Law Firm PPC: Google Ads for Lawyers

10 Cons of Pay Per Click (PPC)

1. Costly.

The biggest drawback of PPC is it can be expensive, especially for attorneys. This is because PPC is a bid system. If your competitors are willing to dig deeper into their pocketbooks, then they can outbid you. And when more people are bidding on specific keywords, that increases the cost per click.

2. Price goes up over time.

The very nature of a bidding war drives up the price of PPC over time. So, what $100 got you in year one might not get you as much in year two. The more competitive the keyword, the faster the price goes up.

3. Budget-dependent.

When your budget runs out, your campaign ends. So, if you didn’t anticipate the popularity of a certain keyword, then your money will be gone before you know it. If the market’s hot, then you may unwittingly blow through a month’s budget in two weeks. That leaves the remaining two weeks open to your competition.

4. Visibility suffers.

Let’s say you’re solely dependent on paid Google Ads to get leads. But then something happens—a global pandemic or a health issue—that keeps you away from work for a while. Suddenly, you don’t have the revenue to spend on paid ads that you used to. Your visibility tanks to zero.

5. Untrusted.

Searchers simply don’t trust paid ads as much as organic search results. Searchers are becoming increasingly savvier and more skeptical. So, you’ll get fewer clicks on paid ads than you would have if you had an organic presence.

6. Requires optimization.

As we mentioned before, it’s easy to blow through your budget on PPC ads if you’re not paying attention. That’s why it’s critical to look at metrics and check ad performance regularly. You can always tweak a campaign to try to get it to perform better. But more often, the wheels fall off the bus while nobody’s looking.

7. Clicks don’t always convert.

Just because someone clicked on your ad doesn’t mean they’ll turn into a case lead. Clicks don’t always translate into customers. This can be frustrating when you look at your campaign results and see how many “conversions” you received. In general, paid ad clicks simply don’t convert as often as organic visitors.

8. Too much variability.

With shifting markets, changing budgets and bidding wars, the paid ad landscape is a nebulous enigma. You can never predict what others are bidding on and how big their budgets are. So, you never have much control over your market. Plus, you might be reaching people at different stages of their process to hire an attorney. This much unpredictability leads to inconsistency.

9. Inconsistent results.

It’s all too common to have inconsistent month-over-month results with paid ads. You might see 200 clicks on your ad in month one and get three case leads. But in month two, you may see 200 clicks and only one case lead. It’s extremely hard to pinpoint what caused the discrepancy. This is frustrating when you want to improve a campaign, but you don’t know what variable to change. Organic search, on the other hand, tends to produce a consistent amount of traffic and leads.

10. Unscrupulous SEM agencies.

There’s a reason why Google earns more than $130 billion in ad revenue. There are thousands of search engine marketing companies out there specializing in Google Ads (formerly Ad Words). These companies will build you as many SEM and PPC ad campaigns as you want, and they’ll take your money all day. They are simply feeding the Google beast. If they can convince you to invest a bunch of money in paid ads, then they can profit off the management fees. But that is just not how we operate.