Supercharge Conversions with Text || Google Performance Max

Episode Notes

Transcript

Conrad Saam:  Before we get started today, we want to thank our sponsors.  Clio, Alert Communications, LawYaw and Posh Virtual Receptionist.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  So, Conrad, it seems that you took our advice from the last episode and have decided to buy a puppy to increase your organic social media leads.

Conrad Saam:  Totally, I’m going to have lots of friends because of the puppy.  Now, the downside is we haven’t had a guest on the show for a while, and this is probably going to be the worst behaved guest that we have ever had on the show.  Oh, yeah, you’re welcome.  See, welcome puppy.  There you go, look.  See, the problem is I got this bone full of frozen Kibble to keep him quiet and I thought we could do a segment where he was all cute before I gave him the bone to keep him quiet, and he realized that we had the bone so now we’re doing adorable puppy eating bone on a podcast.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  The truth is, we’re trying to juice our stats here because Lunch Hour Legal Marketing is now on YouTube.  So, you can watch this actually adorable puppy and listen to legal marketing.

Conrad Saam:  Yes, you think this is just us talking about puppies, but it’s actually a multi-channel marketing juggernaut leveraging your desire to look at cute things on the internet to drive more views of our content.  Do you think I’m kidding?  I’m not.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  I’m about to start showering before we do these, now.

Conrad Saam:  You’re still okay on YouTube without the shower.  I’m pretty sure you’re good.  I’m pretty sure you’re good.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  What are we talking about today, Conrad?

Conrad Saam:  Along with the cuteness of puppies, we have a lot of stuff to talk about.  We, as always, are going to talk about the news, right?  There’s some major news coming out here.  We’re going to talk about conversions.  I’m going to interview you about a new conversion tactic that you’re currently using.  I think it’s pretty fascinating.  And finally brought to you by the brand manager from Viagra, we’re going to be talking about Performance Max, the newest new thing coming out of Google.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Music.

[Music]

Intro:  Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.  Teaching you how to promote, market and make fat stacks for your legal practice.  Here on Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam:  Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.  Let’s hit the news.  Holly cow, Gyi!  Did you know this is less than 24 hours old.  Google is now offering certification for SEOs.  Wohoo!

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yeah.  The people that have been doing this for a long time.  We used to make fun of people that put Google SEO certified partner on their website, and now they’re going to be able to do that.  Maybe this is Google’s badge link building strategy.

Conrad Saam:  To get more traffic to Google?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  I’m just kidding, it’s not.  I had a sneak peek at the syllabus because Google and their infinite wisdom of SEO, it’s one line.  The whole course is one line.  It says, Create great content.

Conrad Saam:  Go hire an English major.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  That’s it.  All you got to do is create great content.  That’s a wrap.

Conrad Saam:  Okay, and done.  So, you have now graduated from Google’s SEO course, you can put that badge on your website.  Moving on.  Hey, you recently did a study of consumer behavior.  I believe the question you asked was very open-ended and it was, “How would you find a lawyer if you needed one?”  What came out of that?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yeah, we still even in 2020 and we joke around about this but we still get lawyers that will say people don’t use the internet to hire lawyers like me.  And again, my study is not scientific by any means.  This is 5,000 respondents.

Conrad Saam:  Well 5,000 is a statistically relevant sample, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  According to Google’s consumer survey metrics it is.  But if you only serve a certain very small segment then maybe it’s not representative, right?  Anyway, who cares?  We’ll post a link to it but shocker, this is an open-ended question so I didn’t nudge anybody, I didn’t pick from Google or Facebook.  This is literally like–

Conrad Saam:  There was no drop-down?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Type whatever you want.  No drop down.  This is typed into an open text box how you’d find a lawyer.  And 5000 respondence number one most consistent answer, Google.  Number two most consistent answer the internet and you know, half the people had some very whether it was gibberish or it was not something that Google could actually throw into one of the buckets and referrals were up there and there was a bunch of different variations on referrals and asking friends.

(00:05:03)

But the most consistent answer was Google.  So, now every time a lawyer tells me that I’m just going to send them a link to this study and be like this many thousand people say they disagree with you.

