Here at Five by Five, we’ve worked with an untold amount of lawyers and accountants and financial planners and business coaches – you name it, we’ve done it! We find the principles for Google Ads are all the same. So in this instance, we’re using a criminal lawyer in Melbourne for our Google Ads case study to show you how to be successful with Google Ads.
Saxon Farnworth is the Director of Gravitate Digital and takes care of all our clients wanting to harness the power of Google Ads to help advance their business goals. Gravitate Digital specialises in Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, TikTok, and LinkedIn advertising, so Saxon really knows his stuff!
We chatted to him about a Google Ads case study featuring one of our clients, who are a criminal law firm in Melbourne, and he shared his insight and infinite Google Ads wisdom with us.
We’re gonna cover off on where we started with Saxon, what results we generated, and what potential future opportunities exist out there on the horizon.
How our digital strategy is crucial to Google Ads services
The digital presence of this specific client had nothing but crickets when we actually started working with the firm.
This lawyer had been working for a bigger firm and had just decided to go out on his own and start his own firm from scratch.
So in January of 2021, this was a fresh new business with no domain registered, no logo, no content – nothing!
What we did over the next 12 months was roll out our Burger with the Lot, a complete digital solution, for a Criminal Law Firm in Melbourne.
The foundational piece is the digital strategy and this is where we spend a lot of time really understanding who we are partnering with as a client and what the aim of the game is in terms of desired results and the definition of success.
This lawyer specialises in criminal law and they’re geographically based in Melbourne so it was up to our Strategy Team to map out the ideal layout for the new website. This is really critical for driving traffic from an SEO perspective and harnessing the free traffic that we get from Google search.
The digital strategy and the layout of a website also plays a critical role in how effective and successful Google Ads are going to be for a site.
What you don’t want is to run an ad for a specific topic but not have a dedicated landing page of good quality to send people to. When someone clicks on a Google Ad for firearm offences for example, you want a dedicated page covered in information about firearm offences with no other noise.
Google will actually go and look at the landing pages of any ads that are run to see that there’s congruence of firearm offences information with the ad that says something about the world of firearm offences.
If they marry up the quality score of your Google Ad improves greatly and it also helps with SEO and pushing your page higher in the search result ranks. All the congruence also makes for an easier conversion from a customer and user experience side of things too!
When you’re running a website that doesn’t have a good architecture, Google Ads will perform a little bit weaker. So making sure you have dedicated pages for each major topic within your business or industry is super important.
How does the design of your website affect the results of Google Ads?
When it comes to the design of your website, it also has a major influence on the success of your Google Ads. There is no point funnelling all this traffic to your website if you aren’t going to get conversions!
A conversion can be anything that our client or their website has set up as a goal. So in e-commerce websites the conversion might be a purchase, and in a service business, like a Criminal Lawyer, it’s a phone call, an email or an enquiry form submission.
Simple things like having your phone number in the top right corner of your website at all times makes it easy and inviting for someone to take action as soon as they feel like it. The two priorities of location and service offerings are so critical to be seen as soon as a user lands on your website. Criminal Lawyer and the location of Victoria can be seen immediately upon landing on our client’s homepage.
Call to Actions or CTAs are another critical aspect of website design and the success of Google Ads. You need to have a CTA within a mouse scroll so you can convert users and strike while the iron is hot!
Google Ads success is defined by how many conversions they are generating and so to have CTAs in the right spot really helps the flow of the sales funnel.
You might be doing an amazing job as a Google Ads expert, getting plenty of users through to a website, but if the website is just leaking people all over the place, then that’s your blockage and where you are going to waste a whole lot of budget.
You don’t just need content to create your Google Ads…
As we mentioned before, the content of your website plays a huge role in the quality score within Google Ads, but also SEO.
The bulk of the traffic to this criminal lawyer site actually comes from SEO, but it goes hand in hand with the paid traffic.
Because a criminal lawyer is such a niche industry, we partnered with a law expert to provide us with 1000 words of detailed copy for each legal service and defence pages. We needed an expert in the correct legal terms because in this industry, one wrong keyword move and we could have our Google Ads account disabled.
This does make the navigation of what keywords we can and can’t use in a Google Ads campaign a little bit more challenging because we might be able to run a DUI ad, but we might not be able to use the words drug driving.
For example, we have to be creative around the wording for criminal defence lawyer ads and keep our finger on the pulse of Google’s policies, just so that we keep their Google Ads in good standing, so that their account stays healthy.
But one of the wonderful things about the SEO space is that once you can make a website and say (almost) whatever you want on it. So anywhere that we couldn’t target particular keywords with Google Ads, we could fill every part of the criminal lawyer keyword space with SEO, utising every possible keyword that we can’t use in ads.
So SEO ties in very nicely with paid traffic which is amazing for a start from scratch campaign. When you appear multiple times on page one of a Google search, it really reinforces your authority in your industry.
