How Law Firms Use Google Ads to Poach Your Leads

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. I am Gyi Tsakalakis of AttorneySync and I love avocados.

Conrad Saam:

I’m Conrad Saam of Mockingbird and I hate when people mispronounce my name Sam, but I’ve learned to just deal with it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Interesting. I didn’t know that about you.

Conrad Saam:

It’s a pet peeve that I’m just like, when I lived in Ireland I was con and so everyone knew me as Con instead of Conrad and here I’m Sam instead of Sam. And there are dt. Different problems I’m going to deal with

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we are the hosts of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, this podcast about marketing in the digital AI information age. Conrad, I noticed on social media that you have been traveling around the country to visit schools. I’m assuming you have an offspring that is be attending college soon.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, spawn two is a senior and we are right in the middle of this is the worst. If you know this is a public service announcement. If there are any seniors in your world, please do them the favor of not asking them about school if they want to talk to you about it and they don’t, but if they do or if they have something to share, they will. But stop asking them. It is a brutal, brutal season. This march is when the kind of late decisions come out and so there are lots of late decisions and these poor kids are just kind of nervous wrecks. I don’t think I’m just speaking about PON two, but yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well I’m sorry that PON two is going through that process. What else are we talking about today?

Conrad Saam:

We are not just here to talk about my kids going to college, not,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We went a little long on banter, so I was like, we

Conrad Saam:

Went along on banter. Okay, moving on. And we didn’t have a good segue, but

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We didn’t.

Conrad Saam:

We are going to start with the news. We’ve got a longer news segment. We’re then going to move on to this question that was phrased on LinkedIn. Is Angel Reyes eating your lunch and stealing your clients? And finally Gyi and I are going to fight about our different perspectives on turning on or turning off direct brand search in Google’s LSA, which is designed to drain more money out of your profit

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Lockwood. Let’s do this.

Announcer:

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:

I do love this music. It is really solid. I know when I came on we talked about changing the music because I didn’t like the money focus, but boy oh boy, do I like the tune. Okay, welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Let’s hit the news.

All right everybody, you cannot talk about the news without talking about what’s going on in Washington DC There have been a ton of federal layoffs including a lot of lawyers. If you happen to be a lawyer or know a lawyer who is recently laid off from the federal government and is thinking about starting his or her own gig, check out Brian and Ben Glass just outside of DC northeast of DC who are going out of their way to help any federal lawyers, federal lawyers get into business for themselves. Brian and Ben have been doing this for people coming out of the military for a long time and they’re extending this to federal workers. So I think that is a very, very cool thing. Great way to give back and a great way to get a lot smarter about running your law firm and starting your law firm if this has unfortunately hit you. Gyi, we also dealt with over the last two weeks since we last recorded the diversity update from Google, coined by Joanne Hawkins. Can you give, and you and I did a live segment on that, we can try and find the link to the recording for that where we went deep on the diversity update. Can you give me A-T-L-D-R on the diversity update please?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

TLDR is that if you are a more dominant firm in the local pack, there is a likelihood or some likelihood that you might have your traditional organic listing demoted, particularly on mobile. Conrad and I go deeper on this and give our opinions in the YouTube live segment that we’ll send a link to. So we won’t go too long on that, but something worth checking out, especially if you are seeing drops in positions in your traditional organic results.

Conrad Saam:

And that would date back to, I want to say August of last

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Year. They’re saying August, but an uptick more recently.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. Okay. Speaking of upticks, there has been an uptick in the aios showing up in legal. There are lots of SmartyAnts, SEO people who are seeing this. Anecdotally, we were real excited when Google launched this. It is continuing to expand, so expect to see an uptick in that, which might also mean a downtick. Is that a thing? Can you have a downtick, a drop

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Zero click? We’re going to be in the zero click environment.

Conrad Saam:

That is the point. So you may see this, the result of this may be fewer clicks to informational type pages on your site,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Which brings you back to you better be asking people how they found you because if you’re paying someone for clicks, you’re missing the forest for the trees.

