Contextual advertising is a powerful tool for promoting legal services on the Internet. Its advantages are fast and clear results, flexibility and high efficiency. But you will not get the expected effect if the advertising campaign is set up incorrectly.
Usually, PPC (pay per click) does not work if the advertising account is configured with errors, as well as with incorrect segmentation of the target audience and incorrect calculations.
You should order an external PPC audit if:
A fresh look and objective advice will help you get out of a difficult situation.
The purpose of PPC auditing is to show you what is working well in your account and what can be improved.
The online PPC audit includes:
Incorrect settings in 95% of cases are the cause of the ineffectiveness of the ads. So we check:
It is an equally important indicator by which you can identify the problem. So we check:
When the PPC audit is completed, Lasting Trend provides its clients with a detailed report with recommendations.
To conduct an audit, we will need access to your Google AdWords, Google Analytics, Facebook ads, etc. Of course, during the work, we will not limit ourselves to these resources only. To analyze keywords, search queries, negative keywords, we use tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc. Such professional tools are quite expensive, so small firms usually do not use them to set up their advertising projects. As a result, they lack the information and statistics to set up their ads correctly. Lasting Trend can help with these issues.
The tools that we use in our work help not only to analyze contextual advertising. We look at the situation on a larger scale and study all possible factors that can affect the entire campaign.
Our team does not limit ourselves to the technical part of contextual advertising but looks deeper. We analyze the landing pages of the client’s website and the advertising activity of competitors, and also offer ways to improve the effectiveness of advertising without increasing the budget.
The analysis of the advertising cabinet includes three main stages.
Of course, the second stage is the most labor-intensive.
To find errors in an advertising campaign and make it more profitable, we must have a good understanding of your type of business. Lasting Trend has been working with law firms for a long time and has a lot of experience.
Also, we use web analytics system counters to find out the history of your account and the entire site. Counters show the number of site visitors, their actions on the site, time spent, browsing depth, traffic sources and the resources to which visitors go. They also record the number of visits from mobile and stationary gadgets and the geography of visits.
In addition, call tracking should be set up. It tracks phone calls, thereby helping to objectively evaluate the effectiveness of PPC.
Ads account structure is an important element for developing and further optimizing your advertising project. Mistakes, incorrect structure and other shortcomings affect the efficiency of budget use. It is necessary to conduct a PPC audit only taking into account all the parameters and principles of formation in the account. Then it will be easier to find weaknesses and see the full picture of work on further optimization.
All keywords should be structured by service groups and categories. For example, campaigns often have a division according to the type of requests: high-frequency and low-frequency, targeted and general, permanently active and seasonal, aimed pointwise at one city or one region.
Performing a PPC audit is impossible without keyword analysis. The quality of the keywords affects the rank of the publication, which has an equally strong impact on positions and cost per click.
We pay attention to the following details:
Irrelevant and ineffective keywords that spend the budget and do not bring conversions are added to the list of negative keywords.
Quality Score is a Google metric that determines and assigns a score from 1 to 10 for each ad. Quality Score is used to calculate CPC in Google Ads. According to Google, the worse the ad, the more you will have to pay to show it.
Conversely, if your ads perform well, they will also rank higher in the auction, and you will receive additional benefits:
That’s why we monitor Quality Score so closely.
Google Ads allows you to apply more than a dozen extensions to your ads. Extensions contain additional information and make ads more visible on the search results page.
According to the official support of Google Ads, when adding an extension, the CTR of an ad increases by an average of 10-15%, depending on the subject of the site, the type of extension, and other factors. It means that extensions allow you to increase the effectiveness of advertising, while there is no additional charge for them. In addition, extensions visually increase the size of the ad, significantly distinguishing it from competitors’ ads.
The ads, keywords, and landing pages are considered relevant if they match the user’s query.
In particular, a relevant landing page must meet the following criteria:
Relevance reflects the usefulness of ads, keywords and landing pages to the user. Google Ads takes this indicator into account when ranking ads and determining the cost per click.
All advertising projects of your company may have different goals. A lot depends on your overall marketing strategy. For example, a campaign might aim to:
Depending on the goals, advertising settings in Google Ads may vary.
If the goal is to build a brand, it is better to set up payment not for clicks (CPC – cost per click), but payment for impressions (CPM – cost per 1000 impressions).
If the main goal is to get a direct response, it is important to optimize the cost per direct response (CPL – cost per lead, CPA – cost per action). As you can see, in each situation the settings will be different.
Many metrics help measure the effectiveness of advertising: number of impressions, reach, conversion rate, CTR, cost per click, cost per thousand impressions, and so on.
We recommend comparing CPC, CPM and CTR to choose the most suitable payment model. If the CTR is high, it will be more profitable to pay for impressions. This payment model is also better suited if the goal is to increase brand awareness.
It is important to take into account the duration of the advertising campaign. For example, if it is launched for several months, it is advisable to analyze the intermediate results at least once a month to notice possible risks in time and make changes.