Conrad Saam:  I’m curious, and we didn’t prep this in our show notes so I apologize for putting on the spot, but how many spots — I want to see if you can go through 5,000 records in your head in real time.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yeah, okay.

Conrad Saam:  How many directories showed up in that?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  That I do not know.  I will tell you the ones that showed up in the — and I’m happy to anybody that wants you can just reach out to us or #LHLM.  I’ll send you the raw data, the underlying data.  It’s fine, nothing proprietary.  We pay for it though but it’s fine, I’ll give it to you for free.  The advantages of being a loyal LHLM fan.  There’s a lot of interesting stuff in the long form answers because there’s some things that are like not intuitive that you wouldn’t have guessed.  So, in terms of shaping cont — so the real reason I did it was because we use this data to inform content strategy, for clients.  Part of our also as I mentioned before the validation of like, yeah, digital is a thing, but that’s really more like the tongue in cheek.  Having people type in what they would do when they’re looking for a lawyer is extremely valuable.  You should be doing this at your own firm.  It’s great market research and there’s a lot of gems in there in terms of the types, because remember, people search in ways that you would never guess.  So, a lot of valuable stuff in there.  Happy to send that to you, just reach out.

Conrad Saam:  I know we’re supposed to be really quickie on the news, but I like where you’re going with this.  So what I was going to say is really quickly, what did you use to do this market research?  How much did it cost you?  So, if I was a law firm saying, wanting to listen to your advice and actually implement it, what are my next steps?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Go to Google Consumer Surveys, it’s one of the tools offered by Google, and 5,000 respondents cost us $500 and it’s a combination of the filtering you do and the number of questions you ask.  I think it’s like fifty cents a question or something like that.

Conrad Saam:  Okay, love it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  You don’t even need 5,000.  And it breaks down.  You can segment by demographics, you can segment by — there’s a bunch of different things you can do in there to play with it, but it’s a really valuable research tool I think for understanding how people are.  If you need a survey tool, it’s a great survey tool in my opinion.

Conrad Saam:  Okay.  Do it. Learn, get smarter about your company and how people are looking for you.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Market research is big.  It’s a thing.

Conrad Saam:  Okay and the other big thing that we cannot skip because it is all over the headlines this morning is the Roe v. Wade leak.  Talk about the biggest big news in legal since the insurrection or attempted overthrowing of the government by — Oh, wait, sorry, no politics.  Anyway, Roe v. Wade came out.  We’re going to see what happens but I cannot imagine that that is not going to have massive impact both socially as well as politically and within kind of the legal world.  Huge.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Huge.

Conrad Saam:  All right, now that we’ve gone all serious, let’s pay some bills.

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[Music]

Gyi Tsakalakis:  No one cites routine drafting as the reason they chose to become a lawyer, but that’s where a lot of time goes for solo practitioners and small firms.  LawYaw can help you transform your existing Word documents into reusable templates with no coding required.  Save time and avoid errors with intuitive features like conditional logic.  Use a tool that empowers your experience and expertise.  Learn more at lawyaw.com.  That’s L-A-W-Y-A-W.com.

And now for the legal trends report minute brought to you by Clio.  What do firms with growing revenue have in common today?  They’re quicker to adopt client centered legal technologies.  Clio’s research shows that firms with growing revenue are 37% more likely to use online payment solutions and 41% more likely to use client portals.  Two technologies that make it much easier for clients to interact with their lawyers.

(00:10:01)

The data is clear.  Firms that find ways to make their services easier and more convenient for clients are the ones that see better client satisfaction and higher revenue.  So, you know, I wonder and folks that are listening to this, we’d love to hear from you.  How many of you — and Conrad, how many of your clients have online payments and client portals?

Conrad Saam:  So, not as many as I would think.  And it’s certainly something that we have brought up with firms.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Same.

Conrad Saam: It’s also not one of those things that like, it’s not a hill I’m willing to die on, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Right.