Conrad Saam:

That is a little foreshadowing of what we’re going to be talking about later on direct brand search in LSAs. You do want to stick around for that. Okay, and finally, Gyi, this is the second time in two days that I’ve gotten to spend some time recording with you. Who did we record for and what did we talk about?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Zack at Lawyerist invited us to be on the Lawyerist podcast. I think you mentioned that’s coming out in a week or two, so stay tuned for that great chat on the impact of AI and marketing across a bunch of different dimensions. So I won’t say much more than that so people get it and I think the plan is to drop that in our feed too. So if you’re a already subscriber here, we should get that and check out the lawyers podcast in general. Great podcast.

Conrad Saam:

That was really good. Let’s see, Rick.

Alright everyone, we have talked a lot. I would say too much and I actually had to convince Gyi to continue the conversation on this about brand conquest ads in Google Pay-per-click. And this has really evolved, but the reason I brought this back is a comment from James Am Morrow, I’m going to read it and then I’m going to describe the ad because describing the ad is very, very important. I’m not an IP lawyer and no idea who this guy is or about, but this crosses the line and is pathetic. Someone sent this to me and now we have to pay lawyers to deal with this dude hashtag shady lawyers. And what he’s showing and describing is an advertisement from Angel Reyes and Associates. The title of the ad is Zelle and Associates. But so the reason this is material is this is a different example that I’m working with.

So it happened to James tomorrow and I’ve also found it happening to Zelle and Associates. So this is not a one-off Oopsie. This is clearly systemic and deliberate, but the query queries for Zell and Associates, the title of the ad is Zelle and Associates, but the Clickthrough Uur L is for Angel, Reyes and Associates. And that is the issue under concern. Now, Gyi, we’ve talked a lot about brand and the conflation of brand with other keywords, et cetera, but one of the things that certainly is within Google’s guidelines is you should not be able to bid on a competitor’s name and that should not be, sorry, you should not be able to pretend that you are a competitor. And the way they actually talk about doing that is including the name of the competitor in the title of the ad. So this is a violation of Google’s policy about having a competitor’s brand in your own ad. So for example, Coke cannot have Pepsi in the ad because that can be misleading. However, we’re seeing this, how did this come about? How on earth could this come about?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

There’s a couple of different ways. One is is that obviously you can bid on the competitor’s name and use dynamic keyword insertion, which Google will replace text in your ad copy with the query that was used to the keyword that was triggered for the ad. And so if I search for, in this case James MRO and I’m Angel Reyes and I’m bidding on James MRO and I’m using dynamic keyword in insertion, my ad will say, James, tomorrow for searchers that are searching for James and Morrow. Now as you mentioned, this is a violation of Google’s trademark policies. We’ll try to get a link to those as well. Two major trademark policies are, one, you can’t violate someone else’s trademark. And two, you’re not supposed to create confusion with your ads and depending on how you’re using dynamic keyword insertion. The second thing I think is up for debate because use the coke and pep as example.

If Pepsi does an ad that’s way better than Coke, choose Pepsi, it’s way better than Coke. That to me doesn’t violate the misleading thing very simply could be like we’re not Coke, we’re not Morgan and Morgan, we’re not James I. Morrow. Those are less misleading. Anyway, Google has countermeasures to try to keep this from happening. And as we were talking about in the pre-show, one way this could be happening to circumvent the countermeasures is this is very speculative, but I suggest that perhaps it was close variance. So in this case, if Angel Reyes bids on personal injury lawyer and Google matches that with James Morrow’s name, it’s possible. I think I actually don’t know. Now I’m second guessing myself. It’s possible that dynamic keyword insertion could match to the close variant maybe. Anyway, it seems like based on the thread that you posted, it seems like this firm is all in on conquesting.

Conrad Saam:

Well, so it’s interesting. I’m going to read, there was a case on this with the responses. I’m going to read someone we do not know Jared Dean Johnson Google Ads is using dynamic keyword insertion, which you cited Gyi, to adopt and replace any keyword they have in their keyword list. This is likely done on accident because your firm name is in the giant list of keywords they’re bidding on. Yes, they’re bidding on your name. No, they didn’t intentionally insert your name into the ad. You can see the case Rocky Mcal v Hughes and Coleman for the legal version of this. However, as this went on and on, a lot of people have had this experience with Angel Reyes specifically. And I was looking at some of the examples here of people who chimed in on this. Someone wrote, he is very aware, I reached out about it last week.

