PPC For Lawyers – Automated Bid Management
Taking a look at three bid management tools:
1) Google Conversion Optimizer
2) Acquisio
3) Efficient Frontier
Managing all your legal marketing activities online can be time consuming: blogging and commenting, building links to your home page, maintaining your Web site, and last but not least, managing your PPC campaigns in Google, Yahoo and Bing. The world won’t end if you’re too busy to work on your blog, your website or your SEO campaigns for a few days… you will just take care of it when you get to it. That’s not really an option with PPC campaigns, as they will cost you money, whether they are running effectively or not.
Thank god for automated bid management (or not?). Automated bid management software takes care of your day-to-day PPC campaign management after you have initially set up your campaigns. Today, I want to introduce you to three very different bid management tools to give you an idea of what’s out there. Knowing the market will help you when talking to an advertising agency and broaden your legal marketing horizon.
Google Conversion Optimizer
Google’s own PPC management software is free to use to anyone advertising on Google AdWords. It’s amazingly powerful considering that it’s free. Naturally, it’s not going to be the best option 100% of the time and human supervision is still recommended, but it does a very good job in most cases.
In Google’s own words:
On average, campaigns adopting the Conversion Optimizer achieve a 21% increase in conversions while decreasing their CPA by 14%.
As account manager, all you need to do is define campaign goals: “Optimize to generate the maximum number of leads at $15/lead” is an example for a typical legal marketing campaign goal. The Google Conversion Optimizer will need some time and volume to “learn” before it can effectively manage bids and Google’s conversion tracker must be enabled. Click here to go to Google Conversion Optimizer.
Acquisio
Acquisio is a small but smart bid management company from Montreal, Canada, which started out primarily targeting agencies as their clients. Acquisio works with Google, Yahoo and Bing, and makes it extremely easy to port campaigns from one search engine to another. A lot of the functionality at Acquisio will remind you of the AdWords Editor. Until recently, when Yahoo! released Y!SM Desktop, the mere fact that it brought “AdWords Editor functionality” to Yahoo! and Bing was one of my favorite aspects of their software.
Acquisio charges their clients a percentage of what they spend when your budget exceeds $30k/month. For advertisers with smaller budgets, as common in legal marketing, they offer fixed fee service agreements.
Acquisio is absolutely great with just one disadvantage: you have to write your own bidding rules and algorithms. A lot of PPC managers, and in particular agencies, are extremely happy about this feature as it allows them to differentiate themselves from competitors using the same software. If you are not a bid management expert yet, you can still use Acquisio’s rule template and simply enter your CPA target. Click here to go to Acquisio.
Efficient Frontier
Efrontier works with Google, Yahoo and Bing. Efficient Frontier uses portfolio management theory, a predictive modeling approach, to set and manage bids. In my experience, this tool is most efficient when managing very large campaigns with thousands of keywords and very large budgets. It probably isn’t suited for legal marketing campaigns but I still wanted to introduce it here to give an overview of the products out there.
Just like Acquisio, Efficient Frontier charges advertisers on a percentage of spend basis. Other than setting up your accounts and campaigns, you don’t get involved in setting rules. Similar to Google, Efficient Frontier needs some time to “learn” the market before it can optimize bids effectively. Another similarity to Google is that you only specify the goals of your campaigns. You don’t have to set your own algorithms or rules. Click here to go to Efficient Frontier
There are several other very effective bid management tools on the market, some more some less useful in legal marketing campaigns. The three programs mentioned here are just a selection to give you an overview of what the market looks like. If you have experience with bid management software feel free to share it in the comments section.
For those who are interested to learn more about PPC please use the contact us section at the bottom of the page.
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AdVolt Legal offers its clients several years of both online advertising and legal industry experience. The legal marketing company was founded by Fabian Ahmadi and Crystal Perkins who respectively spent several years working in the legal and online advertising (SEO, SEM) industries. The two decided to merge their passion and talents to build a company devoted to providing online legal marketing solutions for small and medium size law firms. Our name, AdVolt Legal, epitomizes an important goal of our legal marketing company: to create powerful ads for the legal market. AdVolt Legal understands that operating a successful legal practice requires great legal skills as well as business skills. As such, we are committed to providing you with premium online legal marketing solutions, including SEO and PPC advertising, to help you grow your practice. 
Hi Fabian, well you’ll be glad to know that Acquisio has released proper rule templates – now you can basically just tell it what your target CPA is (for example) and let Acquisio create the rule for you automatically. So even if you’re not too sure where to start with rules, you can get started right away!
[...] PPC For Lawyers – Automated Bid Management | AdvoltLegal4 hours ago by Fabian Ahmadi Introducing bid management tools to legal marketing professionals. A look at Acquisio, Efficient Frontier and Google Conversion Optimizer for legal ma. – [...]
I worked at Efficient Frontier for 4 years, and would only add that of equal importance to any good keyword management platform is the team behind it. In my opinion, no tool works by itself or can be successfully deployed and used by the advertiser without significant implementation and ongoing support from the vendor. On that front, Efficient Frontier is one of the very best in the business. Their team of client service managers and analysts has a wealth of experience managing ppc campaigns and much of the value from EF is provided by the team, and that should not be overlooked.
Chris, thank you for your feedback! I agree 100%. I worked with EF on a very large client account (>$200k/month) and the hands on support from EF was great!
Thanks for your article. I appreciate the insight. Running a very small legal practice it is often difficult to engage in marketing activities that require larger budgets. Having read your article, it seems that there are options, even for small law offices like mine.
Thank you so much for digging into these three tools. I have actually worked with efficient frontier before and found the ‘black box’ format to be very frustrating. I think you have convinced me to stick with old Google. Who knows search better then those cats!!??
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