Sid Chary, Attorney and Owner of Chary Law P.C., uses Prevail Legal Marketing for their branded pay per lead campaigns to get immigration leads. With a goal to get double their initial investment, Prevail was able to deliver an early 10:1 return on investment by providing high quality leads! Hear more about their experience with Prevail and what we can do for your legal marketing.

“My return on investment, I’ve made probably close to 10X at this point and I am not even done with all of the initial leads!”

How is Prevail’s lead quality?

“I’m happy with what I am getting now. It’s a whole different world and it’s really something that I just don’t have time to figure out on my own, so it’s nice to have a good partner that can facilitate the leads for me.”

How easy was it getting started with Prevail?

“So with Prevail it was actually really easy getting the campaign started. An initial phone call, discussion and ideas and things like that, and how we wanted the landing page to look, a bit of background on the law firm and the types of clients we are trying to get. I think everything was up in a week, it was done really quickly. The landing page looked absolutely beautiful, it looks honestly better than a lot of attorney websites out there, or just websites in general. Very clean, concise, to the point. Very professional. It wasn’t long, it took probably about a week total to setup, and my phone started ringing the day after.”

What would you tell someone considering Prevail?

“I would tell anyone considering Prevail to schedule a call and have an open mind and speak with Adam or his team. They’re very smart and they take the time to understand what the attorney is looking for and they take the time to do the research. After that they create great landing pages. They’re a pleasure to work with, it’s very very easy. It’s nice to have someone that is working as a partner with you and open to ideas and suggestions. And they’re very honest.”

What’s surprised you most about Prevail?

“I told Adam at the beginning that I would be happy if I made double my money on my investment, and I have far surpassed that. It has been great so far, where I don’t want to tell people about Prevail, but it’s really a great tool to use. There is a lot of information out there that says “don’t use pay per lead” or “use pay per lead, use Avvo, use Legalmatch” to use these sites for pay per lead. As far as I can tell you guys are definitely the best, if not one of the best doing this right now.”

Prevail Legal Marketing can help your law firm with Branded Pay Per Lead Today!

The post How This Law Firm Got 10:1 Return on Immigration Leads appeared first on Prevail Legal Marketing.

PPC Agency Interview Questions

• Are you a full-service or specialized agency?
• What percentage of your agency’s clients are legal?
• How many people are in your agency?
• How many of those people run PPC campaigns?
• Are your PPC managers full-time or freelancers?
• If they’re freelancers, are they U.S. based or international?
• How long have the people running the campaigns been with your agency?
• Do you white-label a PPC company to run your ads?
• What type of reporting will I get each week or month?
• How often do you make changes to my account?
• Will I be able to keep my account if we stop working together?
• Do you charge based on a flat fee, percentage of spend, or per lead?

Prevail Legal Marketing can help your law firm with Branded Pay Per Lead Today!

The post Questions to Ask When Hiring a PPC Agency appeared first on Prevail Legal Marketing.

Liz Coyle, Marketing Director at JacksonWhite Law, uses Prevail Legal Marketing for their branded pay per lead campaigns. Right away this law firm was profitable with the first 25 leads delivered! Hear more about their experience with Prevail and what we can do for your legal marketing.

“The great thing about Prevail is that every lead is pretty much a qualified lead, so there’s not a ton of junk to filter through, which has been really nice!”

How is Prevail’s lead quality?

“The great thing I would say about Prevail is that every lead is pretty much a qualified leads so there’s not a ton of junk to filter through, which has been really nice.”

Why did you choose Prevail?

“It was the first time I heard of a PPC vendor that sort of structured it in a in a pay per lead fashion – that was totally new to me and I’ve never heard of anybody doing anything like that. And I thought that cuts out the impartialness of the high budget which is something I was looking for because I feel we were taken advantage of some there.”

What separates Prevail’s service from other companies?

“So a lot of time I spend with vendors is educating them on the legal market and what kind of features and benefits potential clients want to see. Do they want to see testimonials? Do they want to see results? This was already done when prevail came to the picture they already sort of had benchmarks in place to know those things and had good structure then good layout of things they already knew were working and we’re tested and that was great.”