An instant PPC audit will be useful for companies that launch advertising on their own, without the involvement of third-party specialists. It is usually a small or medium-sized business where the manager understands contextual advertising well enough to set it up on its own and get moderate results from online advertising, but not well enough to improve these results. Usually, fine-tuning of contextual advertising is ignored, which is why the overall effectiveness of advertising remains low.
Also, contextual advertising audit is relevant for companies that already work with a contracting agency or freelancer, but are not sure about the quality of the services provided. In such a situation, an audit of the account by an external party will confirm or dispel doubts and provide information for further improvement of advertising.
Contextual advertising is an important tool of modern business. But with the wrong settings, PPC can turn into the cause of your losses. To understand how much advertising really costs, you should regularly analyze your marketing campaign.
Also, PPC auditing is required to:
Thanks to the verification of the ads, it becomes clear what was done well and in what aspects errors were made. Based on these data, it is possible to suggest ways to eliminate shortcomings and methods for optimizing marketing costs.
The regular PPC audit helps to identify errors and correct them in time to increase the effectiveness of the project. Even small mistakes can prevent you from achieving your goal.
For example, the goal of your ads is to increase the number of calls to 100 per day. But if it’s hard to find a phone number on the landing page, customers won’t be able to call you. You will not achieve your goals, although all other indicators (reach, CTR, etc.) will be very high. An audit will help identify this problem.
Correcting errors identified during the audit is an opportunity to significantly save the advertising budget. However, Lasting Trend is well versed in other tools for the development of advertising projects. One of them is A/B testing (split testing).
Our specialists create alternative versions of the project with different settings, new design elements, calls to action, etc. Then our team compares both options and chooses the most profitable one. In this way, we can test our hypotheses and experimentally evaluate the preferences of the audience to decide whether something should be changed or it is better to leave the existing settings.
The patterns and relationships are immediately clear here. The more effective your advertising is, the faster you can achieve your goals and make a profit. Sometimes this can be decisive. For example, if you have recently opened your law firm and need to get new clients as soon as possible. You need to return your investment in the business and establish your position in a very competitive market. It is very important that customers find out about you today, and not in a week or a month. In such a situation, every day is crucial. And errors in advertising settings are unacceptable.
Unfortunately, any PPC loses its relevance over time. For instance, competitors can improve their advertising campaigns, offer new services and better prices. Google can change the requirements for contextual ads. The audience can move to new online platforms. There can be many such big and small reasons.
Even if you use very thoughtful settings at the beginning of an advertising project, they will still lose their relevance gradually. You need to constantly keep your finger on the pulse and follow all updates to make adjustments to the advertising projects. Or you can order PPC audit services from Lasting Trend. We will help you respond to all changes in time and help you be productive.
Relevant ads get more clicks, appear in higher positions, and generate more success than irrelevant posts. They can also lower your CPC and save you money.
Three components can make your ad relevant:
All three elements must match each other. The number of keywords in an ad should be limited. The ideal formula is one ad and one keyword. Think carefully before inserting two or three keywords into your ad. It can blur the subject and attract an audience you don’t need, which means you will waste your money.
Cooperation with Lasting Trend provides customers with the following benefits:
We can help you develop a strategy to promote your company’s features and services.
We will give you advice on:
With our help, you will know exactly how to develop your advertising project further.
To increase conversions by 135 percent and reduce costs by 61 percent. Would you like to have such an effect after auditing your ads?
We understand that the concrete results of our work say much more about Lasting Trend than any words. Therefore, we recommend that you go to the Results section on our website and see our real cases.
In particular, you can take a look at the “LaptopMD PPC Campaign” case. That’s where you’ll see the numbers above. We have described in detail how we were able to achieve such an impressive result.
In this case, the Lasting Trend team provided PPC audit services for the client, studied the client’s competitors, selected keywords, etc. We have completed all the work required to restart the advertising campaign. In the article, we described in great detail what tools and technologies we used. In the end, LaptopMD was very pleased with the result and became our regular customer. Perhaps this is the best confirmation of the quality of our work.
The cost of a PPC audit at the digital marketing agency Lasting Trend depends on how deep the analysis you require and the amount of time spent on such a volume of work. If you order our service for the full customization of contextual advertising, our specialists will conduct an automatic PPC audit for free, as this is an integral part of the work. You can see the cost of the full package of our services in the Prices section.
Contextual advertising is the fastest way to get traffic to your website. If the advertising campaign is set up correctly, and all the opportunities that Google gives are used 100%, then an active target audience comes to you. In this case, the conversion can be very significant. PPC can bring in profits that are many times higher than the costs of setting it up, launching and maintaining it.
But if you make even a few serious mistakes when setting up your ads, you risk losing your entire advertising budget. Moreover, even the most effective advertising projects should be reviewed and updated from time to time. We recommend conducting the first online PPC audit within 3-4 weeks after the start of the PPC when the first statistics accumulate. Indicators even for a short period will help to understand whether contextual advertising works in principle.Do you want to attract more clients? Want to check if your ad is set up correctly? Do you want to know which advertising parts of the campaign are making money for you and which are not? To find answers to all these questions, contact professionals.The digital marketing agency Lasting Trend is ready to help you. Order our PPC audit services and open new business opportunities!
