Finding the right ways to advertise your services can be a juggle for attorneys.

If you’re operating without any internal marketing staff, you’re working long hours and having to find effective law firm advertising techniques at the same time. Hiring a full-time specialist is often out of reach for now, yet without investing in sales and marketing, you’re stuck relying on word-of-mouth or serendipitous run-ins with new clients.

You need a simple solution for marketing that's both focused on bringing in more business and is hands-off. It’s a fairly tall order, but it’s possible with the right digital marketing service for advertising your law firm.

PPC (pay per click) advertising is a great solution because it can be a low-cost, low-maintenance way to drum up new business. You only pay for results (the clicks) and it’s possible to make PPC for lawyers highly targeted.

The first decision to make is on which platform to advertise your firm. Facebook and Google are the dominant players in the PPC space, but which will be more effective for attorney’s ads?

Facebook vs. Google advertising for lawyers pros and cons

Facebook and Google each have their own sets of pros and cons when it comes to law firm advertising. The platforms are a bit different for a start: Google Ads are found at the top of search results when someone types in a search query. All sorts of demographics use Google search, including the sorts of people who will be looking for your services. Google ads appear on mobile and desktop searches.

Facebook advertising is through the social media platform. They are display ads that are either shown in the newsfeed or as an advertisement in the column to the right of the newsfeed. These ads appear on mobile or desktop as well.

So a key distinction between Google Search Ads and Facebook Display ads is that search ads are a form of “pull” advertising while display ads are “push” advertising. Search ads only appear to those who are searching for a product or service, while display ads are paid placements that appear based on various targeting parameters.

Let’s look at a breakdown of core areas of comparison:

Cost Differences

Setups Costs

Setting up the ads themselves requires some initial work.

In the case of Google advertising, it’s about the ad copy, which is made of two elements: 1) The headline which allows a maximum length of 30 characters, and 2) the description up to 180 characters. You may be able to manage that yourself in which case it won’t cost you to write the actual ad.

Facebook ads are different - they display images or graphics (promoting events, special deals, product launches, etc.) which require some design work before being implemented. You could opt to go with pictures that you already have or own, which won’t cost you extra to use. On the other hand, visual appeal is key to these ads so you might choose to get design work done by a professional, which will increase your production cost. (It’s difficult to put an estimate on it as pricing can vary widely and is very much a “get what you pay for” situation).

Advertising Budget

In terms of the actual ad costs, Google tends to be more consistent, but more expensive. It relies on a bidding system where people compete for keywords and thus drive up the cost if your keywords are more popular. In most big cities, the costs for localized searches will be expensive. For example, “personal injury lawyer in Los Angeles” will average over $50 and regularly reach upwards of $120 per click (and that’s a very expensive click!!).

Facebook ad costs are often the most cost-effective for beginners in the PPC world, although they can be volatile. Cost is based on reach rather than clicks. If you were to do a poor job of targeting the ad, you could end up wasting a lot of money showing it to people for whom it is irrelevant. Targeting is generally about instructing Facebook on demographics to show your ad to - a large group (e.g. the entire Facebook population of Los Angeles) will attract a higher cost. The idea is to get quite good at defining just the right-sized target group.

Maintenance or management

Neither Facebook nor Google Ads are entirely “set and forget”, not if you want to get good results from them.

You may get lucky with Google and find you get results with little supervision of the ads, however, most of the time, it takes some trial and error to discover the optimum settings for your ads. You’ll do a lot better if these are consistently optimized.

Facebook ads won’t deliver good results unless you pay attention to them. It takes time and experience to get audience targeting right. Most ads will drop off in terms of effectiveness over time, too. Ad fatigue is an issue - where the same audience has seen your ad multiple times. Facebook also often changes how it displays your ad after some time, and you may see its performance drop.

In either case, there’s a time commitment involved if you want results - perhaps slightly more so with Facebook. If you don’t have the time, you could outsource to an agency. This will cost you, so it comes down to weighing up where your time is better spent. For most lawyers, that’s going to be working with their clients rather than managing ads!

PPC ads always take some managing to get the best results

Audience targeting

Google and Facebook both work very differently for ad targeting.

Google ads are based on search terms first and foremost. You can be very selective about the keywords you wish to target and those you wish to avoid. You can learn to refine your targeting so that you go for “high intent” keywords - those searches that generally mean a person is looking to engage the services that you offer. (Some keyword searches are more for information than any sort of buyer intent).

They are based not only on what people key into the search engine but also based on their location (city, state, or country). As you learn more about the keywords that get you results, you become better at refining that audience.

Facebook has a large number of options to drill down and specifically target an audience. For example:

• Set demographics such as location, gender, relationship status, age, language spoken, job title and education.
• Target household composition and whether people own or rent their home.
• Target specific industries, e.g. healthcare, government employees, veterans and more.
• Target key life events. E.g anniversary in the next 30 days, in a new relationship, recently moved…
• Target key interests by business, industry or entertainment.
• Reach people on purchase behaviors, device usage and more.

You can get very prescriptive with who you’re targeting, especially if you use multiple ways to narrow your audience. However, that targeting will be based on user profiles and not search intent.

Policies

Both ad platforms tend to be strict and learning all the compliance rules can be a time suck for new users. You could spend a lot of valuable time just trying to “get it right” so the platform will show your ads.

Is one easier than the other? Perhaps Google by a hair. This is because you only have to worry about the copywriting of your ad because ads are strictly text. On Facebook, both your copy and your imagery must meet with their policies, including things like text-to-image ratios, trademarks and anything that may be considered offensive.

Facebook also tends to come down more strictly (and often without warning) if it perceives an infraction of its rules. It’s not uncommon for ad accounts to get banned without allowing you to petition for a reversal of their decision. Google bans accounts too, although this doesn’t seem to happen as often and they tend to be easier to recover.

Results

How do Facebook ads and Google Adwords stack up in terms of getting results for attorneys? It very much depends upon your goals.

Let’s say it’s all about improving your firm’s visibility. You want to become a household name so that when people think of law firms in your area, yours is at the top of their minds. If that’s the case, Facebook’s larger reach and audience targeting are better.

On the other hand, Google excels at getting you more leads due to targeting the intent of the searchers. If it’s a direct face-off for leads, Google will probably win, although Facebook can compete if you use a retargeting campaign - for example showing ads to visitors who spent a fair bit of time on your website, but didn’t fill out any forms.

Verdict

Who wins? Facebook ads for lawyers or Google Adwords for lawyers? You could say it’s a function of your goals and your budget.

Winner for attracting new leads: Google Ads

Google ads tend to be more expensive to run than Facebook, however, with an optimized campaign, you’re also more likely to pull in leads. This could make the ROI worth it for your law firm.

Winner for bringing back web traffic: FaceBook Ads

Facebook ads are less expensive and have the potential to reach a wider audience. If brand recognition is at the top of your list, this could be the right choice for your firm.

Do you need help with your law firm advertising? Pronto Marketing offers our experienced team to help drive results with Google or Facebook advertising. Take a look here to see what we offer and book a consultation.