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Some facts about getting UK employment
law clients to your site
- 22 lawyers pay 83p to £3.38 advertising to "lawyers
employment" searchers on Google.
Source: http://www.spyfu.com/UK/Term.aspx?t=2794477
measuring cost per click paid-for.
- People reading Employees.org.uk include people searching
for employment lawyers.
Source: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/employees.org.uk#keywords
.
500 people visit a month. 15% visit several times. Many visitors
read more than one page.
Source: http://www.quantcast.com/employees.org.uk/traffic/report?userView=Public#summary
Other sources show that the bulk of them are from England with
some in Scotland Wales and Ireland.
- Adverts on Employees.org.uk cost 1-20¢ a click.
Source: http://www.adbrite.com/mb/commerce/purchase_form.php?opid=1303882&afsid=1
These ads can be charged according to how many people see a certain
page of your site.
This makes it less likely that your ad will be shown several
times to someone who is not interested. There is a minimum ceiling
on clicks of $5 a day, but in practice one or two clicks a month
is a more likely response. Inside pages sometimes used to sport
a special offer from Adbrite: Free Advert Trial for a
free text advert, click here to get in touch. It would be on
the right hand column near the bottom. If you'd like a free trial
with adbrite, we can remove the tradedoubler ads so it's repeated
or put your ad straight on our site with a thing to monitor click-throughs
for the first month.
An agency called Prosperent aims to show UK adverts based on
UK search terms soon. It's not clear when this will happen or
whether they will accept ads from an indiviual solicitor, but
if they do we'll use their service. They pay when a customer
buys a service, rather than when a customer clicks.
- Yahoo & Microsoft only advertise on high-traffic sites;
Google is fickle.
Mainstream search engines have plenty of space next to their
own search results for advertising; snippits of their code on
other sites are their sideline. Microsoft and Yahoo don't bother
with middling web sites outside of the USA. Google sometimes
does; it doesn't invest staff time.
This leaves many middle-sized publishers & advertisers short
of a marketplace in which to swap space for pence and we are
forced to use the more obscure agencies which may not be geared
to the UK. Adbrite
is used on Employees.org.uk. An american agency site that pays
in dollars, it offers advertisers a chance to choose exactly
which site their advert is shown on which is lucky because there
was no UK employment law website on their books at the last check
- the nearest was a Scottish medical blog. Adbrite's UK advertisers
sell miracle muscle compound, miracle tooth whitening compound,
or links to other pay per click systems. When they can't offer
one cent per thousand views, we pass-on the space to Tradedoubler
who have sell national brands such as John Lewis but are an expensive
agency for medium-sized and smaller advertisers to use.
We can set-up our own click monitoring system if you prefer through
bit.ly and invoice you per click, or use other obscure agencies
if the turnover is enough to justify their minimum payment. Most
law publishers charge advertisers directly and charge per six
months. They are selling business to business services. We are
selling one niche of business to consumer services, and so think
it's fairer to charge per click.
- Advertising on the net is easy.
There is no need to contact the publisher to place an internet
ad: you just need a credit card and the patience to fiddle with
the ad agent's website. Adbrite takes you through three pages
of options in which you de-select US advertising, (click the
left arrow button) swap it for UK advertising (click the right
arrow button), type text like the examples
on Spyfu above and use trial and error to find out the minimum
price available for placing an ad. Two prices are quoted - per
thousand views and per click. With trial and error you find that
minimum that each are worth.
On Employees.org.uk
you have a choice of text to go in square adverts on the front
page or coloumns on the inside pages. At the time of writing,
front page is best. There's no need to read anything into the
graphs below: internet adverts come with their own graphs that
tell you how many people have clicked on them. Some agents even
offer pay-per-call instead of pay per click.
- This is a quote from Intelligent Marketing for Lawyers:
Source: http://www.intelligentmarketingforlawyers.co.uk./downloads/10mistakes.pdf
(warning: you could spend a day reading this before placing
an ad on employees.org.uk & you might get bogged-down
& forget. Please place
an ad before reading the guff.)
When did you last use Yellow Pages to look for a professional
service?
Or contact an accountant, say, just because you saw their ad
in your local weekly?
If nobody’s offering you a ready recommendation, don’t
you usually start by Googling when you need to find a professional
service? We’re prepared to bet you do. And this of course
begs the more important question—how many of your prospective
clients do you suppose start searching for an employment lawyer
by flicking through a book? And if you’re still advertising
in Yellow Pages (or another physical directory), do you really
know why? Further, if you’re advertising in any kind of
published media—newspapers, magazines, trade press—can
you quantify whether it’s achieving anything?
Mistake # 8 is to carry on advertising “just because”
and without being able to measure the results. [...] an intrinsic
weak link [...]. Your message is only going to be of value to
people who need what you’re offering at the exact moment
they read, see, or hear your message. If they don’t, they
may remember you, but unless you are Tesco or Ford, they much
more likely won’t. And herein lies the appeal—and what
helps explain the phenomenal success—of online pay per click
advertising, of which more shortly. [...]
Direct response works entirely differently, and if you’re
going to spend on advertising this is where to do it. Here you
are inviting a prospective client to take some action which leads
them to your door. And, unsurprisingly, as you have no widgets
to sell upfront the best type of direct response advertising
for lawyers is offering something for free to start the relationship.