What’s surprised you most about Prevail?

“I don’t know that enough people realize that when you say you’re a leads company that it’s personalized to your firm. So not only are you getting the benefit of the leads but you’re getting extra branding even if if people don’t convert. So I think that’s something really unique and really special.”

Prevail Legal Marketing can help your law firm with Branded Pay Per Lead Today!

The post How This Law Firm Got Profitable Off 25 Leads appeared first on Prevail Legal Marketing.

But there are quite a few red flags to watch out for when considering PPC agencies. Here is a list of things to consider when choosing a marketing team:

1. Experience of Your Account Managers

There are always newer account managers, but if your account manager is also optimizing your ad account, they need to be experienced. Make sure you’re asking how long the person on your account has been with the agency and how long they’ve been optimizing ad accounts.

2. Agency Size

If the agency is less than 3 or 4 people, there’s not a lot of redundancy if anyone were to leave. If that happens, your account might not be touched for months while that individual is being replaced. Make sure the size of the agency matches the number of clients that agency has. If there are 3 people and over 100 clients, that means the team is overextended.

3. Outsourced vs. In-House Ad Managers

If ad managers are in-house, it means that they know the campaigns intimately and are deeply connected with the company’s culture. Outsourcing isn’t always bad, but if management is outsourced overseas or for every single account, that will likely result in suboptimal performance.

4. Frequency of Optimizations

Ask how often accounts are updated. If you have access to the ad account, you could actually check this in the change history to confirm someone is, in fact, optimizing your account. At a minimum, accounts should be touched weekly to continually improve performance.

5. Account Ownership

Oftentimes, agencies will own your ad account and you won’t even know it. If you decide to move agencies, you won’t be able to take the historical data and performance. Be sure to ask your agency if you own your account. In the pay per lead model, the marketer generally owns the account because they’re accountable for performance. In the retainer model, you should own your own ad accounts.

Prevail Legal Marketing can help your law firm with Branded Pay Per Lead Today!

The post 5 Red Flags to Consider When Hiring a PPC Agency appeared first on Prevail Legal Marketing.

At Prevail, we believe the ideal structure for PPC marketing is what we call a Branded Pay Per Lead model. This model solves the problems associated with traditional PPC marketing arrangements.

First, the marketing runs under your brand.

This means that the leads are seeing your firm, they’re converting on branded landing pages, and the leads can’t be resold to multiple providers. They’re exclusive.

When you run marketing under your brand, the quality of leads is far higher because they know who they’re contacting and already trust your firm.

Second, the marketer is compensated on a per lead basis, rather than a retainer.

Instead of paying 25% of your $30,000 advertising budget, you’ll pay a fixed amount per lead that varies by case type. If no leads come in, you aren’t charged.

This places the burden of performance on the marketer and ensures that your money is well spent. You’ll never spend $10,000 and only get 5 leads.

If you order 80 leads for $125 ($10,000), you’d only pay $625 if you only received 5 leads and the marketer would be responsible for figuring out the problems with your campaign.

We believe Branded Pay per Lead is far superior to other management models and we encourage you to work with agencies that believe the same.

This greatly reduces your risk of working with a marketer that’s not good or inexperienced.

Prevail Legal Marketing offers Branded Pay Per Lead for your law firm.

The post Which PPC Agency Structure is Best for Legal Marketing? appeared first on Prevail Legal Marketing.

It’s important to keep in mind that marketing companies are selling time. If a company is charging you $500 per month and their hourly rate is $125 per month, you’re likely getting 4 hours or less of campaign management. In some accounts, this might be OK. In most, this isn’t enough time to create reports, add negatives, optimize the accounts, etc.

If a freelancer is charging $500 per month, their hourly rate might only be $75 per hour, so you might be receiving 6 or 7 hours of work each month. There’s always the possibility that someone is charging $500 and working 20 hours per month, but companies or freelancers that make this mistake often get overwhelmed or burned out and the service doesn’t generally last.