Conrad Saam: I think the thing is I look at through this is what’s the cause and effect here, right?  Is the client portal and the online payments, is that more an indication of a firm that is client-centric and therefore growing in revenue or is the effects that’s actually making more client-centric and how they grow revenue.  I suspect it is more an indicator of the former where like if you care about these things, you’re going to go out of your way to make it easy for people to do business with you which is like business 101, but that does require client-centric mindset.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yeah.  And I think it’s really a good point.  For me also, I think this probably – Clio, if you’re listening, I’d love to see the Legal Trend’s report broken down by more practice area data because the PI lawyers, there’s no point in putting an online payment thing on their website.  Like, of course, they’re not going to have that.  In other practices though, the transactional practices, estate planning, you see the feedback.  I mean, I can tell you that some of our clients that do have those options, you’ll see it in online reviews.  They made it super easy for us because we could log into a portal, we can share documents.  And so, we know it’s a thing.  Maybe, we’re just not working with the lawyers that are implementing this much.  But I’m in the same camp as you.  I mean, most of our clients, I would say they don’t have either of these things.

Conrad Saam: Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis: The client portal also though because maybe, I don’t know if Clio intends this, but I think client portal the other thing I think of is knowledge base, right?  So, like you login to the client portal.  You can share some videos of like the overview of the representation, kind of where they are.  You got all your documents there, you might have answers to frequently asked questions, like that stuff is — clients would love that stuff.

Conrad Saam:  Not to mention, we kind of expect it, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Right.

Conrad Saam:  Like if you’re alive working right now, you expect to be able to look up your kids’ grades in real time.  You expect to be able to find the baseball schedule automatically sync to your calendar.  We are behind the time.  Like I think the legal industry often gets smacked for being behind the times unfairly bluntly, unfairly because there are a lot of — Sometimes, they are super, super aggressive about things and that has panned out and what you’re seeing as those firms that are forward-leaning are doing better, right?  And it’s whether it’s a mindset orientation that is a client centricity or if it’s not that and it is instead a result of putting up online payments either way, like dive in man.  It’s so insane.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  It can be a competitive advantage.  I mean, from a marketing standpoint, those are the types of things you should put that out there.  You don’t have to come into the office.  We can get all your documents signed.  You can engage with us from the comfort of your own home, that’s a competitive advantage.

Conrad Saam:  So, the funny thing is and I did not get this study done, but I asked Gravity Legal, “Do you have any data about having the online payment functionality on a site as a landing page conversion improvement?  So, do more people call the firm because it shows on the website that you can actually do online payments?”  I have not seen that study.  I want that study to happen because that’s really fascinating to me.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Interesting, good study.  All right, for more information on what tools successful firms are adopting, download Clio’s Legal Trends Report for free at clio.com/trends.  That’s Clio spelled clio.com/trends.

Conrad Saam:  All right, Gee, I was on your website the other day.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  You were, why?

Conrad Saam:  This is true, and this is why we added this segment.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Intelligence.

Conrad Saam:  I was snooping all over attorneysync.com.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  You’re trying to hack it, but we’re on WordPress and Cloudflare, so you couldn’t get in.

Conrad Saam:  It’s now written in — no, it’s not.  It’s all Greek.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Speaking of Viagra.  I don’t know why you mentioned the Viagra thing.  You’ll get — that’s your segment.

Conrad Saam:  We’ll get to the Viagra joke.  Maybe, that Viagra joke was pre-emptive.  Anyway, I was on your website the other day and I noticed that you’ve got a really aggressive pop-up and I find them annoying.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Me, too.

Conrad Saam: And I wanted to know why you are deliberately annoying your website visitors.  How is that for a setup?

(00:15:02)

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Well, you know, for years I was anti all pop-ups.  I was anti chatbots.  I was anti modals, and I’m still anti — you know, the modal’s that block out the entire experience of something huge on those specially on mobile because, as we know, that’s a no-no from Google.  But I got to tell you, the data shows that we actually had better conversion.  We get more people to sign up for our tips list.  We get more people to reach out to contact us for free consultations.  We get more people to schedule calendar list with those pop ups on there.  And the one that we are in the process of testing right now that I’m in love with is called Leadferno.  And Leadferno, they’re going all in on text.  So, to go to attorneysync you’ll see there’s a little thing at the bottom contact.  If you click that, one of the options there is text.  And when you think about it, how many of these websites like you can’t text.  Everybody’s texting all day.  All day every day that’s the most convenient way.  Everybody’s talking about how they won’t answer the phone, but they’ll send you a text.  And I think there’s going to be a huge part of the acquisition funnel and integrates with Facebook messaging app.  It’s going to integrate with Google Business profiles messaging.  I think unifying a messaging solution that also handles SMS text is not just the future but also the present.