Here’s what he said, horses are now long out of the barn and this will be part of the new competitive environment for attorney advertising in Texas that came from Ryan Z. So it looks to me like this is a bit of a middle finger that this is how it’s going to work and I don’t care that pisses you off. However, for me, the fact that this is happening with this specific firm repeatedly and the same tactic it suggests what they have figured out how to do is to do this conquest ad by using Google’s own dynamic keyword insertion based on the branded keyword list in order to bid on other firms. So they’re using Google’s own automation to violate Google’s own policy. And that’s pretty fascinating if I’m right about

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That. My take on this stuff is I always bring it back to the economics. I would love to see the economics on these conquests type campaigns. Now the basic math is are they actually converting clients profitably? Two of course is the part that you can’t maybe measure so much is what’s this costing you from a reputation standpoint in your computer? And obviously Attorney Reyes does not care what other lawyers in his community think about him and his ad strategies.

Conrad Saam:

Some people might say that we don’t care what other agencies think about us in our strategies. Just saying

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s true. There’s some truth to that. I tend to think that this falls into the you’re drafting off other people’s brands.

Conrad Saam:

So given the lower cost per clicks, right, given the lower cost per clicks for brands, is it inconceivable to you that this tactic doesn’t pay off financially,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Not inconceivable, I would say in this case looks looking at this specific example that was posted here, this is the Ryan Zel example. So Z and Associates is showing reyes’s URL Reyes’s ads and the ad is literally just Z and associates. So in this case, this to me violates false and misleading rules of professional conduct. It violates the false and misleading ad rules. It violates Google’s policies.

Conrad Saam:

Okay,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So this is pretty clearly not okay. Now what if it was the same one but it said use Zelle, try Reyes, something like that.

Conrad Saam:

Zelle Worth, hell try Reyes.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

There you go. There’s some good advertising. That one I could see both economically and I could see, you know what? Hey, this is not a trying to mislead the consumer. This is, I’m trying to distinguish myself from the consumer. Again, I would love to see the economics of these campaigns again. Now the other thing that you might pick up, this is another thing that lawyers will not like. You might pick up existing clients that are searching for the contact information that are unhappy with the firm and they might make a switch after already hiring the firm. And so anyway, I would love to see robust economics on conquesting, forgetting about my personal taste in all of this distaste, assuming that you’re doing this in a way that is economically viable, passes muster on the compliance side of the house. I think you’re going to see it more when I think of the plaintiff’s bar and really law practice in general, I’ve got a lot of great friends are lawyers, I’m a lawyer, I love lawyers, but it is pretty cutthroat out there when it comes to advertising. And I don’t think that traditional notions of like this is just bad for your reputation. Tasteless, tacky, drafting off competitors, sweat equity stuff. I don’t think that’s going to carry the day, especially as we get into A B, S and PE money and all this stuff coming into legal too.

Conrad Saam:

Tasteless and tacky works man,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? Oh yeah. And again that’s tasteless and tacky is subjective and

Conrad Saam:

Underhanded can work.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, my thing is one, can it pass ethics muster? Can it pass Google policy muster? And then two, is it economically viable? And I would love to see data on that.

Conrad Saam:

We do not recommend this.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We do not recommend this either.

Conrad Saam:

I do know that we have clients for whom we do not run their pay per-click for this very reason for whom it works.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Now let me ask you a question. Let me ask you a question. Don’t you add local competitor names to the negative list for the very reason that they’re triggering them creates waste in your ad campaigns.

Conrad Saam:

So at the risk of you throwing me a softball over the plate to talk about how amazing our pay-per-click services, is that what you were doing there? I appreciate it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

After all of the heckling

Conrad Saam:

I using during the

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Pre show I’m using, I’m using your amazing pay-per-click services as an example of, or at least maybe a data point on potentially why I’m skeptical that conquesting works because when you just match to competitor names, it doesn’t convert very well.

