So it looks like things are getting serious. You’ve done your homework and have realized the potential of getting hot leads calling your phone within days using platforms like google adwords.

It’s exciting. It’s scary. It seems too good to be true. Is it?

The fact is, not every law firm is a slam-dunk for google adwords. That’s why we take a hard, objective look at all of the data we can before we recommend moving forward with it. The first step in the process is looking for traffic

How (and why) Google provides search data

As of 2015, Google has 60 billion reasons to make getting into search advertising as easy as possible. One of the ways they do this is by providing keyword data. You can think of the Google Adwords Keyword Tool as a little window into the giant computer that powers adwords (and 80% of Google’s revenue).

Every time you make a search, google records it and sends it back to that computer. Billions of searches per day are recorded with three primary data points:

1. The search term entered into google (the keyword)
2. Where the search is being made from
3. What eventually ends up being clicked

It’s a quick interaction, but you can get a lot of information based on those three data points. What this means for potential advertisers is that you can get a pretty accurate estimate of how many searches are happening for whatever keyword you want in whatever area you want.

Take a moment to let that sink in. You can know whether there is an audience for your campaign in your exact area before spending ONE DIME on google adwords.

Putting the data to work

Let’s say you’re a divorce lawyer in Kansas City considering whether google adwords is right for you. After coming up with a list of keywords (your adwords expert can help out with that), we can plug them into the google adwords keyword tool and set the location to Kansas City.

In the end, you’ll get a picture that looks something like this:

(At ExpertEngines, we actually send images like this directly to clients)

What are we looking at here?

This is google’s estimate of how many searches will be conducted in Kansas City for the basket of keywords that we’ve put in. This is based on real data from actual searchers for terms like this in KC.

The curve represents how many times your ad would be shown to these searchers. This is known as an ‘impression’ in Google-ese. The higher the bid, the more likely it will be that your ad will show (but we’ll get into that later).

The important thing to look at for this part of the process is the total amount of impressions. As we can see at the top, we are between 7290 and 8910 searches for divorce law keywords per month.

Volume vs. relevance: the fundamental tension

Here at Expert Engines, we use 5000 searches per month as a rule of thumb for a market being big enough. Larger is fine, but smaller than that is not likely to yield the amount of clicks and calls that make hiring a company like ours worthwhile.

This example seemed to work out, but let’s take a look at one that doesn’t

Let’s say that you were super picky and only wanted to do high net worth divorces and divorce litigation. No judgements here, who doesn’t like the big money clients?

Take a look at the quick and dirty impressions report we get from google

As you can see, the search volume is much lower. Around 1000 people search for this per month in Kansas City. It’s not enough volume to get a solid campaign going. Turning this on would yield some patchy clicks and one or two calls per month if you were lucky.

So what do you do in this situation?

You can always get more searches on google. As we’ve seen, there are literally billions of searches happening a day. But only some of them will be worth it to your law firm.

You can go broader geographically. Maybe you can expand your High Net Worth Practice to the entire state of Missouri.

You can go broader with your keywords. By using broad match types, you can let google pick some synonyms for high net worth divorce. Or you can go after general divorce practice and have ads about high net worth divorces only.

Both of these have their drawbacks. If you’re targeting people far away geographically, you’re less likely to convert because that person knows they might have to drive 2 hours to reach you. If you’re targeting people with broad keywords, your ads will not get clicked through as much because they don’t match as exactly.

The cases might pay well enough that neither of these matter from an economic perspective (more on this later)

That’s the fundamental tension of adwords – get enough traffic, but make sure it’s the right traffic.

Next steps

Wouldn’t it be cool to see how the competition was doing? With today’s tools, you can find out exactly what they are bidding on as well as how much they are spending.

Some of these signals are green lights, and some of these are red lights. We’ll get into it in the next blog post in this series. Stay tuned!