Adding Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Pay-Per-Impression (PPI) to Your Online Marketing

Enhance Your Visibility with PPC and PPI Campaigns

You can’t hope to effectively compete in the legal marketplace today without a well-conceived online presence, but it’s a fiercely competitive environment. You can spend a lot of time, and a lot of money, trying to get your message to the right audience. There are, however, cost-effective tools that can ensure that your firm’s name and links get first-page visibility in search engines—pay-per-click and pay-per-impression.

What Is Pay-Per-Click?

If you’ve looked at a Google search engine results page (SERP) in the last decade, you’ve seen the impact of pay-per-click (PPC). PPC is an internet marketing strategy where the cost of the advertising depends on how many times web users click on your link on the search engine results page. Google places those ads at the top of the SERP and designates that they are paid advertisements by placing the word “Ad” at the beginning of the listing.

Advertisers bid for those placements based on keywords. For example, if you practice in Atlanta and represent clients in commercial real estate transactions, you might bid on a number of related keywords, such as “real estate attorney,” “commercial property lawyer,” or “buy-sell agreement attorney.” If you win the bid and your advertisement appears at the top of the search engine results page, you pay a fee anytime someone actually clicks on the link to go to your website. Ideally, the fee you pay will be negligible compared to the business generated by the PPC campaign.

What Are the Benefits of a PPC Campaign?

There are two ways to improve your ranking with search engines—you can focus on the content of your web pages or you can use pay-per-click. Both can be effective, but there are distinct advantages to a PPC campaign:

• A successful PPC campaign puts you on the first page of the search engines. That kind of visibility can easily produce a positive return on investment.
• Your visibility is immediate. Once your bid is accepted, you’ll start appearing on the first page of the search engines. While an effective organic content campaign can produce similar results, it often takes a long time to get to the first page, and it requires continual effort to stay there.
• When properly done, a PPC campaign can be highly cost-effective. Unlike other advertising campaigns, where you pay the same fee regardless of whether anyone ever views your ad, pay-per-click ensures that you only get charged when someone has a potential interest in your services.

What’s the Difference between Pay-Per-Click and Pay-Per-Impression?

With PPC, you are charged only when someone clicks on your link. With a pay-per-impression program, you are charged anytime someone goes to the search engine results page that contains your advertisement. Though there’s typically a lower conversion rate with a PPI campaign, the cost per impression is lower. A PPI campaign can be an effective way to build brand or name recognition and can also potentially generate new clients.