Conrad Saam:  So, one of the things we talked about specifically the texting in legal.  I mean, it’s great for you.  You run an agency, Merry Christmas, but you’re not running a law firm, right? And so, —

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Right.

Conrad Saam:  What kind of issues come up?  I mean, let me not — we all know what the issues that come up with texting in legal.  How do you as a law firm minimize those issues or is that something that law firm should be really worried about and stay away from that technology because you never know what’s going to happen with your law license?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yeah.  I mean, look, you got to navigate these issues.  Security is important.  You should be vetting all of your technology and communication partners.  You should be vetting your email and all this stuff.  But, to me, we know the gold standard.  The gold standard is end-to-end encryption, right?  So, something like Leadferno though, the thing that I like about it is like you don’t have texts floating all over the place with different staff members on different phones.  And in fact, that’s the big thing of this whole texting thing is lawyers are hearing that they’re like, “That’s nuts.  You’re going to give out your cellphone number?”

Conrad Saam:  Yeah, that was the next follow-up question.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  To all of your clients to text you every seconds?  Like, no.  That’s why a tool like Leadferno comes in to unify that they become the communication platform for the text.  So, you’re not even showing your cellphone number it will show up as like a contact record.  You could set it up so it’d be like, so and so such law firm is actually the contact record that shows up when the texting is going on and not your cellphone.

Conrad Saam:  Okay.  This is going to come across as a pitch for Leadferno, but I think —

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yeah, I know.  And again, you can go look — I would go other options.  There’s a lot of other options out there.  The folks at Leadferno are doing some really cool stuff.  I think their widget is pretty cool, the interface.  They’ve got things you can set up.  So, you have similar like how Slack.  Like slash commands I guess where you can be like it will give you an automated response based on the slash commands.  It can be like a greeting slash command, and you can also — it doesn’t have to be just text, right?  So, you can link your other conversion apps to it like Calendly or send them to a web forum page.

Conrad Saam:  All right, let’s talk about conversion.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Integrates with CallRail?

Conrad Saam:  All right, I was just going to ask.  Conversion tracking with text.  That sounds like it could be problematic.  But no?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  No, they handle that.  They actually have a nice funnel report in there, too.  So, you can actually see all.  It’s got a Google analytics integration.  And so, you can see the number of times that the lead box was shown.  You can see the number of times it was engaged with and you can actually track qualify leads.  You can assign leads.  So anyway, for me, again, it’s even like you said it’s coming across the pitch for Leadferno, these messaging platforms that are integrating across messaging platforms that include SMS text.  They’re worth researching.  People want to engage like that.

Conrad Saam:  Okay.  Let me here some other problems with texting.  So, you just said it’s a pain.  I mean, you’re setting a pretty, pretty high expectation of very, very fast turnaround and responsiveness with texting.  Does that create a really problematic precedent when you’re actually go to servicing the client?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yeah.  I think it’s about expectation setting.  So, to me, it’s not the medium.  It’s a substance of your text.  And so, another thing that Leadferno does and many of these other platforms do is you can set it up so that during certain hours of the day, it’s set to your away and it will send messaging or direct them to something else.

(00:20:08)

So like, “Hey, not available to text right now.  Would you like to schedule something?”  Boom, you can have it schedule something or you can direct them to a lead form.  So again, if you think about it, that’s no different than the phone, right?  Because we always talk about responsiveness on this show.  But the issue is no one’s suggesting that you as a lawyer need to be available 24/7 on your phone to answer all these calls.  Well, the same thing is true of text but setting the expectations of how you’re going to communicate, giving people options, communicating when you’re available or when you’re going to follow up.  It doesn’t matter if it’s text or a web form or some other autoresponder, or a phone call, it’s about the actual substance of your communication, not the platform, in my view.

Conrad Saam:  Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  We should be working to reduce friction.  Why would we be like, I mean, there’s this conversation in this Facebook group the other day and there’s lawyers that are like, “I’m on the phone with the contact.”  The thing I tell them on the phone is, go to my website and fill out my form.  Does that sound like a great experience to you?

