According to reports, a new Google privacy tool will allow users to follow brands they like and opt out of sensitive ad categories. The name of the tool? My Ad Center. Tune in and join the conversation if you want to hear how this tool will impact your law firm’s Google Ads campaigns.
Grace and Liel explore how My Ad Center will let users decide which topics, categories, and brands they are interested in. But, most importantly, it will allow users to opt-out of certain types of advertising and even provide live feedback on the ads they are being served, even on the search network.
The conversation then jumps to analyze the results from a recent PPC survey on adopting Google Ads recommended automation. The results are not surprising to us, but they could be to you if you are not involved in the managing of your Google Ads account.
Target Cost per Acquisition sounds wonderful as a strategy – you set the price, and Google gets you the conversion. What’s not to love about it? Well, to start with, a conversion is not a case. Unless you train Google very well, and we mean it V E R Y well, your campaign may still not get you new cases. That is why we shift our focus in our conversation to VBB, also known as Value-Based Bidding.
Tune in now and get the latest on Google Ads search for law firms.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Send us your questions at ask@incamerapodcast.com
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Transcript
Liel: [00:00:00] Google announced the launch of Google Maps Center at its IO 2022 developer conference last week in an effort to make users more comfortable with their data usage. But both the winners and the losers will be the advertisers. And it’s up to you to decide how this will impact your law firm. I’m Liel Levy, co-founder of Nanato Media and author of Beyond Se Habla Español How Lawyers Win the Hispanic Market. And this is in Camera podcast where we’ll be clicking on about this ad every time. Welcome to in camera podcast, Private Legal Marketing Conversations. Grace Welcome back. How are you today?
Grace: [00:01:04] Good. How are you, Liel?
Liel: [00:01:06] Doing great, Grace. Thank you so much for asking. It’s nice to see you. And it looks like you have a calm day at the office because nobody’s around to bother you, right?
Grace: [00:01:16] That’s exactly right. I can actually close my door and just get tons of work done today.
Liel: [00:01:21] That’s the thing. That’s the thing. It’s really tremendous. The amount of work that one can get done when you are not getting interruptions, whether they are happening in person or whether they’re happening through other means. Be that a phone call, be that an email, be that a text message or a web form submission that you are not expecting. Right. And some of these interruptions, don’t get me wrong, they could be great, but they still potential is going to slow down what your initial plans of today were. But Grace, the reality is that today’s conversation is not going to be about time management. It’s going to be about another topic of interest, or we hope it’s going to be for about a topic of interest to our audience. And that’s going to be advertising in Google primarily. Primarily. But we’ll see where the conversation leads us and maybe we’re going to be also looking into some other platforms. Grace. The reason why I wanted us to start the conversation here is because a new things coming up. Right, that did not exist before. And that is following the trend of what we’ve seen over the past year happen across iOS, across other platforms.
Liel: [00:02:38] And that’s in relation to authorization from users to number one, users give access to their data for advertising purposes. And secondly, volunteer information about themselves for better a better targeted experience. Right. Those two things, and we know very well here that Google has kind of like flown a little bit under the radar when it comes down to all of this, because it kind of like collects data from users but gives immediate results back to them. So the exchange feels very transactional and very fair. Right, however. As consumers are shifting their mindset about how much they want to share information specifically, specifically with advertisers. Google needs to also up their game and show more consideration about users privacy and have a more transparent approach all about the way in which they serve ads to users. So Grace recently Google announced the launch of Google’s My Ad Center, and I was hoping you could help us understand in easy terms, what does Google my ad center basically is?
Grace: [00:04:17] So the way I see it and I’d love your obviously your input on it as well, but the way I see this is basically to allow you to have full control or as much control as you possibly could want on your privacy. Right. And that is what kind of brands do I want to follow? What ads do I actually want to see? Do I want to I want to opt into these ads rather than just being shown things? Because I long time ago said it’s okay for Google to use my info and to show me stuff that I like. Well, now it’s going to be even more control, and that’s kind of how I look at it from the consumer’s perspective. There’s the other side as well, but I think we can start with just the consumer’s perspective and how that’s going to affect them, you or me, when we’re interacting with brands and their ads?