Conrad Saam:

So we go out of our way and I’m going to get this data point wrong, but I think this is accurate. This is what I recollect. Really, really sophisticated negative on brand, extremely sophisticated. I believe when we set that up, we saw an across the board decrease of 14% in your cost per, I don’t want to say conversion, I do believe it was cost per lead. We really go out of our way to avoid this. I mean we’re at the extreme level of avoiding this because

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Why do you do that? Why do you negative out so many competitor names?

Conrad Saam:

Because ultimately we are trying to get around the way Google is deliberately monetizing brand to their benefit and nobody else’s, which in general reduces the economics of how this plays. The other thing we’ve seen.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So that’s a very, hold on a second. It sounds like you’re dodging this question. Aren’t you doing it because by bidding on competitor names, you’re creating click waste in your campaigns waste a hundred percent. Okay, alright.

Conrad Saam:

100%.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That wasnt clear from what you were saying to

Conrad Saam:

Me, but so think about the difference here in this ad. When the ad actually looks like it’s Sam Zell’s business, your click to rate’s going to be pretty solid, right? The economics when it is literally great quality

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Score

Conrad Saam:

Deceptive, right?

Yeah, you’re a great quality score and it’s literally deceptive. So the economics on this are going to be a lot better than a confusion ad where the ad really isn’t about pretending that I am a moral law. It is about something else. So I think you can make the argument that if you, and we haven’t done this, but if you deliberately go out of your way to set it up and have Google trick its own guidelines into serving up these conquest ads, I think you could make the argument that the economics is pretty solid and based on the middle finger that Reyes has sent, people who have complained about

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It.

Conrad Saam:

Anyway, those are my thoughts.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I also love horses are long out of the barn.

Conrad Saam:

That is a, I mean I haven’t heard anyone under 95 say that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m totally using that. I’m totally using that. The horse is long out of the barn on that one.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, when we come back, we’re going to talk more about brands and how to spend money or not on your brand through Google’s other product, the local service ads.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we’re back. We are super grateful from a recent review on Apple Podcasts, excellent marketing for Legal world from Nick Rwa. Nick, thank you so much. This is very kind of you respect Key and Conrad a great deal. They’ve got so much experience in marketing, SEO as an operator of a legal directory, I find staying up to date on all things legal marketing a necessity for me, LHLM and the hosts are trusted resources. Nick’s super grateful for you and Nick, if you’ve been listening, you’ll probably be happy to know that we both are long on directories making a comeback in generative AI land.

Conrad Saam:

I was going to be cynical and say Nick has become a fan after Gyi and Conrad were talking about the importance of directories in LLMs.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Maybe not. That’s probably the case. I don’t know. I know Nick and I think Nick actually listened before that episode. But anyway, we’re grateful for you, Nick, grateful for your attention and your review. And now we are going to talk about why I am wrong about direct brand search in LSAs. And I’m just kidding, I’m not wrong, but Conrad and I are going to fight it out. We’ve talked about this before. It keeps coming up. Conrad, why are we talking about this again?

Conrad Saam:

Well, let’s talk about what we’re talking about before we talk about it so people know what we’re talking about. Direct brand search in LSA basically was Google’s gross way of generating more money out of your pocket when they quietly opted everyone into direct brand search, which basically means an LSA will trigger when someone looks for your brand, not just for what you do.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So we got to zoom out even more because let’s assume

Conrad Saam:

Someone

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Year out of nowhere, they have no idea what this is. So what’s an LSA?

Conrad Saam:

The LSA ads triggered by keywords that when they started out were a paper phone call to your business, which seems like a really, really good thing. But what happens with the economics of that when you start throwing your brand in the value of that lead is very different than if that is someone who’s searching for family lawyer Detroit instead of Smith and Jones divorce lawyers. Right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay. And I have said in the past, my position is generally, well first my position is you should do this for your own firm because whatever I’m about to say and whatever Conrad I is about to say may not be applicable for your firm economics. But my position has been if the economics work, if your cost per client and your volume is making money for you and you’re not a huge brand, right? I don’t know what the tipping point percentage is, you should probably turn the brand search on because you’re going to benefit from the idea that when Google gets paid, they’re more likely to show you’re ads. So Google lead payment per impression is improved with brand search on. And so that can actually help you capitalize on more volume from non-brand.