Conrad Saam:  Likewise.  The expectation setting needs to be handled pretty carefully.  I got an autoresponder from a lawyer the other day that was like, “I will respond to my emails between 1:00 and 1:30 on every day and you need to wait until then.”  You’ve now set the expectation that you’re kind of hard to deal with.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yeah.  And I’ll tell you, another one that lawyers don’t think about and this actually didn’t become clear to me until I started a marketing agency that was emailing lawyers a lot and lot more volume, we’ll send out a campaign and middle of the workday on like a Wednesday and I’ll get like 25% of the total send will be an autoresponder.  So all the autorespond messages pop up and the autorespond messages are horrible.  It’s like they never — they didn’t spend a second thinking that this autoresponder is actually going to go out to somebody and so again, same thing.  You’re like, “Oh I got it handled with my autoresponder.”  No, you don’t.  You literally just told that person, go find another lawyer.

Conrad Saam:  Yeah, I mean.  It’s a really good point.  The autoresponders, setting expectations can be done the right way and the wrong way and I do think a lot of those autoresponders, the way that your voicemail comes across can basically set an expectation that you are an inflexible, uncaring pain in the ass.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  You’d be better off turning off the autoresponder and just waiting until the next business day to email them back than being like, “Hey, autoresponder go away.” or “Autoresponder, call my secretary.”  And it never says that.  You know what it says?  “In an emergency, this is who you can call.”  Well, it’s not an emergency, we’re trying to hire you.

Conrad Saam:  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  I just got arrested and I want to hire you so I don’t know, it’s an emergency for me.

Conrad Saam:  Yeah, and let’s go back to that most important thing that people care about when they’re hiring a lawyer, responsiveness, right?  That’s come across study after study after study.  Okay.  Sorry.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Anyway, I think something I want to track is, I’m going to get an answer to at least on the texting thing, to give you some numbers on the impact of conversion from text.  Stay tuned.  We’ll talk about that later.

Conrad Saam:  Stay tuned.  Coming back to you at the next episode of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.  Let me ask one last question because this is important with the texting.  When we talk about these autoresponders, do you think having a third-party function as your human autoresponder when you’re not available, good idea, bad idea?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yeah, I think it’s fine.  We’re customers of Smith.  Is it as good as me answering every call and email?  Probably not.  But guess what, I’m one person.  Solos and small firms, one person, other people — and here’s the alternative, I’ll tell you what these third-party systems do a lot better than nobody.  They do a lot better than voicemail.  They do a lot better than infinite ring.  They do a lot better than autoresponder.

Conrad Saam:  Yeah, so, I mean, I think set your expectation that those third parties are going to be a third party.  It’s not going to be as good as you.  They will be a B+ at best and that is a lot better than the best.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  And train them.  That’s the other thing too.  It’s the same thing with the autoresponder and this is the same thing with all these automations or whether you’re working with vendors.  Tell them what you want, shop yourself, tell them how you want your phone to be answered or your texts messages.  Like give them a script and at the very least, the simple answer is don’t try to turn them into an intake conversion specialist.  Try to get them to stop the search, set the expectation when you get callback, get their name, email, phone number.

(00:25:00)

That’s the biggest one because again, you don’t have to qualify the lead for you.  All they got to do is to tell, “Hey, got your message.  Tell you when that you’re going to get back to them.”  That’s the key.

Conrad Saam:  My best practice on that is I would love a small amount of lead qualification and integration with your calendar.  So that person is not waiting for a callback.  They have a callback scheduled with the firm.  That’s my favorite approach on that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  That’s better.  That is better.

Conrad Saam:  You know what?  We got a question out of Twitter.  So I’m going to read the question.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  But first, we got to take a break.

Conrad Saam:  Stay tuned.  See, Gyi is reading the show notes better than I am.  After —

Gyi Tsakalakis:  I’m throwing the break.

Conrad Saam:  See?  It’s almost like we’re trying to keep you around.  Listen through the ad and we’ll come back and answer this question that came to us via Twitter.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  You’re going to throw it to break.  See, now we’re on YouTube, we have to do fancy stuff.

