Injury Lawyer Gets Conversion Rate Up 156%

With target CPA bidding, I was able to get a southern California personal injury lawyer’s conversion rate up by 156% and his cost per case down to $900.  Let’s dive into this Google Ads case study.

The Problem

Things were not going good in southern California.  One of my injury lawyer clients who I manage Google Ads for was spending a lot of money, but he wasn’t getting a cost per case that he liked.

The campaign had been running for a few months, and we were spending around $5,000 a week.  You could argue the cost per case was slightly profitable, at $2,390, but at the same time, that kind of cost per case was nothing to write home about.  The lawyer was making a little bit of money off of his campaign, but he wanted to make much more.

The Proposed Solution

Southern California is a very competitive market for most industries on AdWords, and that includes the personal injury space.  There seems to be hundreds of injury law firms all over southern California, and many of them are running ads on Google with very aggressive bids.

Cost per clicks can get into the hundreds of dollars.  If you want to show up on searches like “car accident lawyer” in southern California, you’ve got to be willing to bid hundreds of dollars per click.

And when the bids are that high, you’ve got to get a great conversion rate to make things profitable.

Our conversion rate was 9%, and I knew that we could be much better because other injury lawyer campaigns I run have conversion rates of 20% to 30%.

I was doing everything I could to get us a higher conversion rate.  I had the search terms right, the ad copy was good, the website was fine, and all the conversion tracking was in place.  But the conversion rate wouldn’t budget.

I decided it was time to bring in the machines and see if the smart bidding strategy of target CPA bidding could get better results than my manual bid management was getting.

The Results

And that turned out to be a clear yes.  The machines kicked my butt.

With target CPA bidding we were able to get the conversion rate up by 156% to 24%, and crucially, we got the cost per conversion down to $900.

In this lawyer’s case, the cost per conversion represents the cost of a new, signed up client.  And this lawyer is very happy with a $900 cost per case.

The following results are from two 14 day periods.  During the most recent 14 days we’ve been running target CPA bidding, and for the 14 days prior to that we were still using manual bidding.

Clicks and clickthrough rate are both down big, but that’s okay because conversion rate and overall conversions, which is the primary goal, are both up by a lot.

When I turned on target CPA bidding, I used the recommended target CPAs that the system was recommending for each campaign as long as they were close to my overall CPA goal.  And if the system didn’t have a recommendation for a campaign, I went with a target CPA that was near my $1,500 cost per conversion goal, so I didn’t ask for too far off of what I had been getting, but I did ask for an improvement.

As Google’s machine learning capabilities get better and better, automated bidding strategies should continue to get better as well.  I’ll continue trying them out and reporting on the results here.

Thanks for the article to RothmanPPC.

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