Conrad Saam:

So when we talked about this and we asked about it, you said most of the time you have direct brand search turned off, turned on, sorry.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I would say that that’s a reflection of most of our clients. It’s still, I shouldn’t even say that and it’s been a while since I’ve said that, so I should go back and look. But my hunch is is that for our clients that aren’t big offline media buyers that aren’t big brand builders, we have it turned on, but it’s still case by case. Because Google does not segment your LSAs by brand and non-brand. You have to use Multisource attribution and ask people how they heard about you. And so then you can be out of all of our Ls. You’re getting

Conrad Saam:

To the punchline.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Oh sorry.

Conrad Saam:

No, you’re fine. No, go

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Out of all of my LSAs, how many of them are reporting that they were referred by a friend or some other brand source?

Conrad Saam:

So when GI and I initially had this conversation, we are going to come back to this brand attribution conversation. We’ve talked about it a lot, but this is a great example of where this is really, really important. We by and large, and most of the firms that we work with, and most of the firms that I talked to have the direct business search turned off. So I went to LinkedIn and did a highly scientific poll to try and prove that I was right. And what we found was a mismatch of who knows. So we asked the question, if you are running Google LSA, did you disable direct business search? 42% of people said that they disabled direct business search. 37% of people said they did not disable direct business search. And a full 21% of people have no idea. So if you fall into the 21% of people who don’t know what the heck you’re bidding on, go turn your LSAs off because you should not be driving while under the influence of Google.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And one of the 37% knows on there of the 19 participants was me. So this is about as scientific as it can get.

Conrad Saam:

This is not scientific. So the point being, I mean I was fascinated that there was a discrepancy and my perspective on this is if you are bidding on your brand, it is overall incentivizing Google to show your brand up for whenever it possibly can because they’re not telling you how much you’re paying for that lead, which is not really a lead that LSAs are generating. It’s a lead that other things have created and they’re just capturing and taking credit for that lead. Like all of the scummy agencies who have been bidding on your name through pay per click or calling all of your Google business profile inbound calls, their effort.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I have a question for you.

Conrad Saam:

Hit me.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Do you have any clients that you buy brand for on search in any context?

Conrad Saam:

I would say every single one

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That you’re paying for the attorney’s brand name,

Conrad Saam:

Absolutely.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay. So your big issue with this on LSA is that you don’t have transparency into it.

Conrad Saam:

So let me take the first derivative of your comment. The concern is because we don’t have transparency into that, Google’s incentive is to screw me and they can’t do that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well that’s also true. It’s also true on regular ads.

Conrad Saam:

Well, so what’s happened with regular ads, and I’ve got the grass, I’ll find this study somewhere, but we’ve seen the cost per conversion, which is a cost per lead for branded queries have gone from, and this is over a period of, I want to say seven years. It used to be $5 per conversion. It is now $91 per conversion. So that has increased almost 20 x. However, the economics of that, I am still okay with mostly okay

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So it works, right?

Conrad Saam:

It makes sense to capture that, right? Because I know, however, I think it is naive to make the assumption that the mix would be similar in a local services ads environment where you don’t have that level of transparency and it is a completely opaque system. Let me use an extreme example for this. If you have, I’m going to use round numbers because it’s easy. If you have a $10,000 budget in LSAs and Google can figure out how to spend all of that budget on your brand, they will do so because that leaves the non-branded queries the budget of everyone else who is bidding. It increases

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Not buying brand, right? What you just said just made me think of something else. So if you’re a firm and you’re buying brand queries on Google ads and your cost

Conrad Saam:

Per

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, for yourself,

Conrad Saam:

Not the angel reyes approach.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. Not that example. You’re buying your own brand and your cost per qualified brand lead is equal or more than what your overall LSA lead costs per qualified lead is. You might conclude turn brand on because on a per lead basis, you’re still spending less for each lead than you are buying your brand queries on. And presumptively, your non-brand lead are way higher. Your non-brand qualified leads on Google ads are way higher. And so now your entire set of LSA leads on a qualified lead basis is less than the cost of your brand leads on Google ads. You should assume you should turn those on.

