Google is doing an increasingly good job of reaching out to agencies through its Google Engage Program. Recently, Skunkworks was even assigned an agency representative to assist us with our clients’ campaigns. We really appreciate this new point of contact for two reasons 1) Google suffers from a Wizard of Oz corporate structure where it can be unclear that there are actual humans existing behind the corporate veil and 2) our agency rep has already been quite helpful.

Although we enjoyed speaking with a living, breathing, member of Google’s team, it was one of our rep’s recommendations that triggered a flurry of campaign adjustments as well as this post. Specifically, Google recommends that AdWords users create separate campaigns for mobile devices. Whereas previously we might have had one campaign servicing mobile devices, laptops, computers, and tablets, we now have created separate campaigns that specifically target high-end smartphones. (While we already had separate campaigns for the display network, we had yet to split our AdWords campaigns by device.)

Benefits of Splitting an AdWords Campaign By Device

The benefits of splitting a campaign are numerous. Not only can we adapt the language and extensions included in our ads to more effectively target the mobile market segment, but we can also easily customize our bidding strategy to more efficiently target mobile customers. The latter benefit is important in the management of a mobile AdWords campaign, as Google’s search results are not the same across devices.

For a user interacting with Google through a tablet or laptop, multiple sponsored ads are visible on the first page of the search results at both the top and on the right sidebar. The same is not true of users searching on mobile devices; where only two or less ads will ever appear at the top of a Google results page. If you have yet to split your campaign and one or more of your keywords’ average position is below 2 and above 5, then your ads will be visible to people using tablets, laptops, and computers but virtually unseen by people using high-end smartphones. By splitting your campaign, you can manage your keyword bidding to ensure that you bid more aggressively for keywords that are searched for on mobile devices without simultaneously increasing the amount you spend on keywords that are searched for on other devices. In short, you will maximize the visibility of your ads according to device.

By splitting your mobile campaign from your greater campaign, you will also be giving yourself the gift of accurate metrics. Keywords tend to be cheaper for mobile devices than they are for other devices; however, if you’re targeting mobile devices within a larger AdWords campaign, then your average cost-per-click will represent the average cost across devices. Using less-specific data might influence you to make decisions that detrimentally affect your campaign. Creating a separate mobile AdWords campaign ensures that you will have to take the device into account when making campaign-level adjustments.

How to Split An AdWords Campaign By Device

1)     Open AdWords Editor

2)     Click on the “Campaigns” tab to select the campaign that you are interested in splitting. Copy the campaign and paste it underneath itself.

3)     Re-name the pasted campaign to differentiate it from other campaigns (include the word mobile so that you can easily remember that these ads will only appear on mobile devices).

4)     Adjust the budget by highlighting the new mobile campaign and adjusting the figure under the heading “budget”.

5)     Beside the heading “Devices” it should read “Desktop and laptop computers, mobile devices with full browsers, and tablets with full browsers.” Click edit and a new window should Open. Remove the check-marks from beside “desktop and laptop computers” and “tablets with full browsers”.

6)     Finally, go back to the original campaign. Click on the “Edit” button beside “Devices” and remove the check mark from beside “Mobile Devices with full browsers.”     

7)     Post selected changes.

The Economics of Online Ads

How much does it cost to run an ad for your law firm in The New York Times?

This question elicits a spectrum of responses.  Most people that I query guess that an ad-buy in one of the most circulated and respected newspapers would cost – at the very least – thousands of dollars. We are, after all, living in an era of Super Bowl advertising. However, after crunching the numbers, we can tell you that the cost  for 440 impressions (the number of times your ad appears) on the nytimes.com website is a shocking $1.63.

We were able to achieve these results by accessing the Google Display Network. Display advertising allows companies to place ads on any website that is a part of the Google Display Network. While websites like the nytimes.com or theglobeandmail.com tend to sell their own ad space, they often use Google’s Display Network to fill gaps.

Thus far, we’ve had tremendous success placing banner ads for our law firm clients – commonly accumulating hundreds of thousands of ad impressions per week. Initially, we focused our efforts on placing ads on websites belonging to local BC news publications such as the Georgia Straight or The Tyee. However, we quickly realized that we could extend our clients reach and branding capabilities by targeting international newspapers like The New York Times and The Guardian.

This new strategy of targeting behemoth publications is where the phenomenal capabilities of the Google Display network become clear. Within only a few weeks of adding The New York Times to one of our client’s list of managed placements, this client received 440 impressions from the popular website.

New York Times – West Vancouver Edition

It’s important to note that these impressions are not being wasted on surly cab drivers in Queens or heiresses in the Upper East Side, as the Google Display network is able to tell where the people reading a particular website are located. In short, the ads that we ran for our client on The New York Times’ website are seen by individuals living and working in Vancouver and the surrounding region. The ads can be geo-targeted at a very granular level (including by neighborhood).