Liel: [00:05:04] Yeah, absolutely. Grace. So there are a few things here to keep in mind. And I think one one that is very important is to understand that Google serves you ads in many different platforms. There is the search network, the one that we tend to focus the most here in this podcast. But there are also other places where we get served ads and one of them is YouTube. One of them is going to be the display network and those are going to be ads that oftentimes are a response or a result of search terms that we have put up into Google. But so what Google is doing here with my ad center is it allows you to proactively select categories or topics, if you may, that could be of interest to you. And just like looking at here at the Settings page, which by the way, they really put a lot of effort into making the user experience as easy and intuitive as possible. It definitely doesn’t look like a settings page. It looks more kind of like your profile building on a social media network platform, very user friendly, very easy to navigate. And you can see there, like some of the topics that are being or interest that are being offered are, for instance, hybrid and alternative vehicles, food and groceries, beauty and personal care, very, very specific consumer based topics that you can then opt in and tell them, Yeah, you know what? I would actually be interested in getting information about these topics. Now, here is the other thing. You can also point out specific brands that you like and follow and that you would actually appreciate getting ads from. And so, again, users are giving here a lot of opportunity to personalize the ad experience they’re going to have across these platforms.
Liel: [00:07:03] Now, here is the other thing that is important to keep in mind. This actually also allows you to limit it just to select how much ads you’re going to be seeing from the things you like. But it actually also allows you to limit how much ads you see from other categories that you do not care for. Like, for instance, alcohol, like for instance, gambling, like for instance, weight loss or dating, like things that you may not be in the market for. And so why are you being served those ads? Just because you are of a certain age of a certain income level, live in a particular area, or have shown other type of interest signals that just categorize you as a as a suitable candidate to see ads that you potentially not care for. So by having these options, you can also remove yourself from seeing ads that you are not interested in. And here is the other thing. This is something that existed, for instance, in platforms like Facebook that when you go and you see an ad, there is like there is like a little tab there that you can feedback Facebook and say, no, I don’t want to use I don’t want to see this ad. I don’t want it’s not content that I care for. But, you know, where you could not do that and you still cannot do it until these things like this thing launches and the search network. You cannot like you get share of that and you have to put up with those thoughts whether you like them or not. Now, you can actually give feedback on it. Grace This is this is meaningful, right? This is meaningful because of.
Grace: [00:08:43] This.
Liel: [00:08:44] Change this could impact. Absolutely. You’re definitely I mean, advertisers, particularly law firms. Right. That rely very heavily on the search network. They’re really going to have to up their game. The quality of the ads that they create and the more spammy their ads seem, the more irritating they’re going to be to users and users. As we’re saying, it’s a behavior change that’s happening now. And so while before, they were just like, okay, I’m going to ignore I’m not going to do anything about it because I cannot do anything about it right now. When you’re triggering a user with your ad, you can expect also for them to to feedback the platform and say, I don’t want to see more of these ads. Right. And so that’s that’s something that you that you need to keep in mind. Now, the other thing here, Grace, that I think it’s also very important is that now when you are showing up ads on the search network, you may remember that as of now, there is kind of like a little button right next to the ad that reads, why this ad it reads, why this ad? And it basically then just opens up a generic paragraph that explains that the search query matches the topic or interest of the ad, and that’s basically it. But now when you’re showing a search ad, you’re going to have another button that is going to be about this ad. And that’s actually going to give you not just more information about the ad, but it’s actually going to tell you who is behind that advertising. And you may be thinking yourself as a law firm. Well, they probably already know because it says they’re the law offices of John Smith.
Liel: [00:10:37] And so when they click on it, it’s going to say the law offices of John Smith. That’s going to be the case for those advertisers who are actually advertising their businesses legitimately, who is not going to have any fun at all. Here is those advertisers that go under the name of accident injury San Francisco dot com and they’re a lead generation company that have no law firm behind them. And they’re going to have to disclose themselves with a lot of transparency that they are basically a lead generation company. And now it’s going to be very easy for users to tell, apart from who are real law firms and who are lead generation companies. And not just that, but this is going to be massive for the branding campaigns because right now it is very, very commonly seen for big brands, big law firms being targeted by lead generation companies that are showing call only ads under their brand name, which can mislead users into thinking, Well, I’ve just searched for Morgan and Morgan. And so this ad comes at top with a telephone number called Now and whatnot. And it doesn’t tell me that it’s not Morgan and Morgan. It doesn’t tell me that it is Morgan and Morgan, but it doesn’t tell me that it’s not Morgan and Morgan on the actual ad copy itself. So I am assuming it’s Morgan and Morgan and I’m calling them, but in reality you’re calling a lead generation place. And so now with the actual about this ad, you’re going to also be able to see who is actually advertising these entail that it is not Morgan and Morgan. Now, Grace, you just told me something. Doesn’t all this sound wonderful to me?