Here are some pros and cons of each PPC agency pricing model.

Flat-Fee Retainers

A flat-fee retainer is a monthly, fixed dollar amount you pay a marketing agency to run your PPC accounts. Some agencies charge a fixed fee of $1,000, $2,000, $4,000, or some other amount to run your campaign regardless of the spend.

If the fixed fee is low (i.e. $1,000 per month), then the agency is operating on a volume basis and your campaign likely isn’t getting a significant amount of optimization.

If the fixed fee is higher, you’re probably getting better service, but it might price you out if you want to spend less than $10,000 per month. Alternatively, the agency might not be working on the account much and you’re still spending a lot of money, which is a doubly bad situation.

The benefit of flat-fee retainers is that you might pay a low percentage of your overall spend. For example, if you spend $50,000 per month and only pay $2,000 in agency fees, you’re only paying a 4% management fee.

Flat-fee retainers are nice because they’re highly predictable. However, they don’t incentivize performance. Once a campaign is running at an “acceptable” level, the agency might “set it and forget it,” collect management fees, and spend little time working on the account. There isn’t incentive to improve performance and you could easily be paying 10-50% more for a lead than you would with proper optimization. You wouldn’t know it and the agency might not know it either.

Percentage of Spend Retainers

It’s very common for marketing agencies to charge for PPC marketing using a percentage of spend model. In this model, the agency charges you a percentage of your ad spend and generally has a minimum.

For example, if an agency charges 25% of ad spend with a $1,500 minimum, here’s how that might look based on different ad spend scenarios.

• $3,000 monthly ad spend = $1,500 fee (minimum wasn’t hit)
• $10,000 monthly ad spend = $2,500 fee
• $20,000 monthly ad spend = $5,000 fee
• $50,000 monthly ad spend = $12,500 fee
• $100,000 monthly ad spend = $25,000 fee

As you can see, the fee might be reasonable up to $15,000 or $20,000, but once it gets above $5,000, it’s hard to understand the value of that cost. Is someone spending 50 hours per month on the campaign at $100 per hour? It’s highly unlikely. As fees increase, it makes even less sense to be paying a marketing agency $10,000 per month for less than 10 or 15 hours of work.

Hourly Billing

Hourly billing is less common, but I’ve heard of freelancers charging hourly for Google Ads work. In this model, the freelancer charges you hourly based on the work they’re doing. The hourly rate might be anywhere from $25 per hour for someone very inexperienced up to $150 an hour for a more advanced ads manager.

While this might be appealing for firms, most agencies don’t like the model because it removes the recurring revenue model. Also, the psychological mindset of spending more to optimize campaigns is difficult for most lawyers to accept. Most business people want to spend less on marketing and they see the hourly charges as an extra expense, rather than an investment that reduces costs in the future.

The retainer model allows PPC managers to optimize campaigns on a regular basis. Of course, if those optimizations aren’t taking place, that’s the downside that we discussed in other pricing models.

Pay per Lead

The pay per lead model is exactly as it sounds, you pay for an individual lead. This is most common when working with lead vendors or 3rd party lead generators that sell leads using their own marketing funnels.

In this model, you commit to buy a certain number of leads from a lead vendor and then they deliver on that commitment. That commitment is called an order. You might place an order for 100 leads at $100 per lead. After the order is placed, you pay the vendor for the leads so they can go generate the leads using advertising dollars.

Nearly every lead vendor will require payment up front to reduce the risk of a client not paying after leads have been delivered. There’s an incredible amount of risk for that lead vendor if they don’t take payment first. If all the leads aren’t delivered for some reason, then you would receive a credit back for those unfulfilled leads.

The benefit of this model is that you’re only paying for the lead itself. If the vendor doesn’t run the campaigns well, their margins will be thin and they might even lose money. However, you have very little risk and can end the relationship quickly.

Many law firms will buy leads and run their own campaigns simultaneously to increase their volume.

Prevail Legal Marketing offers Branded Pay Per Lead.

The post Different PPC Agency Pricing Models Explained appeared first on Prevail Legal Marketing.