Social Media Banner Ads

While we can register even more ad impressions through social media, we have found that social channels have not been as effective for law firms in terms of ad placements. We do recommend that firms maintain a visible presence on social media, but that ad revenues be allocated elsewhere.

No Magic Bullet

Although the cost of the nytimes.com ads appears to be very low, these costs are based entirely on impressions. These ads did not generate any traffic from the New York Times to our clients websites. Costs rise on a pay-per-click basis as soon as traffic flows in greater quantities. In addition, the quality of traffic that we’ve seen through the Display Network has been far lower quality than through the Search Network. Visitors spend less time on the client’s site and tend to bounce away more often than not. The Display Network is not a marketing end unto itself. It requires parallel traffic through conventional means (whether a search campaign or through referral networks).

Conclusion

Although 440 impressions is a relatively small number when compared to the impressions that our clients accumulate on local websites (where the ad-buys are less competitive), it is very valuable to know that we can tie our clients’ brands to some of the most storied and esteemed publications in the Western World. We are very excited to see that the Google Display Network is living up to its potential.

Earlier today, Doug Jasinski and I gave a presentation on the topic of content marketing for law firms. The event was organized by Brian Mauch and his team at BMC Networks. Many thanks to BMC for the invite.

Content marketing is a fairly vast space and the presentation flew through some of the trends, platforms, and economics that have made “content” the hot topic in the marketing world. While law firms may adopt each emerging online platform, adoption itself does not answer the content question: “How can our firm find the time to produce high quality, timely, and relevant content?”

The demand for quality content relevant to the legal industry is one of the top requests from our clients. Considering that many lawyers lack the time to develop their own content, outsourced options are being considered. However, finding outsourced providers who can be trusted with nuanced practice-specific legal matters can be challenging.

For today’s presentation, we put together a Prezi that I have embedded below. While it lacks our witty banter and explanatory narrative, it does offer an overview of the topics covered.

Recently we have been working with Megan Ellis Q.C. to develop a website for her firm Megan Ellis & Company. Ms. Ellis started the firm in 2002 and has since been joined by Shannon Aldinger and most recently Paula Kalsi – who came on board as Associate Counsel on March 1^st of this year. Ms. Ellis is well known as one of the first lawyers in Canada to devote a significant part of her practice to representing adult survivors of sexual abuse and assault. As a result, her work in this complex area of personal injury law has led to significant developments in the law and legislation as it pertains to victims of abuse and assault.

Over the last 20 years, Ms. Ellis has developed an extensive family law practice and is well respected both for her focus on helping clients achieve negotiated settlements and for providing vigorous, cost-effective representation in court whenever that form of resolution is necessary. During the course of her personal injury and family law career, Ms. Ellis has taken on a wide variety of appeal work including those unusual situations where there is either little case law to guide the courts or where the existing case law, legislation, and policy have formerly led to perverse or unfair results for her clients. 

Ms. Aldinger has an active family law practice and, like Ms. Ellis, commits herself to developing creative and practical solutions for clients dealing with the complex and often emotional issues that arise in this area. Ms. Aldinger has negotiated settlements and provided representation in court in various aspects of family law. A very brief selection of her considerable experience includes the resolution of custody issues and child and spousal support issues, the division and reapportionment of property, and the well-crafted arrangement of family law agreements.

The newest member of Megan Ellis & Company, Ms. Kalsi, has considerable experience dealing with issues arising in personal injury law and, like her colleagues, has worked on cases that involve sexual abuse and assault. For the past eight years, Ms. Kalsi has devoted a considerable amount of her time to the Public Guardian and Trustee of British Columbia (PGT). This is an entity that acts to protect and advance the legal and financial interests of children and vulnerable adults in BC. In addition to her focus on cases of sexual abuse and assault, Ms. Kalsi has developed a practice in electronic and document disclosure issues in large-scale litigation and has a great deal of experience analyzing the complex documentation that emanates from cases of this type.

These three women are exemplary litigators with a unique and necessary set of skills. They wanted a website that was modern and sophisticated in design but straight forward and to the point in terms of content and navigation. We have done our best to develop a site that works on both these levels. Take a look:  www.ellisandcompany.ca.

When our clients ask us why their competitors are ranking highly in Google’s organic search results, we tend to start by having a look at the competitor’s website. If the site design, content, history, notoriety and relevance can’t explain the ranking, we turn to a nifty tool called opensitexplorer.org run by SEOmoz to review link relationships. Amongst its various features is the ability to compare inbound links and their respective quality. One particular criminal law firm is doing particular well thanks to (amongst others) links from Marketing With Integrity.org. While I won’t link to the site (which would only help their rankings), it does make me wonder whether the word integrity is being properly used. Moreover, the use of .org as a top level domain seems to be fairly flexible these days.

This makes MarketingWithIntegrity.org our link farm of the week.