Conrad Saam:

So here’s the nuance to your philosophical setup. I

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Love this,

Conrad Saam:

This stuff. It depends on your budget. Totally. And so my argument on this vociferous aggressive argument is twofold. Number one, if they’re looking for your brand, the likelihood that they don’t find you because you didn’t have brand turn on an LSA, that person is so stupid, you don’t want them as a client. And that is going to happen well less than 1% of the time. Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. So your example, yes, but what I would throw in there just a monkey wrench with this a little bit is it’s very difficult to know whether or not for that brand search that showed the rich LSA experience with the reviews and everything that motivated someone to contact you and hire you they otherwise might not have

Conrad Saam:

Fair. So we are not using data here, we’re using theory. My perspective is it’s unlikely that someone is looking for your brand and is not going to connect with you because the LSA isn’t there. And you’re going to say, how do you know?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, no I I’m going to say why do you buy pay-per-click media then? Because that’s the same point. They should be able to find you organically.

Conrad Saam:

Agreed. Agreed. So why are you,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Are you paying? Why are you buying

Conrad Saam:

Brand? We buy pay per click because I am okay with that cost. I’m decreasingly okay with that cost because it I am, it is a conversion cost not a marketing cost and

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Premium. You’re premium,

Conrad Saam:

You’re paying a premium for that. But it is a conversion cost and I’m okay with that. But I’m going to go back to the second part of my point. If you have a finite budget and you eat up some of that budget, half of that budget and when you have no idea how much of the budget you’re eating up with direct brand search. But if you eat up half of that budget on people who are already looking for you, that means whatever the other $5,000 that generated two clients last month, you’re now missing out the opportunity cost on that. The additional two costs that budget would’ve gained if you had not run direct brand search. And that’s why for me, when you’re dealing with a budget that is a problem. And then the reality nuance of LSAs is most people have their budget sets to more than they can ever pay in a month because they think that that’s how they’re going to get more clicks and more action out of that. So that’s another side of this many faceted coin.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, no, this is great. And again, for people that got lost in that coin, the thing to do here is if you’re inclined to test this stuff, turn your LSAs on turn brand search on Ask every single person who comes through LSAs how they heard about you or who they thank for referring you. And then bucket between the ones that came from a quote branded Bleed, someone that’s like, no, I’ve known about, I’ve been watching your commercials for 50 years. Put those in one bucket. And then the ones who are like, I just did a Google search, I just randomly searched, put those in a second bucket. And then so now you’ve got your brand and non-brand loosely segmented and do the economics on those and look at the cost pers. And the other thing that I wanted to ask you, Conrad, is do you think I’m wrong about this idea that having brand on impacts visibility for non-brand and ads, do you think that that’s a thing? Or do you think that that’s not a thing

Conrad Saam:

For those of you who think, Gyi and I are married, you can try this tactic with your spouse and see just what happens. Let me just repeat what you’re saying and tell me if you think I’m wrong. Actually, I think

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s not so much about me being wrong. That was a bad way of saying it.

Conrad Saam:

No, that’s I sorry.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m curious of whether or not you think that having brand on impacts non-brand visibility. I

Conrad Saam:

Do not.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay.

Conrad Saam:

However, what I really believe, I have a level of certainty on that. My higher level of certainty is, and this is a very unscientific way to go about dealing with LSAs. If you are struggling to get LSAs to show up, change something, shake the bottle, right? Change something because that seems to be the way to make things work. And the contrapositive is true. If LSAs are working for you right now, don’t even log in, just let them run until they stop working.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Book the leads, book the leads in their platform.

Conrad Saam:

Sorry. Okay, totally fair. But don’t monkey with your bidding strategy, don’t change your strategy if it’s working. And it really seems to me that the rhyme or reason is responding to change. And that’s what I really feel like, and the reason I answered your question in the negative in that I don’t think the turning brand on is going to improve your performance on non-branded queries is because we have so many clients who are running LSAs with the brand off and it is working.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Here’s another question for you.

Conrad Saam:

Go.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Do you think buying brand in Google ads in the same account and or campaign impacts your non-brand performance?

