Law firms and marketers can and have been using pay per click advertising to generate new leads for well over a decade now. They can do this in a number of ways, but the general strategy includes bidding on appropriate keywords in Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines.
The question is whether it’s worth paying for this type of advertising, and when the time is right to do so. Personal injury attorneys who want to find out if pay per click advertising will benefit them should conduct keyword research to find out what is popular among Internet users. They should look for keywords that are related to their practice and see which ones receive the most traffic, then decide whether or not it’s worth the cost for the expected return on investment (ROI).
PPC For Personal Injury Leads: A Matter of Cost Effectiveness
The biggest challenge in pay per click advertising for personal injury attorneys is the cost per click – searches for personal injury attorneys are amongst the highest priced clicks anywhere online. Lawyers often have to pay so much money for a click that the cost per client signed is upwards of $3000-$5000, which is often very high, especially for smaller cases. We’ll take a look at some average CPC’s for personal injury and car accident settlement related search terms below.
Calculating Costs to Generate Personal Injury Leads:
Because of this, estimating your cost per case is crucial. The formula to calculate cost per signed case on personal injury leads from PPC campaigns looks like this:
Estimated average cost per click (CPC) x Estimated landing page conversion rate (how many clicks turn into leads – form fills or phone calls) x Estimated intake conversion rate = Cost per signed case.
For example, let’s say your average cost per click is $20 and it takes you, on average, 20 clicks to get a lead (a 5% conversion rate, pretty standard in digital marketing), and 5 leads to sign a client (a 20% conversion rate, also pretty standard for internet leads). With these estimated numbers you can calculate your expected cost per signed case:
$20/click x 20 clicks = $400 per lead. 5 leads per signed client = $2000 cost per signed case.
Once you have compiled this data and done the math, you can decide whether or not it’s worth doing PPC advertising to generate personal injury and car accident leads for your law firm.
Ways to Improve Your Cost Per Case:
If you decide it’s a little too expensive, but might be close, there are a few ways you can help bring your cost per signed case down:
- Create better landing pages: A landing page is where you’ll send visitors from the pay per click ads. These pages should be simple and informative, but most of all persuasive.
- Create more persuasive ads: This can be done by thinking about what messaging your audience will respond best to, and then testing different variations of the ads.
- Change your bidding strategy: You can bid lower to try and get lower lead costs, you can try only advertising in off hours or look at days of the week you tend to do better and only run ads then.
- Convert more leads into clients. There are a number of ways to do this, here are links to a few posts where we discuss how to best convert personal injury leads into clients.
How much does PPC cost for Personal Injury Attorneys?
The tricky part is, cost per click is changing minute to minute and every keyword is different in different markets, days, times, etc.
As a benchmark, here are some recent examples of cost per click for personal injury and auto accident attorney related searches in Southern California as of January 2022:
- Car Accident Lawyer: $93-$450
- Personal Injury Attorney: $46-$306
- Car Accident Settlement: $5-$50
- Auto Accident Injury: $14- $93
- Car Accident Lawsuit: $9-$125
As you can see, pay per click advertising for personal injury attorneys can be an expensive way to gain new clients. However, it does give attorneys the chance to target potential clients who are actively looking for legal services online.
The risk involved in pay per click advertising is that the owner will be charged for each click they get on their ad. If a potential client clicks on an ad and leaves immediately, this can present a significant loss of money. But if you can make it work, it can be a steady stream of new personal injury leads and cases for your law firm.
Here are some tips for running a successful PPC campaign for personal injury leads:
- Focus your efforts on key terms that bring in new customers that fit your firm’s needs and vice versa.
- Increase your ROI by tailoring ads and landing pages to the search term a prospective client just typed in. For example, someone typing “average whiplash settlement” into a search engine would probably respond well to an ad that said “Whiplash Injury? Call Us For a Free Consultation” and then sent them to a landing page with an image of someone in a neck brace.
- Track how much you spend on each keyword and for each ad, then track what is working well and do more of it.
- Look at time of day and day of week data within google. It’s possible to schedule specific times for your ads to go live (ex: only on weekdays or during certain hours), so if you notice you do better on a specific day, or waste a lot of ad spend in the early afternoon, you can adjust accordingly.
- Create specific, automated bidding rules for each keyword and/or ad group. Once you’ve seen enough to know which keywords are turning into good cases, bid more on those keywords to get more of those clients. If you notice you’re spending a lot of money on a specific keyword or group of keywords, pause or lower your spend there.
In conclusion, pay per click advertising is a great way to quickly increase the amount of personal injury leads contacting your law firm. However it’s important to keep a close eye on costs, and watch the data carefully to make sure you’re spending money in areas that are most likely to result in more cases.