Google & Bing Ads

Google and Bing can be broken down into different sub-categories because each channel has multiple ways of delivering ads. We’re primarily going to talk about Google because they own roughly 90% of the search market with Bing having far less volume.

Search Result Ads

Ads in the search results are some of the highest quality because consumers have high intent when they’re searching for legal help. They’re looking for the services you offer in order to solve a problem.

When a lead converts from a search ad, they’re a higher probability of close because they want to talk to you about help.

Display Ads

Display ads are image advertisements that appear on news sites, YouTube videos, and various other spots around the internet.

Because most users that see display ads aren’t actually looking for legal help, display campaigns generally have an extremely low conversion rate with a high cost per lead.

YouTube Ads

You may be surprised to hear that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, right behind its parent, Google.

YouTube consumption is massive and ads are relatively affordable. If you have a practice area that isn’t time sensitive, like estate law or bankruptcy, YouTube is a channel that might work for you.

If your services are needed within a very short window of time, like criminal law, DUI, or personal injury, YouTube is a more difficult channel to generate leads.

Facebook/Instagram Ads

Social media ads are often lower quality than Google or Bing because they were never intending to contact you in the first place. We call that lower intent.

Someone marketing on Facebook might be using their ads to suggest users pursue a personal injury case that occurred over a year ago.

Technically, the case might have some merit, but older cases are generally lower quality. The same low quality idea also applies to consumers that weren’t injured or insurance wasn’t involved.

They may be a “lead,” but the likelihood of a case is very low.

Affiliate Networks

Affiliate networks are generally used by lead vendors and not as often by traditional agencies. Lead vendors will often buy leads from affiliate networks or post their landing pages on the networks for marketers to generate leads.

Hypothetically, in this scenario, unknown marketers run ads and sell leads to the network for $50, the network sells the lead to the lead vendor for $80, and then the lead vendor sells you the lead for $150. It’s very difficult to generate a quality lead for $50 and you’re paying $150 for it after various stages of markup.

The post How do Marketers Generate Leads Using PPC? appeared first on Prevail Legal Marketing.

Full-Service Agency

If you need a wide range of services for your law firm, a full-service agency might be the place to start. These types of agencies offer everything from website design, to SEO, to PPC, and everything in between.

One challenge with growing a full-service agency is the need for many skill sets amongst a single group of people. For example, if the agency offers eight different services (web design, development, content, SEO, PPC, PR, etc.), that means the company has to employ a minimum of eight people to fill those needs. If the agency doesn’t have eight people, some will be responsible for two different services.

As you know, covering two completely different service areas makes it incredibly difficult to be an expert at either one. This becomes even more complicated when one of those key individuals leaves the company and no one else in the company has experience in the services they covered.

This type of situation is very common with pay per click.

Pros of Hiring a Full-Service Agency:

• You have a single point of contact for all your marketing projects
• It can be easier to maintain brand consistency
• Your team can handle a variety of different marketing needs

Cons of Hiring a Full-Service Agency:

• The experience level and quality of PPC advertising might be very low
• There’s risk of a key employee quitting which might leave your campaign untouched for months at a time
• The agency may have limited resources to devote to PPC campaigns
• The performance of your PPC campaign may be low due to resources being spread thin amongst numerous service offerings
• Reporting might be weak due to the amount of time, energy, and expertise required

Specialist Agency

Since we’re covering PPC in this guide, we’re going to talk about specialist PPC agencies for legal marketing. There are certainly other specialists in content writing, SEO, websites, and other service areas. The same concepts apply to those types of agencies as well.

Specialist agencies have decided to focus on a very specific service and not branch into the full-service category. Sometimes, these agencies will offer just one service, and they might offer it to just one industry as well.

Prevail is a specialist agency for PPC marketing. While the company is not exclusively branded for attorneys, we do specialize in legal marketing since it’s an industry that’s conducive to lead generation.

Agencies that focus on one service are generally very experienced and skilled at that one service. If you ask a PPC agency to build a website or offer SEO, they will likely say “no” and would have a very difficult time doing quality work even if they said yes.