Adams, Brown and Curtis could, for example, advertise a free
redundancy seminar in the local paper, either directing readers
to a dedicated phone number (ideally an 0800 number) and/or to
a specific page on their website. Either way, the means are in
place to measure the response and gather the names of some new
prospective clients, and the firm has also achieved a little
positive profile-raising. It’ll also quickly become obvious
whether it was worth the effort.
What about those ads on Google then?
You know the ones—they appear at the top of your search
results on both Google and Yahoo!, and in a column down the right-hand
side of the page. This is pay per click—direct response
advertising 21st century-style and the easiest way to get a high
searchengine position. [meaning in the "sponsored links"
column] Google’s AdWords take the lion’s share;
Yahoo!’s equivalent is Sponsored Search. PPC can produce
fantastic returns because you advertise to people who are very
specifically searching for what you’re offering—and
they want it right now. You only pay for your ad when somebody
responds by clicking through to your website, and the pricing
is determined by a real-time auction based on actual market values,
not a figure plucked from the air by an advertising executive.
A further huge advantage of PPC is that—unlike just about
any other type of advertising—you can turn it on and off
at will.
So far, so good, and the process looks disarmingly simple at
first glance. But do not be fooled. Finessing any PPC programme
can be incredibly time-consuming and complicated. And because
it’s becoming more and more popular, the goal posts keep
shifting, and it’s all too easy to spend a great deal of
money very quickly and achieve nothing. So before dipping even
a toe into the PPC water, research the topic thoroughly, get
some expert advice, and don’t just rely on what Google and
Yahoo! tell you about their respective packages!
Internet advertising is booming because it is easy to dip
a toe into the water with a pay-per-click text advert stating
your name, your town if the software doesn't allow regional adverts,
and inviting a click on your personal page of the corporate web
site, your blog or perhaps the contact form of a smaller legal
firm web site. You can do it from your laptop. You can do it
after a few glasses of wine if you check back in a day or two.
You can do it as a junior employee without bothering your boss
(but consult a lawyer if not true). Basically it it suits self-teachers
and dabblers.
Those who practice get more. The results may be a few clicks
a month and little or no trackable new business, but this is
a good way of learning what works. Maybe modest advertising is
best. Intelligent Marketing for Lawyers quote another example
of a card on a stand at the Citizens' Advice Bureau (Advice
Service Alliance are the rival) which may only bring one
client a year but is still worthwhile. If internet advertising
is so important to your business that it can be out-sourced to
a specialist, it's still worthwhile to dabble and experiment
before going to a meeting with them, just in case it isn't. Otherwise
you will be going to a meeting about something you are clueless
about, which is surely every lawyer's nightmare.
"lawyers employment [town]" if people are searching
for "let down by my trade union". And the click
itself is of low value unless you offer a local or niche service
that people discover in more detail. Your office's reputation
might rise from "that firm over the road" to
"Bloggs.co.uk over the road who have an employment specialist",
or from "that firm I see advertising" to "the
one with sample grievance letter templates".
If your corporate web site doesn't allow you to ad tracking code,
you can set-up a personal blog page and add it there. Here's
an example by
a criminal lawyer.
So it's best to set the ad to click on your particular page of
a large corporate web site, on a blog, or research ways of tracking
what happens next. Yahoo offers a pay-per-call option. The ideal
would be a pay-per-case won, check cleared and nett happiness
caused worldwide. The worst result is teasingly put in the title
of another expert's article:
http://www.barnesgraham.com/Traffic-has-no-value.html?page=1
No add agencies offer happiness tracking but most offer some
sort of tracking code that can go part of the way, tracking who
clicks on your contact form for example. It could be technically
possible to pay per deposit, even if no agency offers the service
yet. Meanwhile, please book a test advert before going-on to
read the rest of the download.
Employees.org.uk can offer a boxed direct link to your site,
offering you a slight advantage on search engines, as well as
the advert, or it can offer a bespoke advert and track
outbound links for you.
Other places to advertise employment law - none of which uses
mainstream ad services:
TakeLegalAdvice.com charge lawyers a minimum subscription fee
each year according to The
Times.
Lawyer
Locator - an online version of Butterworth's - offers £199
annual promoted listings to its 51,000 monthly searchers. Like
several law web sites, they charge by time but do use an agency
called adtech for tracking visitors, which is good because their
100 times more visitors than employees.org.uk are spread between
1,643 law firms and an extraordinary variety of niche specialities
that are mainly business-to-business rather than business-to-new-customer.
InfoLaw
offer 30 pages of free solicitor's listings with paid-for highlighting
or top placement as well as more ambitious search engine optimisation
services for legal web sites.
Venebles.co.uk manages
all ad sales manually - there are two, possibly three ad spaces
amongst  employment
law solicitors and others around the site. She operates a waiting
list. Current advertisers & renewal dates are here:
Venables.co.uk/aboutsponsoredlinks.htm#group
2
Solicitor.info
is free and takes two minutes to sign-up to. The reason it's
a respectable link is that it invites reviews of firms from the
public. Some firms pay by the month to have an advert in a county
section or shown nationwide.
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Source: NOP survey for Lexis Nexis 2004
This is an example of a tradedboubler ad
This is an example of an adbrite ad
If they look the same it's because sometimes Adbrite is set
to show trade doubler ads rather than repeat the same ones too
often next to each other.
If you are worried about possible costs paying a US-based
ad agency in $US, don't. If the problem is worth thinking about,
there are cards like the post office travel money card with pay
you money to sign up. If the problem is not worth thinking about,
imagine that you have never read this paragraph. |