Lawyers Advertising Online With AdWords
You Don’t Make Friends With Salad responds to my recent $1,000,000 post:
Jamie is decrying the online ad spending of the local criminal defense bar. According to his estimates, in the Austin market alone, criminal defense attorneys are spending about $1 million per year on Google's cost-per-click AdWords program. I'm not sure that the number is quite that high, but if it's an overestimate, it's not by much.
For the lawyers who are getting in and bidding upwards of $50 for the most popular keywords and phrases, I have to think that Jamie's right. This cost is being passed on to the clients. But lots of costs get passed on to clients: rent/mortgage payments, staff salaries, etc. In a market like Austin where the fight for clients is so competitive, you have to have some way to drive potential clients to call, email, or walk in the door. Referrals are great, especially from former clients, but it takes a long while for a practitioner (however great) to develop a critical mass of new clients based solely on reputation.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong, certainly in and of itself, with passing costs on to clients. And when it comes to professional services, that often includes advertising. Actually, the post was just my amazement at the numbers.
As for the numbers? YDMFWS’ suggestion that I might be overestimating made me rethink. I claimed one million was conservative in the original post. I’ve crunched some numbers.
If you include not just [Geographical Location] criminal defense lawyer, but various individual offenses, such as DWI, assault, marijuana, theft, etc. with [Geographical Location] County Jail, Bail Bonds, etc… well…
It might be an overestimate, after I tried to figure it out. Let me restate.
I’m working with some unknown factors here. I’m going to give the one million dollar estimate a confidence interval of only 50%. Not very confident, for the mathematically challenged. But at five hundred thousand dollars or more?
99% confidence. (N.B. I’m using the Statistics definition of confidence interval.)