Our real life Google Ads Case Study
The first thing to really look at when it comes to this Google Ads case study of our Criminal Lawyer client is that they have a lot of different locations around Melbourne, but they also have a lot of different specific services in the criminal law space. So when we build our Google Ad campaigns, we’ve built them in a way that we honour each of their services in each of the different locations.
This allows our client to decide each month if they want to turn up the spend on certain campaigns for certain services and turn down other services, and the same with specific locations, depending on what the focus for the business is at any time. This also avoids bottlenecking a certain area of the business.
How do Google Ads work?
For this particular Criminal Lawyer client in Melbourne we are currently running 22 Google Ad campaigns. Campaigns are defined by what services and objectives we are targeting, what audience we are targeting and where that audience is located.
Within those campaigns we have 144 Ad Groups that break down the service from each campaign into a deeper level. For example, in our Driving Offences campaign, we have Ad groups for DUI, Drug Driving, Drink Driving, Driving Offences.
Those Ad groups consist of 442 ads in total that we’re running and constantly split testing, making sure we are getting the best results possible. Those ads encompass 1,934 keywords that are being refined and optimised daily.
This model means we are agile and we do our best to make sure everything is filled. Just because we have all these Google Ads prepared, doesn’t mean we have to run them all at once.
But it does mean that when we want to run them all or if we want to run certain ones, we can move things quite quickly and we’re not having to restart the whole thing from scratch.
How Google Ads can help you advance your business goals and make more money
Above is a snapshot of the averages and the totals for our Criminal Lawyer client’s Google Ads account from the last six months.
Let’s break down what each stat really means.
Conversion Rate:
Of everyone that visits the site from a Google Ad, on average 8.9% of them have converted in the form of a phone call, email or form submission.
Average Cost:
The average cost spent for each conversion is $55 but considering these law services can range from $1,000-$40,000 depending on the case, it is well worth the investment of $31,000 so far.
Impressions:
An impression means the Google Ads have been put in front of 168,000 people’s eyes.
Click Through Rate:
Of those 168,000 people seeing the Google Ad, 3.74% actually click on it and end up on the client’s site.
We believe every person with a website needs to have their site set up with Google Analytics. Data should drive every one of your marketing decisions, and Google Analytics is where you can find some of the most powerful data available on your business. One of our favourite pages in Google Analytics is the source medium.
This page incorporates every single source of traffic to your site and it includes SEO, Google Ads, direct traffic, EDM and social media marketing – everything!
You can see that the client’s website traffic has gone on that nice healthy incline over the last year.
Organic Traffic:
Our SEO team has driven 31,000 people to the site through organic Google searches, providing over 75% of the overall traffic and also contributing to 30% of all the conversions.
Google CPC:
Google Ads has driven almost 6,000 users to the site over the last year which is 14% of the all traffic and hasn’t had to focus on gathering the ‘top of funnel’ traffic as that has been taken care of by SEO. What we are trying to do with Google Ads is we’re trying to close the loop and drive directed quality traffic, hence the 9.72% conversion rate.
Direct Traffic:
Often direct traffic is the third most common traffic source and this is when a user goes to the website directly from the URL bar by typing in the exact web address.
Average Session Duration:
One little observation on the average session duration is that people are spending more time on the site when they click through a Google Ad than they do through an organic Google search. So that would indicate a more engaged user or just higher buy intent within that audience.
Google Ads are just like Ronaldo in a game of soccer.. Kind of!
When we look at the conversions it shows the last click that generated the conversion. Whereas if you go to this other section in analytics called top conversion paths, what it’s going to show you is all of the different players that led to that conversion.
So an analogy we love is that conversions are like a goal in a soccer game. If you look at the source medium statistics it’s just like Ronaldo scoring the goal and him getting all the glory.
Whereas if you look at the top conversion paths, you get to acknowledge all of the different plays of all of the different players on the field, passing to each other, defending against the other team, to then get to the point where Ronaldo scores the goal.
And so what we can see in the graphic below in row six is that organic search was the first touch point and then it got passed over to a second direct site visit which got the conversion.
Or in row seven you see organic search, married up with paid search to bring it home, which ultimately led to the conversion.
We can acknowledge all of these different strategies who kick together and pass the ball to get the goal. When you throw in social media and EDM marketing in the mixer you can have a long string of passes where Google Ads may eventually make the final touch point that scores the goal!
If you are struggling with understanding how to be successful with Google Ads then get in touch with us today!
Not only can we put you in touch with Google Ads experts like Saxon, we can create the perfect website that ticks all the boxes needed for effective Google Ads.
It’s all well and good sending quality traffic to your site but remember, you need a website that converts!
Team up with us to get the most out of your website and Google Ads and see how Google Ads can help you advance your business goals and make more money!