Grace: [00:12:24] It does. You know, it gives you control over privacy. It gives you control over certain things. You know, of course, on the flip side, as the advertiser, if you’re not in the game, meaning you haven’t upped your game, as you said at the beginning of this conversation, you’re going to be left behind. Because, I mean, for someone to be able to say, I don’t want to see any law firm ads as a category, that could be a huge problem. But if they say, I like this law firm brand so much that I want to follow that law firm brand, that’s a win. So, you know, you do have to be careful about it. But at the same time, for me, this is shifting towards the way the consumers want to digest the information. And so it has to happen one way or the other, I think.
Liel: [00:13:12] Grace, you know, if you haven’t upped your game, you’re probably already given up because you haven’t been able to make it all the way to this point in which we are. It’s the reality having sort of make your bringing your Google ads campaigns and your SEO strategy to this point where it can continue to thrive requires for a lot of adaptability. And if you’re still whether you’re seeing fluctuations on your campaigns, you’re still generating a return on investment from your digital marketing strategy. It means that you have kept up with times and that you are actually keeping up with with the trends and with user behavior. And that’s fantastic Grace. I will tell you one thing here that it’s very important to be mindful about when talking about my ad center, it basically comes down to whether users are going to use it or not, whether users are actually going to take the time to go and customize and fill their profiles and give feedback to Google. Because the reality is that we think oftentimes a lot as marketeers, that users care too much about privacy and about customization. And the reality is that oftentimes they do not. And so I think what Google is doing very well here is actually designing a very seamless and very interactive user experience around the process of building your ad profile, if you may.
Liel: [00:14:42] But at the same time, if you are not really caring much about it and you are not providing Google with any data or such, you’re probably going to have a very similar experience in the way that you are consuming ads as you’ve had up until now. And so it’s going to be something that we’re spending on adoption. It’s spending on actually how much users are going to be willing to build their ad profile. And it may not happen overnight. Grace This is probably going to take some time, but I think all the indicators are pointing us that we are heading towards a place where people care more about their data and they’re also for their own user experience, going to be more interested and more incentivized to have more accurate profiles about what their interests are and such. Now, to really come to the point where you’re going to be as a personal injury lawyer, followed by or selected to someone who wants to specifically follow your brand. I think there’s probably just a handful of law firms at this point that may have that level of fan base, but it certainly speaks to how you need to look at creating a brand if you want to if you want to thrive in this marketing environment.
Grace: [00:16:05] It is, you know, I mean, all the changes in privacy, all the changes here, you know, anybody that has an iPhone has been seeing this kind of come down the path anyway. And the truth is, you know, you we want privacy for our own data. Like we should have control over our own data and we should have always had control. But, you know, Google is is moving always towards the user experience and user intent. So this is a good move from their part, particularly the way it’s laid out. I like it. I think that, like you said, it’s not it’s not clunky. It’s not like little buttons and cogs and wheels. It’s almost like a profile on Facebook or something, you know, using buy images, you know, like if you want to learn about hybrid vehicles, you want to see some ads about it, you can just click a little plus sign.
Liel: [00:16:54] It’s like setting up your Pinterest profile, right? Kind of like what type of images you want to see. It is kind of like that experience, and I think it’s very important and I think it’s very clever. Grace Because that’s how Google is trying to portray the ad experience to look and to be in. Honestly, to be very frank with you, I think they probably need to find a different way and stop using AD. I know it can be a little bit misleading, but at the end of the day, just the connotation of ad, doesn’t it has it just doesn’t generate the best reaction because people don’t want to be felt that they’re being sold right. And so I think that’s part of the big challenge that needs to be overcome here is just shifting the mindset about that. But anyhow, that’s a much bigger conversation now. Grace Let’s talk about some other Google ads related topics. And I was actually very happy to see and I say happy because, you know, it’s up to a certain extent reassuring to see these surveys that was published by Search Engine Land a few well, actually it was from PPC survey, but the article came from Search Engine Land. And basically what it does is it uncovers what are the most pressing issues of PPC experts when it comes down to the recommendations or the automated recommendations that Google ads is making with regards to automation in its platform. So first, let’s give some context Grace, because I think, you know, you manage Google ads accounts and you, you know, when you’re logging into Google ads, there’s going to be a few pop ups that come up. And so why don’t you share what are some of the things or some of the recommendations that you may see Google ads presenting to.