Conrad Saam:  One or two things.  I can just pick up the puppy.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Ah, yes.

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[Music]

Adriana Linares:  Are you looking for a podcast that was created for new solos?  Then join me, Adriana Linares each month on the New Solo podcast.  We talk to lawyers who have built their own successful practices and share their insights to help you grow yours.  You can find New Solo on the Legal Talk Network or anywhere you get your podcasts.

Conrad Saam:  All right, a question came to us from Twitter which is great.  From Chase Squires which by the way, if you’re a lawyer named Chase Squires, if your named Chase Squires, you better become a lawyer.  That is the best legal name I can come up with.  All right.  So, the question is, “Apple is starting to flex its muscle with revamped Apple Maps.  Should law firms be paying attention?  Google was a default but this Apple Maps merit attention?”

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yes, it does and we’ll put some show notes to our friends at Near Media and Local Marketing Institute on this topic, but Apple Maps, guess what?  How many iPhone users are there in the United States?  Do you know off the top of your head?

Conrad Saam:  Lots and plus one.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Over 100 million.  100 million iPhone users.  Guess what’s the default map on their device?  Apple Maps? So, claim your Apple Maps listing.  You can fill out your information.  Make sure it’s accurate in Apple Maps just like you can on Google Maps.  But yeah, you should make sure that you show up on Apple Maps.  I mean, that’s a no-brainer.

Conrad Saam:  All right.  Tactical awesomeness coming to you from Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  And if you have a question that you would like us to answer on air and say your awesome legal name, then hit us up on social media, #LHLM.  All right, Conrad, my turn to turn the tables on you and ask you about Google’s new-ish Performance Max campaigns that you are calling the Viagra update.  I know that you’re very passionate about naming Google updates.

Conrad Saam:  Well, I have this fear that the Mockingbird update, you know, the Mockingbird algorithm update is going to come along and my agency is going to disappear in the depths of the search results.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Actually, I think you have a great chance of ranking for those queries.

Conrad Saam:  Yeah?  Yeah?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  That’ll be great for you.

Conrad Saam:  Well, Performance Max, I mean come on, Google.  This does sound like a male enhancement product, right, but it’s not.  Performance Max has been and I’m going to take an unfair shot at these guys because I can’t help myself, Andy Stickel and Bill Houser have been all over the internet calling this the biggest change to Google in the last 10 years.  Wow.  Strap in.  Anyone heard about Performance Max?  So, in all fairness, this is not the biggest change to Google in the last 10 years, unless you missed the move of local into the top of the search results or you were unaware that the local service ads have actually launched, but it’s still an interesting thing.  What Performance Max is, it’s really kind of an agency killer.  They’re really setting this up as an agency killer and basically Google has a lot of different properties and you can now run ads across multiple properties that they will create ads for you.

(00:30:04)

You upload a bunch of creative.  You upload some messaging and they will automatically generate ads and using AI push those ads to the appropriate channels.  And they will use that AI to maximize cross-platform conversion optimization.  That just sound super awesome, but my problem with maximizing conversions across Google Properties is — and haven’t brought this up thematically yet in this episode but we’ve talked about it at nauseam, elsewhere.  The conversion for a law firm does not happen online and the conversions that get funneled into Google Analytics, they stop at the lead level.  Phone call, form fill text or chat, right?  And so I mean, we talked text earlier, these are all good things, right?  We are talking about leads, but our studies show that for our clients and this is the work that we do.  I’m proud of the work that we do, but 84% of the leads when you stop at just counting the number of leads, 84% of them are not leads.  And so that seems like a big error to add into a data set to be optimizing towards.

And so, my concern with this Performance Max, I mean, it’s interesting especially if you’re selling bunnies online, or — I don’t know why I came up with bunnies, who sells bunnies online?  Probably nobody.  If you’re selling coffee cups online, this may be helpful.  But if you are really doing your conversions in an offline setting, phone call, a meeting, those conversions become more difficult to track.  And so I’m not sure the value for the legal Community.  I mean optimizing for leads is great, but that’s a really small part of the picture is my concern with Performance Max.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Well, I’m going to give you the “Yeah, but.”

Conrad Saam:  Yeah, go “Yeah, but” me.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yeah, but that’s true of regular Google ads too my friend.

