Legal Search Marketing

Archive for the ‘Pay Per Click Marketing’ Category

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – An independent report filed on Friday in an Arkansas court sided with Google over disgruntled advertisers who had sued the search engine giant accusing it of trying to drive up fees through so-called click fraud.

The two sides agreed to commission the report as part of a settlement deal for the lawsuit, filed by advertising customer Lane’s Gifts in a state court in Miller County, Arkansas.

Pay-per-click advertising, where advertisers only pay when people click on ads, is seen by critics as the Achilles’ heel of Web search leader Google, which last quarter saw revenues grow 77 percent to $2.46 billion, virtually all from such ads.

The suit alleged Web advertisers allowed their pay-per-click ad systems to be abused in order to drive up fees paid by customers. It argued that companies such as Google have not taken reasonable steps to regulate the practice.

"Based on my evaluation, I conclude that Google’s efforts to combat click fraud are reasonable," Alexander Tuzhilin, a professor of information systems at New York University, said in the report. Lane’s Gifts commissioned Tuzhilin’s report.

The Google Blog just posted the independent study on their click fraud detection practices that shows Google makes reasonable efforts to detect click fraud.

This is probably true and Im sure Google does all it can to battle click fraud, but they cant prevent it totally.   I think Google adwords is the best pay per click program by far but I would be cautious of the Google content network and I never recommend it to clients when doing Adwords advertising. 

AFTER SURGING DURING THE HOLIDAYS, the price of purchasing keywords ebbed dramatically last quarter, according to DoubleClick’s most recent quarterly report about search pricing.

The "cost-per-keyword" fell to around $30 in the first quarter–from around the yearly high of $59 last December, according to the report. Year-over-year, cost-per-keyword was relatively flat. To arrive at a cost-per-keyword, Performics combines cost-per-click with the volume of clicks; the figure represents the average cost to a marketer of purchasing a keyword for the entire month.

Read entire story at Mediapost Publications

ClickZ reports sponsored link impressions on Google and Yahoo! grew 16 percent in the past six months, according to data released by Nielsen//NetRatings .

That study shows that "sponsored link advertising impressions" grew from 55.4 billion to 64.3 billion over the past six months (August 2005 and January 2006).

Google in August 2005 earned 36.2 billion, which increased to 41.1 billion in January 2006, a six-month increase of 14%. Yahoo percentage growth was larger than Google’s, accounting for 19.2 billion in August of 2005 with an increase to 23.2 billion in January 2006 or a 21% increase in the past six-months. These figures include all of Google’s and Yahoo’s search partners and contextual networks.

Usually when you first launch a legal web site, your going to do a more aggressive Pay per click campaign at Overture and Google adwords because it takes some time to get good organic or free listings, especially at Google. Over time you can draw back on your PPC campaigns once your organic listings come in, but its usually best if you can have both going.

This way you get the most exposure on the search engine page. When you have your firm listed in the organic listings on the left side and then also the sponsored listings on the right side, it gives you a better chance of someone clicking on your site and finding your firm.

An example of a law firm that has dual exposure at Google is The Law Offices of Don Thompson. If you type in the search of Chicago Probate at Google, his site comes up #1 in the organic listings on the left side, then the same site comes up on the right side under "sponsored listings".   

Sometimes it might not make as much as sense to bid on keywords that are very expensive, especially if your already coming up in the free organic listings but if the pay per click keyword is less then 50 cents per click, then I would suggest it.

Getting listed in the PPC engines is easy, the real trick is getting your law firms site in the top 10 in the organic listings.  We have helped many lawyers achieve this and as a result they have gotten new business and many new clients.  Contact us if we can help your law firm succeed on the Internet.

The search engine watch blog has a post about a click fraud lawsuit filed against Google by Steve Mizera in the Northern District of California in San Jose.

Yahoo Search Marketing, formely Overture, has eliminated the $20 monthly minimum spending requirement for the pay per click Sponsored Search.

This is a good thing because for some lawyers, they only need to bid on certain geographic specific keyphrases that arent that expensive and dont have much competition. So now lawyers who may have been hesitant because of the minimum requirement can now choose to spend as much or as little as they like, with no minimum to meet.

Search engine watch reports that MSN is opening its pay per click program and is now looking for takers. The pilot is invite only, but you can hope to get picked by signing-up here. 

The sponsored ads will rotate in on a portion (25 percent) of MSN’s pages, with the rest still coming from Yahoo Search Marketing/Overture.

ZDNet Asia reports on MSN Paid Search that details the launch in Singapore, with France to follow and a MSN Keywords pilot in the US in October. 

According to Eva Balan, MSN’s international marketing manager for MSN adCenter, advertisers pay a one-time subscription fee of S$5 (US$3) for MSN Keywords.

For each keyword, they bid a minimum of S$0.10 and pay for the number of times search users click on their advertisements, which appear as sponsored links alongside search results. The placement of the links will depend on the bid price, click-through rate as well as the types of user profiles captured by the system.

The WSJ reports that next week MSN will announce a new ad program called MSN Keywords and this is another example of how MSN is trying to mimic Google and encroach on its search territory.

Microsoft next week will announce that an invitation-only test of MSN Keywords will begin in October with 500 advertisers and search-engine marketing specialists. The service will move MSN closer to how Google handles advertising, by using live auctions of keywords. MSN Keywords is one tool of a broader set of new advertising services called adCenter that Microsoft is building on MSN. Microsoft executives say they hope the tools will allow companies to tailor advertisements by giving them more detailed information on Web users than is currently available.

Ive noticed that when your bidding at the Overture Pay Per Click search engine, that sometimes it makes more sense to NOT bid on the top 2-3 spots, at least for the Yahoo results.

This is because at Yahoo, the top 2 or 3 spots are listed at the very top of the page and then the #3-5 spots are listed at the bottom of the page, AFTER the top 10 organic listings. THEN on the right side of the page, the first 3 listings are the same as the bottom 3 listings, thus giving you two listings on the main page.

An example of that is for the term of california elder law and at Overture my clients site, California Elder Care Lawyers is #5 in the sponsored listings and its at the very bottom of the page and then also the 3rd sponsored listing on the right side.

Not only does he get two listings on the main page, but he’s only paying 10 cents per click, where the #1 and 2 are paying over 50 cents per click.

MSN USES OVERTURES RESULTS A LITTLE DIFFERENT

NOW the other search engine that uses Overture pay per click results is MSN and they do it a little different, they list the top 3 bids at both the top and bottom of the page, then on the right side, they start out with the #4 bid and work down. 

So this is why the California elder law site is only listed on the right side as the 2nd listing at MSN Search. Luckily though they are coming up in the organic or free listings and are #5 & 6!

**Actually they now moved up to the #3 spot in the pay per clicks, and also moved up in the organic listings to #4&5. Plus the basic elder law blog we put up is coming up #3. **

Its important that you know the pay per click rules and its usually best to employ a professional to optimize your legal web site and then also manage a focused pay per click campaign.  Contact us today if we can assist your law firm.