Grace: [00:18:56] You when you use it? Yeah. So the the recommendations that kind of pop up when you’re inside of the Google ads could be anything from, you know, essentially. Let me rephrase this. So recommendations that pop up on the top of the screen. It comes up in green. Right. And it can give you all kinds of recommendations, anything from adding a g a universal property to increasing your budget. And there are multiple things in between. There’s tons of recommendations. I’ve actually experienced quite a few of these as I run Google ads for other non legal companies and I have seen some of the most of the recommendations that. Least from the account that I manage seem to make sense, but in some cases they don’t. So with this kind of what they call a one size fits all approach, it does get a little bit of clunky when you kind of have access to somebody else’s Google Ads account, and then as the owner of the account will go in there and click in. If you see something that says that there’s a recommendation that hasn’t been done and you’re not 100% in the score. How do you think that most of them will feel? They’ll feel like you, as potentially the marketer or the agency, are not doing his or her job. And that may or may not be the case, obviously. And that’s because as marketing people, we look at other things than what it specifically says. We do it for the category, the market, the demographic. And so some of those recommendations are irrelevant, frankly.
Liel: [00:20:40] Yeah. And or you strategically just don’t want to implement them. Right. Grace. So I love a lot of things that you’re saying there, how you’re framing this. First of all, this is important because many of you lawyers who have hired someone to run your Google ads account may every once in a while enter the Google ads account to see what’s going on, how much is the spend or whatever. And then all from the sudden when you least expect it, you start seeing all of these pop ups that say, you haven’t implemented this, you haven’t done this, we recommend to do this. Your quality score drops this much, this, this week, and you have kind of like what is called the opt score that is not necessarily looking great and you may get concerned. You are like, well, it looks like my ads manager is not doing a good a good job because I have all of these alerts telling me that my optimization score is not good. It’s not good. But here is the reality. The reality is that. Across the board the survey that was completed by pay per click managers across all over the world and obviously that have been very well established and with a lot of experience in the industry are saying that, hey, you know what, we also don’t don’t don’t follow those recommendations because they’re not suitable. We understand that Google has an agenda to pursue more automation, but guess what? We don’t feel that many of these one size fits all recommendations are good for us. Few examples of very, very unpopular recommendations that I can tell you ourselves we will never, ever implement into the strategy.
Liel: [00:22:26] One of them being brought much using broad march as a keyword modifier for the campaigns. We don’t want that. We don’t want we know very well for which search terms we want to show up and we want flex into showing for other stuff. I don’t care how much you’re going to tell us that we should so broad match not interested. We also not interested in using smart bidding when we know very well how much our keywords should be worth and which ones are the ones that we are willing to play more, pay more, and which ones are the ones that we’re not interested in paying more? And specifically not budget increases. We don’t want to hand over the right to Google to decide when are we going to be increasing our budget just because an automated recommendations coming up telling us go ahead and increase your budget because the market is fluctuating. So these are amongst the ones that are in popular, but the reality is that some others are actually good. And let me tell you one of them that’s actually very popular as a recommendation, responsive search chats, which we talked about it last week and we actually praised them and said that this is a great example of AI and automation being used to your benefit. And so it really comes as no surprise to me to see that this was has been highly adopted and praised by marketers across the spectrum. Now, another very interesting here is target cost per acquisition. Right. And we’re going to talk a little bit about cost per acquisition in general, because this could be, in some cases, an acceptable strategy for law firms that are very, very aware of what are they’re comfortable spending per elite acquisition.