Conrad Saam:  Yes, but.  Let me “Yeah, but” you back.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yeah, please do.

Conrad Saam:  So the key here and this is so unbelievably important is being able to look at your consultations and understand where they’re coming from and ideally, and I’m not sure how well this works but ideally you can feed that data back into Google where you’re starting to look at those consultation.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Right.  So, okay.  I was trying to lead you down a path here.

Conrad Saam:  Did I walk on the path correctly?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  You did.  You can look at the — the issue that you’re identifying which is that the Google conversion pixel firing is not necessarily a client or qualified lead even or an intake qualified lead or attorney qualified lead, whatever.  What do you like to say?  Attorney qualified lead?

Conrad Saam:  AQL.  Attorney — so we call it Intake Qualified Lead as to basically a consultation and then AQL is our Attorney Qualified.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Okay.  Consultation.

Conrad Saam:  Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  So that’s the problem both for Performance Max as well as regular ads, but as you alluded to, the solution is offline conversion import and what you’re telling Google is, “Hey, out of all the Google conversions, these are the only ones that are actually conversion that we want to optimize to.”  A couple other things that my experience with Performance Max, one, it is not for the lien of budget because it takes a while.  I’m not going to say a long time, but a while longer than a human in my experience to learn where to spend the money.  And because it is AI-based and remember, this is not general AI, like out of a movie.  This is very narrow AI, it does better with larger data sets.

So if you’re a thousand dollar-a-month PPC budget and your target cost per acquisition is a hundred dollars per qualified lead even, you’re going to spend a long time learning and Google’s going to spend a lot of money before they figure out where to spend the money and still it’s not amazing.  But I will say this, I look at it like this, when it’s working it’s a great way to pick up and to have more ads consumed.  So if you are in a brand campaign, you want to build brand awareness, Performance Max is great because again, what Performance Max really means, Google disagree with this is Exposure Max.  So like they’re showing your ads everywhere they can find a spot that matches your profile.  So, if it’s Loosely matching your audience, they’ll show the app across YouTube and every other place that they can think of.

Conrad Saam:  So, I was going to call it the maximize CPM for Google because they have become a massive publisher, right?

(00:35:04)

I mean the reason this is happening is because they are trying to get everyone to advertise beyond the PPC, right?  And looking beyond — and by the way, in the unlikely event that you haven’t connected these two dots, Universal Analytics disappearing being replaced by shocker, Google’s AI expectation of analytics of how people work across multiple channels.  Like these two things are happening at exactly the same time and the end result is Google is going to be guesstimating accurately or otherwise, you can use your own cynicism or level of cynicism to determine that, guessing how impactful multi-channel is for you.  And then they’re going to be serving that multi-channel because they have so many bloody channels and so many impressions.  So if I’m a publisher, this is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  And I don’t care where you spend money, but you should be checking out Offline Conversion Import.  That is your buzz word for the day.  Make sure you’re optimizing to actual intakes and consultations, not just pixels firing.  With that, we must wish you a fond farewell until next time.  Thank you so much for dropping in.  Please do subscribe if you enjoyed Conrad and I ranting about legal marketing and hit us up.  #LHLM.  Find us on your favorite podcasting and now on Youtube as well.  Thank you.

[Music]

Outro:  Thank you for listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.  If you’d like more information about what you heard today, please visit legaltalknetwork.com.  Subscribe via Apple podcasts and RSS.  Follow Legal Talk Network on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Conrad, is there something wiggling around on your lap?

Conrad Saam:  He is referring to this.  And we start off the show with the extra cuts of — let’s try again.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Conrad.  I’ll start over, I’ll start over.  Does the puppy have anything to say?

Conrad Saam:  50-50 I’m getting peed on while we’re doing this segment.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  That would be gold for the —

Conrad Saam:  I’ll just keep going.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Just stand up and show us your pee pants and then blame it on the dog and we’ll be like, “Yeah, we see what’s going on.”

Conrad Saam:  One of the upsides of having a dog is if you pee yourself.  All right, are you ready?

Gyi Tsakalakis:  You can blame the dog.

Conrad Saam:  Blame the dog.  It’s like farts.

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