This legal technology company provides online services to families and small to medium-sized businesses. For those who want one-on-one guidance, the company also offers access to a network of lawyers who can answer specific questions and provide legal advice.
23%
YoY conversion growth
46%
Increase in Google ad conversions
Continuing the momentum of unprecedented growth
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in the first half of 2020 the company had experienced unprecedented growth, with Paid Search being the primary driver of customer acquisition. We were eager to continue this company’s growth in 2021 after a period of extraordinary demand for online legal services and documents. However, industry research predicted the legal documents category would see very little search growth in 2021, compared to +20% in 2020. This meant our account team would have to think bigger and go beyond search to find a solution to adapt and succeed in challenging market conditions.
Rethinking strategies to fuel growth
To get started, we identified top growth opportunities with Facebook and YouTube marketing. This included:
- Setting up platforms for success using our best-in-class campaign structures.
- Testing lead ads to reduce UX friction.
- Capturing qualified users through prospecting strategies and bringing them into a series of retargeting steps to create a funnel sequence – without spending millions of dollars.
- Initial campaign learnings that fueled the creation of new documents and revenue sources for the business.
While this company had been the leader in the legal documents category, its branded search volume was not growing at the same rate as its competition. We also uncovered other ways we could grow the company’s footprint. Examples of these were:
- Expanding audience targets beyond SMB owners.
- Implementing iterative creative testing.
- Utilizing a broader awareness approach through retargeting to generate additional demand.
- Entering new marketing channels (LinkedIn, Google UAC, Apple Search Ads, etc.).
Taking a comprehensive approach, we implemented two main strategies to drive growth: aligning the company’s account structure with industry and platform changes, while also going after more mobile users.
While the company was already heavily leveraging automated bidding, their campaigns were in Alpha/Beta single-keyword ad group (SKAG) structure, which had been a best practice of ours for many years. But based on the recent success of smart bidding, responsive search ads, and less control over keyword mapping due to the industry’s embrace of automation, our approach needed to evolve.
Our team restructured the campaigns into multi-keyword ad groups (MKAGs) to group similar keyword themes together and saw immediate improvements in the Google algorithm’s ability to optimize – thanks to greater data density – and uncovered more impression volume.
Additionally, we chose not to leverage an algorithmic bidding platform like SA360 and rely solely on individual engine bidding algorithms. This proved to be extremely valuable, especially in Microsoft, where the team chose to leverage their native target cost-per-acquisition (tCPA) strategies. When we found that Microsoft’s tCPA strategies outperformed Search Ads 360’s CPA bid strategies, we migrated the majority of the company’s campaigns over to Microsoft. Loosening up mobile modifiers and embracing automated bidding also helped the company tap into growing mobile searches.
Outperforming unprecedented performance
Despite research stating that demand in the legal documents industry wasn’t expected to grow in 2021, we found a path forward.
By leaning on untapped performance levers, we drove 23% year-over-year conversion growth for the client in the first half of 2021.
Switching to Microsoft’s tCPA strategies was a major factor in scaling spend on Microsoft by 167% YoY and growing the investment to a 22% share of the paid search budget, compared to just 11% in the first half of 2020.
Mobile drove growth on both Google Ads (+46% conversions) and Microsoft Ads (+20x conversions). This was a key finding, because while 45% of industry searches for legal documents happen on mobile, they had only made up 18% of spend in the first half of 2020 — and this figure grew to 22% of spend in the first half of 2021.
Questions?
VP of Growth
Lou Amodeo
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