’s also the risk they might actually click on it. You’re giving people more options, so they’re less likely to start reading the copy.
So, you shouldn’t have navigation on the landing page. You don’t need it. If you’re doing Google Ads, it’s not like other types of marketing, like SEO, where you need all the pages to link together. This enables you to create a tailored page because you can have lots of pages that aren’t connected. People won’t see you’ve got 50 of the same page. You can create different pages to match the person’s location and the keyword or offence they’ve typed in. This can all be tailored dynamically or with separate pages. As you see, it’s very simple.
The big USPs, benefits, and credibility are highlighted with a little bit of rapport, and then you ask them to call, giving them a reason for a free consultation. That will be enough to convert most people. The image in the background, such as a police car, can give a sense of urgency. For other areas of law, you may want a different picture. This approach is based on the results of many tests. We have more copy further down and a form for people who want to read more. It’s important that the copy is super simple—one to two sentences per paragraph, with short, simple paragraphs, not legalese.
If they have to do more work to process the text, they have less positive feelings towards whatever they’re reading about. If it’s simple, they have more positive feelings. You’re exposing them to your brand for the first time. Starting with big, mammoth paragraphs is like how people feel about their maths teachers—they just don’t enjoy it. If the text is harder to read, they will like it less.
So, keep the copy super simple and positive. That’s it. It gives you a good idea. It’s quite simple: a manual campaign with Google Ads, lots of focus on devices, time of day, and the quality based on the keyword. A standalone landing page matches what they’re looking for. Keep it super simple and use as much positive wording as possible, especially at the start of the page. Avoid negative keywords, even if it’s a double negative.
For example, saying “getting charged can be a real pain” is not ideal. Understand that you’re trying to build rapport with the person. A lot of solicitors say, “divorce can be the most stressful time of your life” at the start of the page, but you shouldn’t use those words when introducing your brand. It’s likely the first time they’ve seen your logo and brand. Their subconscious part will register all that negative language. It’s like showing them your logo and psychologically giving them a punch in the arm.
Positive copy works best. I hope that gives you an idea of what works. If you’re interested in setting up something like this for your area of law, feel free to get in touch. We have run many campaigns in the past for different areas like family law and employment law. We have a lot of campaigns that we can essentially copy and paste, which is another advantage of a manual campaign, and tweak them towards your location. We have templates like this, so we can adjust them for your logo and any credibility indicators you have.
I hope you found this useful.