Conrad Saam:

This may come across as extremely naive. I do not.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay. I do not agree to disagree.

Conrad Saam:

Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And the reason is at a very even loose level is that the engagement signals with your brand ads, depending on how they’re structured in the account and in the campaigns will signal to Google that, Hey, show more of these ads because it’s making us more money. And I think that holds,

Conrad Saam:

So you’re saying depending on how you have your PC campaigns structured, you can improve your clickthrough rate through branded ads to have the perspective to

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Impact the non-brand impact,

Conrad Saam:

To

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Improve quality score, to improve ad relevance for non-brand.

Conrad Saam:

I’m going to get into the details of how that setup would have to work. In order to do that, you would have to ambigu, I don’t know if that’s a contrapositive to disambiguate, but it feels like it should.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

This feels very MBA

Conrad Saam:

Conflate to literally put those things together in order to conflate the quality score, which would artificially raise the quality score for non-branded queries by combining those things. And then when you conflate those two things, you have a difficulty in separating out your brand versus non-binary queries. That’s what I don’t like about it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, no, you could still see in the search anyway, we’re getting really nerdy on this.

Conrad Saam:

The

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Interesting thing to me about all this is, is forgetting about how the strategic execution, all this kind of stuff is we both agree that Google’s main incentive is to make money, whether it’s through show ads that are getting clicks and show ads that are generating leads for us,

Conrad Saam:

Regardless of how good it is for the client.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes. Or the yes completely. They do not care about your return on ad spend. They do not care about your profitability. But if that’s true, it seems to me that they’re building a machine that at least in part takes, in signaling that when Google makes more money compared to other advertisers, they want to show the advertisers ads that are making them the most money. And brands that are generating click volume, both in ads and LSAs do that for them. And so they want to show those ads more. And that’s why I draw the conclusion that they show your non-brand more when you’ve got brand turned on. But again, that’s all totally anecdotal. And the only other thing that I could say is that just the inverse of what you said, we’ve got clients where it’s like the economics are still so good on LSAs even though we, and we ask, and most of those still have an examples I’m talking about, most of them are non-brand.

They’re not saying, I was referred to you through the LSA channel for the most part. And even if they are, I am with you, I pay the premium on the brand, as long as it’s not getting to the point where you’re like, okay, our qualified brand leads. Our brand clients now are costing us as much as our non-brand. Now you’ve tipped the scales, but you’re getting a hundred dollars, you’re paying a hundred dollars premium on a brand lead and you’re doing volume. You are talking about nickels and dimes in my opinion. Now to your point, small budget, yeah, you can’t do that.

Conrad Saam:

It’s all within budget. To me, it’s, they’re not optimizing at the campaign level to get as much out of an individual campaign as they possibly can. I think they’re optimizing across the entire system. So the more money that they can waste on brand, the more money is left over to artificially drive up the prices of non-brand. That’s the thing that I think that they’re doing. And this is why

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Makes sense.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. We should conclude this with we’re not sure.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, we’re not sure any of this. Again, this has been a recurring theme, the show, look at your own data, look at what’s going on with your firm’s data. I mean, again, we’re going deep on all this stuff and my hunch is that a lot of listeners are like, don’t even have Multisource attribution locked down yet, especially throughout their intake process. So go fix that issue first before you go turn your brand search on. Especially if you’re doing offline media buys, guess what? Your premium to Conrad’s point, your premium is going to be super high.

Conrad Saam:

This is the takeaway. Gyi said this earlier, it’s the dual source attribution for your LSAs. You should know at a pretty detailed level, was this someone looking for you or was it someone looking for what you do? And if you don’t know that, you’re guessing just as much as key and I are right now.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Exactly. What a great way to tie it all together. And with that, we are going to thank our listeners as usual for tuning into this episode of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Thanks to Nick, thanks to everyone who listens and leaves reviews. If you are new here, please do subscribe and drop us a review comment. We’d love hearing from you topic, suggestions, questions, ideas. We’re very grateful for you. Until next time, Conrad and Gyi, for Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.

Announcer:

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Conrad Saam:

Welcome to lunch Hour Legal.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I think you got it. Nailed it.

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