Liel: [00:24:11] Right. But at the same time, it can maybe not necessarily be the most effective way of running your campaign because then again, you’re handing over to Google too much power over the handling of your account. And don’t forget, Google needs to be trained in order to understand really what’s generating value for you or not, because AI is basically taking signals from your account performance. And if those signals that it’s analyzing and setting up the rules on are not the right ones, then you can very well be generating the wrong type of acquisitions that are not necessarily generating results for you. And so a term that has been created around these that actually I really like is value based bidding. Right. You basically set up rules to go for Google to know exactly what are the behaviors that generate value in your campaign or that are likely to deliver you a conversion that is going to actually be of value for your firm and then set up rules around that and then base the automation around that. So I think to get to that point, you definitely need to have scripts implemented into the campaign. You need to have your own parameter on the automation established, but you cannot just kind of let it run wild just based on the Google recommendation. So. Grace The takeaway on this particular one, don’t be misled into believing that your account is not performing well because your opt score is not showing up great numbers.
Liel: [00:26:02] Your campaign should be measured by the number of cases that you’re signing on a monthly basis, and that’s it. That’s where it starts. That’s where it ends. And as long as those numbers are profitable, as long as that cost per acquisition is sustainable, that’s great. The other thing that is very, very important to keep in mind, particularly when you’re looking at a pay per click campaign, is that, yes, you have an average case value and you’re probably going to be running your numbers based on the average case value. But the reality is that not all cases are worth the same, particularly when you’re in the personal injury. Any practice area, to be quite honest with you. Right, any practice area, but. In personal injury. You don’t know when you’re going to hit the homerun, right? You don’t know when your Google ads account is going to generate a lead that’s going to be worth seven figures on settlement. So you need to understand that you’re not necessarily always going to be getting your desired return on investment on every single lead that is being generated. But this is more so kind of like an overall investment over a period of time that should be looked into the years like not just a year, but into the years, and then see how much money has gone into that strategy, how much revenue has been generated out of the leads generated into that strategy. And so kind of like that long term vision doesn’t need needs to remain at the center of the way in which you go into into these campaigns.
Grace: [00:27:36] Well, you know, I feel like when it comes to the automation and, you know, bidding and all of that, it’s nice to have the option to automate. It always is. Right. But whenever you automate, just like you said, Liel, you always kind of have that possibility of it going wild. And so you always need to make sure that you level set expectations within your actual parameters. And there are plenty of ways to do that. You just have to make sure that you pay attention to it so that if your agency is the one handling this for you, that is what they do, right? So the only thing that you need to make sure is that you’re providing your agency. If that’s someone that’s doing it for you or you’re whoever it is that’s doing your advertising for you, you need to provide them with the information that they need to do their jobs, which is what is the true cost per case. What type of demographics do you actually get in the cases? Because, remember, they are not your they’re not lawyers. But for the most part, they have this information. And if you tell them what you’re willing to pay in terms of value, and they should have this information already by now, but if they don’t, that’s something that you want to share and that’s something that they need to know so that they can properly create the parameters and not have this automation go wild.
Liel: [00:28:58] That’s right. And here’s the reality. If the agency is good, they are going to proactively ask the question. They’re not going to wait for you to come in and tell them what is your desired cost per acquisition? Not proactively going to want to know that. And here is the other thing that you cannot that you need to not do to forget. Don’t try to get too clever there and say, well, my desired cost per acquisition is $250 per lead. Because here is the thing. There are metrics, there is data that is accessible to anyone and not just agencies. Any single person that goes and opens a Google Ads account can actually go and see for how much keywords that are pay per click relevant high intent are going for in a given market. And if the beats in that market are at $400 per click, then guess what? Your expectations are unrealistic, are not in line with the market. And here’s the other thing that you always need to remind yourself. These cost per clicks are not set up by Google. Google does not set up how much the clicks are going to cost. The clicks and the cost of them are set up by other law firms. Other law firms are the ones who determine how much they’re willing to spend on a click on a keyword that is relevant to their practice area.
Liel: [00:30:15] And what does that mean? That means that they generate a return on investment on those costs. And that’s why you need to understand whether this is the right strategy for you, because if you cannot sustain that cost, then that’s not the venue for you to go and find leads from. If you can sustain the cost, then that could be a very powerful place to actually go and get leads from. And that’s why you need to start taking more seriously opportunities like brand building on social media, like organic traffic and such, because you may feel that paying to an SEO agency to run and to create SEO content for you and optimize your site and such may feel very, very costly. But in reality it’s more affordable than what you potentially need to be spending on pay per click on a given month in order to generate cases from there. And don’t forget, pay per click is not a way of building a brand. Pay per click is a way of generating volume to the extent that you can. Right. So keeping that in mind, I think we’re ready for more takeaways.
