Using the Google Display Network (GDN) For Your Legal Firm
Choosing managed placements
There are a couple ways you can choose a list of managed placements for your law firm’s PPC campaign on the display network. If your goal is casting a wide net and increasing brand awareness, you may want to consider some high-traffic general sites on the Google Display network. For example – nytimes.com and yahoo.com have a lot of visitors. You can add these sites to your list of managed placements to get your ads to have a larger audience. This won’t give you extremely targeted results, and may not even garner you very many clicks. There’s no way to know if the audience on these sites are in the market for your services. If you’re advertising on GDN using a CPC model – this could give you many impressions and improve brand awareness before users even need the service.
Search your keywords and choose the top ranking organic pages
If you have a list of terms that you are focusing on for organic traffic – this may come in handy when searching for potential ad placements. Competitors or local news sites could be coming up organically depending on your business. If these pages are on the Google Display Network, it’s worth adding them in. This method is much more targeted than using general high volume sites. You’re getting your ad in front of users who are searching for your specific service or topics. This is different than targeting an audience based off searched terms; targeting users as an audience will target them wherever they are on the web. This type of targeting will capture them only when they are looking at your chosen relevant content.
Another idea to find relevant managed placements, is to take a look at your referrals – if you have access to Google Analytics. If another site has shown interest in your company or services, they may have included a link to some of the page or blog content as a source. If you have some good referral traffic, you may consider using these as placements to increase the number of users coming from that site.
Be sure to keep an eye on where competitors are serving their ads. Tools like SEMRush can give you good insight into where their ads are appearing. With the competitor analysis tools you can use through third-parties – always remember they aren’t 100% accurate. The only way to completely accurately see this data is to log in to a competitor’s GDN campaign. It is still a great way to research new possible placements.
Benefits of using GDN
There are a few benefits to advertising on the Google Display Network. While your law firm’s PPC campaigns are going to be your best option for driving inbound leads right away, display advertising can be an additional low cost source of leads for your law firm. Display ads general have cheaper CPCs and CPLs than Enhanced Text Ads. You can get more impressions for your dollar when using display ads. Depending on how targeted you’re getting – the Cost-Per-Leads can be much cheaper as well. When using your campaigns for Brand Awareness, you may not want to look at your cost-per-lead as a metric of successful performance. Many users viewing the ad in a non-targeted scenario may not be needing your product or service at this time. It is valuable to have your name in front of them if they ever do in the future. Many users are more likely to choose a business they are familiar with.
Another benefit is the ability to use responsive display ads. This ad type makes it easy to show in as many placements as possible. Google with create an ad based of a set of assets (headlines, long headlines, descriptions, images and logos). The ad will be created to fit in the designated placement. Google will also constantly test new combinations and can show your users the top performing one.
