Lawyers spend millions of dollars each year to get their name out to the public and bring in new clients. Some law firms spend hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to drive potential clients to their website. What happens after someone visits the firm's site, but doesn't take the next step and call or contact the attorney?

Remarketing is a pay-per-click service that can compliment your natural search engine optimization and offline marketing efforts. By placing a code on your website, you can advertise to your past website visitors in an effort to bring them back to your firm. Here is how it works:

Building a Pool – A pool is a group of visitors who have seen a section of your website. For example, a personal injury lawyer could have a pool for car accidents, one for medical malpractice, and one for workplace injuries. Google provides a code that is placed on each of those pages. When a visitor goes to the page with remarketing code on it, they are added to the pool. If a visitors goes to the car accident page and then returns to Google's search results, they have been added to the car accident pool and can reached again at a later date.

Setting Up Ads – While Google has recently introduced remarketing in search as a beta product, the most popular form of remarketing is through banner advertisements displayed on other websites. Google has one of the largest networks of ad publishers through their Adsense program. When your visitor visits a page with the remarketing tag, a cookie is placed in their browser (this is how they are added to your pool). When the visitor goes to another website that has Google Adsense ads (which is about 75% of advertising networks), a banner advertising your firm is displayed to the user. Make sure your banner is professionally designed and encourages individuals to return to your website without using languages like “come back” or “return.”

Establishing a Budget – Remarketing is very budget friendly. Keep in mind, these visitors have already been to your website, driven there either by search engine, press release, television, radio, or via print. The goal is to bring them back. While your banners may be showing up 20,000 – 30,000 times to a pool of 1,000 visitors, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. This essentially gives you brand building and name recognition for pennies per impression.

As a pay-per-click service, you are bidding against other advertisers, but, you are not necessarily bidding against other lawyers. If a visitor is shopping for a digital camera on Nikon's website, a pair of shoes on Nike's website, or a book on Amazon.com, you are bidding against those remarketing advertisers for each visitor in your pool. A personal injury lawyer in a major metro area might spend $40-$60 per click if doing pay-per-click marketing in Google search. But when they are using remarketing, they will pay just $2-$5 per click.

Conversion – Each practice area is different, so we have put together an average that is based on data from all the practice areas that we manage. Most attorneys can maintain a pool of 600-1,500 visitors in their remarketing pools. Usually, attorneys should keep visitors in the pool for no more than 30-60 days; you do not want to keep advertising to someone who has already selected another firm, but still might click on your ad. A pool of 1,000 visitors will generate 20,000 – 30,000 impressions per month. Service-related industries, like law, have lower click-through rates. Of those 1,000 visitors seeing your ad 20,000 – 30,000 times over 30 days, 15-30 will click on your website.

Here is the good news: Once a visitor clicks on the remarketing banner, conversion rates are significantly higher than standard search marketing. Most practice areas enjoy 8%-15% conversion rates among visitors who return to their website via the remarketing banner.

Remarketing is a great complimentary service to add to your existing search marketing efforts. The click charges paid to Google come out to between $50-$150 a month, making it a relatively inexpensive way to improve your online marketing conversion and bring in new cases.

Other Resources: The Bigger Law Firm magazine | Legal News |Attorney Press Release Distribution

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