Grace: [00:31:19] I think so. So to me, the first takeaway absolutely has to do with privacy and the Google Ad Center. I mean, I know that was our pretty much most of what we talked about. And there’s a reason for that, ladies and gentlemen, and that is and non-binary people. And that is because you need to pay attention to all of these changes that happen. But this is. A major, major one because your brand needs to mean something. You can’t just put garbage out there and you never really could. But this is going to make a huge impact on advertisers and people personally, because if I don’t want to see any more legal ads, I might click that. And that’s a big problem for the entire community of lawyers.
Liel: [00:32:05] Grace That’s it. You hit the nail right on the head. That’s it. Eventually, people will be able to decide that. And so that’s why it’s so important to have have a brand, have have something that sets you apart from everyone else, have something that sets you apart from just being a category but actually being a source of value to your community, to your audience. I think everything that has to do with what we’ve discussed about my ad center has to do with advertisers having to shift away from just blasting out sales messages to their audience to actually creating content of value in their advertising. And that’s where we are seeing that. The mindset about how you go about writing your copy, about creating your advertising needs to go above and beyond just having a catchy sales message. And definitely there is no room anymore for spammy stuff happening. And the reality is that a lot of these lead generation companies that have been taking advantage of other well-established brand names in the legal space and such are going to get a hit. And you know what? Good for good for the law firms. Big, big win for the law firms that have been building their brand and working strong to stand out. And I’m I’m happy for that. I’m very, very, very happy and very optimistic about it. But then again, let’s not forget that this this whole entire model, it’s going to be measured based on user adoption.
Liel: [00:33:43] So I think it’s a new chapter, but one that may not necessarily generate the this impact right away. It’s going to take some time. But just like with everything Grace and with everything like the changes right now, like responsive search ads that we are now going into full mode and it’s going to take over the format of standard search ad in the next 30 days. That’s been around since 2018. Like, I still remember when this was presented in Google Marketing Live, I believe in San Jose. And so you see it’s a journey of four years for it to just become the standard, but this is how things end up happening. And so, you know, again, a long term vision and I think that could be a good takeaway number to Grace. It’s not forgetting that, yes, pay per click has this appeal of it to that it will generate results from the from the get go and it’s fast and you don’t necessarily have to rely on having a brand and you can just get in front of users that are high intent and you select the keywords and that is all there and it’s wonderful and it can certainly help you boost your caseload with a significant impact fast. But the mindset that I’m trying to put in to people who are very hyped and excited about going into pay per click is like the day that you launch your paper. Click Campaign is the day that you need to start thinking about how can you make your law firm not reliant on that strategy as a source of the majority of its cases? And that’s how you should approach it, because here is how it will go.
Liel: [00:35:27] Even if your pay per click campaign launches to great success, your great success is going to trigger a reaction in the market from your competitors who are losing potentially cases to your new strategy. And so they’re potentially going to figure out a way to also become more competitive oftentimes by raising bids. Right. And then you’re going to potentially get a little hit there and see, I lost some impressions. Share. I did not generate that much. Maybe budgets need to go up so we can remain competitive. And before you know it, your your cost per acquisition may potentially have increased by a significant amount over a period of time. And so there is going to be a point where you’re going to want to maybe continue this because you’re big and you can afford it. But you’re also going to want to have other sources that are generating you quality leads without necessarily having to just rely only on Google, and that is social media, and that is going to be Google organic and that is going to be building your brand through community outreach, through advertising on TV to billboards, to radio presence, to being in every single place that your buyer personas is just like that.
Grace: [00:36:45] It’s as simple as being present. It’s about your story, which is your brand. So you’ve got to stand out. And the only way to stand out is to be authentic and be true to your brand and who you are and make sure people are aware of who that is and part of your community. That’s it.
Liel: [00:37:01] Yeah, that’s right. Grace So do we have one more takeaway?
Grace: [00:37:05] I can give one more take away. You know, when you’re looking at cost per acquisition in legal, there’s a tendency to forget that that can be somewhat exclusive of certain items and sometimes too inclusive of others. So when I talk about costs per acquisition or when we talk about that, we’re talking about the terms for Google Pay per click and that type of thing. We also talk about on our side here in the law firm internally, I talk about a cost per case.
