PPC (Pay-per-click) Facts
By Bob Schwartz, CRS, GRI ©2007 Promotions Unlimited All rights reserved.
This material is subject to copyright and any unauthorized use, copying or mirroring is prohibited.
A Pay Per Click (also known as Pay Per Ranking, Pay Per Placement or Pay Per Position) search engine lets you to list your firm’s site at the top of the search engine results. You pay only when a web searcher clicks on your listing and connects to your site. You don’t pay to list; you only pay for click through.
You list your website by selecting keywords that refer to your practice area. For each keyword you determine how much you are willing to spend. The higher you bid, the higher you will appear in the search results.
To produce sufficient results, PPC search engines combine paid listings with unpaid listings. Such terms as: featured listings, sponsored listings, partners etc. are what PPC search engines call the listing to differentiate from the ‘real’ non-pay listings. Some smaller PPC engines have 100% results paid and therefore, do not have this differentiation.
The perception many have is that PPC search engines are a great way to drive targeted traffic to your site because you only pay for actual clicks to your site, and that it is risk free and a cheaper alternative to hiring a search engine optimization firm to gain top placements with the bigger search engines.
But be careful . . . all may not be, as it seems!
Bid prices … (cost per click), are going up as more firms believe it is the ‘magic bullet’ to increased Internet business. Below are some recent examples of the bid cost, per click, to be in the top position on one of the major PPC engines:
Los Angeles criminal defense attorney - $15.14
Los Angeles DUI attorney - $42.25
Los Angeles accident attorney - $10.00
San Francisco accident attorney - $26.00
San Francisco personal injury attorney - $20.00
Houston personal injury attorney - $8.00
Houston accident attorney - $6.10
Las Vegas defense lawyer - $5.00
At these rates, and a typical high click-through conversion rate, a firm could really put a major dent in new client acquisition costs.
CLICK TRAFFIC … It seems that ad click traffic is continuing to grow, but fewer visitors are clicking through to either take some kind of meaningful action, or actually transact business. In other words, clicks are increasing, but conversion percentages are declining.
RIPOFFS … The consensus among knowledge webmasters is that the PPC affiliate programs are to blame for this: PPC search engines pay webmasters for hosting their paid ads and/or providing search results that link through their PPC network. It seems some affiliates may be artificially boosting their PPC hits in order to increase their share of the paid click-through revenue.
Supposedly the PPC engines have technology to detect this fraud, but Internet ads advertise recruiting people to surf the Web and click on ads using their own computer. Having all the different IP addresses and a network of such scammers, it is an impossible task to regulate the rip-off click-throughs.
CONVERSION RATES … For legal firms it has always taken a large number of click-troughs to actually convert into a paying client. Now combine this with the above trend in scam click-troughs and the cost effectiveness of the PPC model for legal firms may not be the panacea once believed.
Copyright 2004 Promotions Unlimited. All rights reserved.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bob Schwartz, is the founder of Promotions Unlimited, an Internet legal directory (CA, TX & Las Vegas ) publisher and search engine placement technology analyst. You can contact Bob via e-mail at bob@websitetrafficbuilders.com or visit his San Diego legal directory at: http://www.sandiegolawyerforyou.com/special.htm
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