With specialist agencies, you typically have redundancy amongst roles and less risk than a full-service agency due to the deep skill set in that one area.

Pros of Hiring a Specialist Agency:

• Deeper experience and skill in PPC management
• Your campaign will likely have a lower cost per lead and save money
• Greater overlap in skills which reduces risk if someone leaves the company

Cons of Hiring a Specialist Agency:

• Lack of ability to offer other services like SEO, website design, etc.
• Another point of contact for you or whoever is managing your firm’s marketing

Learn more about performance marketing for your law firm with Prevail.

Freelancer

The distinction between a freelancer and a small agency can be blurry at times. The most standard definition of a freelancer is an individual that provides a service, but doesn’t work for any one particular company.

Freelancers are business owners. In most cases, they know what they’re doing. They’ve often learned a skill at an agency or company before leaving to start their own business and become a freelancer. With that said, there are instances where freelancers are “learning on the job” and don’t have the experience or track record of generating results yet.

It’s important that you find good freelancers by asking qualifying questions to know where they fall when it comes to track record and experience. Since most freelancers don’t have an office or staff, they’re sometimes more affordable than working with agencies. However, they often don’t have all of the resources that agencies have, including developers, designers, and strategists on staff.

It’s not uncommon for freelancers to get tired of the stress associated with finding new clients, selling new projects, and then maintaining those projects day-to-day.

When this happens, freelancers often take full-time jobs with companies or agencies and only retain a very small group of clients. If you don’t fall in that group, you’ll need to find another service provider, which can be a headache.

Pros of Hiring a Freelancer:

• Often very skilled at their craft, but make sure to qualify their experience
• Generally more affordable than full-service or specialist agencies

Cons of Hiring a Freelancer:

• Don’t have the resources that agencies have to cover all needs of a campaign
• Don’t have coverage for services when they’re on vacation
• If something happens to your freelancer or they take a job, you’ll need to find a new service provider

Lead Vendor

Lead vendors fall into a category of their own. They perform the same type of work as agencies, but the relationship with your firm is more transactional.

Companies that generate leads do so using digital marketing with Facebook, Google, YouTube, and a variety of other marketing platforms. However, when they generate leads, they drive the traffic to a website they own with a separate brand they use for lead generation. The brand is vague even though it relates to the practice area they’re marketing.

When a visitor sees the page, they might fill out a survey or complete a form, and then submit their information to be contacted. That lead is then routed to one or more attorneys to follow up and try to win the business. Attorneys will often complain about the quality of lead vendor leads. There are three reasons for quality issues.

The first is that visitors see the lead vendor’s brand after clicking an ad, and then submit a form on that page. Then, the lead is sent to an attorney who calls the lead. Unfortunately, the lead has never heard of your firm and may say “I don’t know who you are and I didn’t fill out a form for you to contact me” even though they just filled out a form.

One reason this occurs is because the person isn’t connecting the page they saw with your firm. They’re also being contacted by two or three firms who bought the lead. They’re confused by all the firms calling them and thinking they were just filling out a survey for some legal help.

Second, if the visitor is submitting a form that misrepresents the services you offer, their expectations won’t align with your services. For example, if the lead vendor is using messaging that says “Get free help with your DUI case” and you offer a free consultation, but obviously not free help, the quality of the lead will be low. They are looking for free help and you offer a free consultation. Unfortunately, you don’t have any control over what messaging a lead vendor uses.

Finally, if the lead vendor is generating traffic from lower quality sources, the lead quality will suffer. Different traffic sources have different levels of quality.

Pros of Hiring a Lead Vendor:

• Fixed lead cost with limited risk of wasting ad spend
• Ability to scale with higher volume
• You can run your own ads and buy leads at the same time

Cons of Hiring a Lead Vendor:

• Quality of the leads is generally weaker than an in-house PPC campaign
• Leads may not expect your firm’s call and are less likely to talk

The post How to Decide Which PPC Provider is Right for You appeared first on Prevail Legal Marketing.