Liel: [00:37:37] Yeah.
Grace: [00:37:38] Rather than specifically just the CPA, because a cost per acquisition for me is terms that don’t mean anything in legal for a case like to actually get a case. That’s great. Look, this is what we need. Not just the lead, not just. All and a cost per acquisition is more about that, about that side of it. So a cost per case is your true cost per case. How much did it take to get that person retained? And that should include all kinds of other things like your overhead, the marketing and certain things like that. That is a conversation all by itself because that has to do with a lot more than just the marketing dollars being spent. It’s multiple attribution methods and different things like that. So just be very clear on terminology that you use, that you use with your marketing people and understand that a cost per acquisition is just that. It’s How much did it cost me in marketing dollars and cents through Google in pay per click specifically, if that’s what you’re looking at to get that.
Liel: [00:38:41] Lead, I mean, cost per acquisition to Google. It’s the phone call, right? The phone call. That’s it. That’s that’s up until the point that Google can measure. Right. You can potentially set up a time there as well. How long does the call duration needs to be? But I mean, since we’ve been talking about personal injury, this whole conversation, you know, every the call could have been coming in for the right reasons. Car accident, the reason the injury person’s not at fault. There is a police report. But guess what? The other party did not have an insurance. So what happens now? What happens? You still don’t have a case and you’re still paid for the lead. And this is going to happen and it’s still going to be something that you’re going to have to add to your costs, because to generate a call that’s going to turn into a viable case that you can sign, you’re also going to generate other calls that are not going to be viable and that you cannot sign. So the best that you can aim for is for those calls to have the relevancy that you would expect them to have in terms of calling for the right reasons. But calling for the right reasons is not enough to actually guarantee you that you’re going to be able to convert that lead into an actual signed case.
Liel: [00:39:56] And that’s the appeal that local service has has, is that if the call is calling you for the wrong reasons, if somebody is calling, if you’re a personal injury lawyer and you get a criminal law campaign, you can you can appeal that to Google and say, hey, I do not do criminal law, so I’m not going to I’m not going to be able to serve this case. And so Google is going to say, oh, sorry about that. We’re going to refund you and you’re going to get refunded, right? If that happens in Google ads, you’re not going to get a refund. But you should go to your agency and say, what the hell is happening here? I should not be receiving these calls, and rightly so, and your agency should be able to fix that if you’re good. Now, I do want to remind everyone that in local service ads, if you get a property damage call, they’re not going to refund you. They’re not. Verses car accident and so forth and so on. You cannot take care of that case. Well, we’re sorry to hear. But but the person was in a car accident, right? You may sometimes get away. Sometimes you may get away with maybe the first time that you say property damage, we cannot fix this. They’re probably give you a refund. But if you start doing that with frequency, it’s not going to it’s not going to respond.
Liel: [00:41:08] They’re not going to approve the request for a refund. So that’s also to keep in mind local service ads. It’s not a guarantee that you’re going to get a case. It’s more reassurance that the call is going to be calling for the right reasons. But with the right Google ads campaign on the search network where you have way more control and you can definitely have way more visibility than in local service ads, you can also control that. But then it comes down to all of the technical aspects in the way in which you run your campaign. Grace This conversation honestly kind of like feels like a rant from my end. You’ve been very you’ve been very graceful and you’ve been very patient. You’ve been very positive. I don’t know why. I just got all hyped up. Maybe this coffee, it’s very strong. This coffee that I’ve been drinking throughout the conversation. You understand? You’re also a heavy coffee drinker, just like I am. But it was fun, Grace. And I hope that our listeners can get some good takeaways from this and mainly perspective. And so that’s where I’m going to end, and I’m going to thank you for your time, and we’ll be back next week with something else to talk about or rant about.
Grace: [00:42:17] And that’s right. If we have to rent, we will.
Liel: [00:42:20] All right, Grace. Have a great rest of your day.
Grace: [00:42:22] You too, Liel.
Liel: [00:42:23] And if you like our show, make sure you subscribe. Tell your coworkers leave us a review and send us your questions at: ask@incamerapodcast.com. We’ll see you next week.
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