Normally I’m not a fan of Mondays but today was not so bad in large part because we were able to launch a new website for Murray Rankin, Q.C. – oh and it was sunny for a whole thirty minutes (you Vancouverites will understand).  We are very happy to have helped Murray establish his new brand and a web presence as he starts a new chapter of his practice. 

I did not have the good fortune to have Murray as a professor while completing my LL.B at UVic  but I know plenty of folks who did and he has garnered a reputation as an accomplished, caring and thoughtful teacher. His professional reputation is equally favourable as he has graced the halls of Arvay Finlay, Barristers and most recently Heenan Blaikie LLP. But rather than gush about Murray’s professional abilities, his contributions to the legal profession and policy development, his trips to the Supreme Court of Canada and extensive tribunal work, or his perpetual good humour, I think I will simply direct you to his new website so you can see for yourselves and close by saying it was both an honour and a pleasure.

Visit the site:  www.murrayrankin.ca

When we think of members of the legal community we often imagine suave professionals wearing the latest and sharpest bespoke suits or old and wise practitioners of the law wearing flowing formal robes. We tend not to think of a group of men and women dressed in Kiss make-up and leather pants rocking out in a manner befitting Jimmy Page and Robert Plante. However, stereotypes were meant to be broken and likely will tonight as lawyers from across Victoria take part in the Seventh Annual Battle of the Bar Bands.

The event will be taking place at The Victoria Edelweiss Club located at 108 Niagara Street: an excellent venue with delicious food and cheap drinks. The cost of entry is $30 with sponsorship tables (8 tickets) costing $500. The audience is guaranteed to enjoy a fierce competition as Victorian legal practitioners and a few lawyers from other cities in BC attempt to shred, finger-tap, and wah-wah their way to victory. There will also be ample room for dancing and prizes at the door (generously donated by local businesses). 

The Battle of the Bar Bands is a once a year event that supports the Canadian Bar Association (BC) Benevolent society, whose mandate is to provide assistance to lawyers and articled students that have suffered an illness or injury. The event is modeled after the original Vancouver Battle of the Bar Bands that has been held for the last 10 years at the Commodore Ballroom.  Similar Battles are now held in Kelowna and Nanaimo. Together, the events have raised tens of thousands of dollars for the Society, which have gone to those in need.

Skunkworks wishes the best of luck to all participants while kindly reminding them of the multifarious liability issues that can result from attempted body surfing.  We encourage all those interested in attending to email Krystle Gill as kgill@hart-legal.com for more information. 

Skunkworks regularly hears from lawyers and law firms looking for search engine optimization (SEO) services. Typically, the request is articulated as some form of “I want to be first on Google.”  Our clients clearly understand that a solid SEO plan can yield large dividends by placing their website higher in the organic search rankings. They are aware that better visibility means more traffic and more traffic means bigger profits

Search engine optimization tactics usually fall into two camps: white hat SEO strategies (endorsed by the major search engines) and black hat SEO strategies (actively opposed by the major search engines). This post describes why the legal community should only consider white hat methods.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.

The issue that many corporations interested in SEO face is that white hat strategies, though effective over the long term, take time to implement and require the development of high quality content, the nurturing of meaningful social media contacts, and good website design. Conversely, black hat SEO tactics offer a quick pay-off and require little more than your credit card number.  

At Skunkworks we pursue white hat tactics on behalf of our clients. This is motivated not only by our belief that these methods create a better search experience for users, but also by the numerous corporate horror stories that have resulted from engaging in black hat SEO. For instance, just last year Google caught JC Penney using black hat tactics that included link farming (the placing of links to JC Penney on less than reliable websites) and punished them by manually dropping their page rank. There’s also the story of Vitaly Borker who harassed his customers with the hope that they would post negative reviews to various websites. While his strategy of “All News is Good News” was undeniably effective, he was subsequently arrested for fraud.

We believe that it is not in the best interest of legal professionals to be caught engaging in practices that could jeopardize their brand and their professional reputation. Furthermore, as Google’s search algorithm becomes increasingly sophisticated, the efficacy of pursuing black hat tactics will inevitably wax and wane. More and more companies will be at risk of facing the negative consequences of black hat SEO without ever reaping the benefits. In many ways, a bet on black hat SEO is a bet against the intelligence of the engineers at Google.

Unfortunately, many Canadian law firms appearing prominently on organic search results owe their visibility to black hat methods. Although it is likely that these law firms are not completely aware of the strategies being used by the companies they hire, there is a definite lack of due diligence.

I discovered the less than honorable SEO tactics of a few select law firms the other day when I decided to do some research on the inbound links of the most popular personal injury websites in Toronto. My goal was to better understand the factors that were affecting their page ranking. I use opensiteexplorer  when performing tasks of this type and highly recommend this software for any company interested in reviewing the quality of their inbound links or the links of their competitors.

The sad fact is that some of the highest-ranking personal injury websites were engaging in the exact same link scheme that landed JC Penney in hot water. I found links placed on hundreds of websites that were only marginally connected to the practice of law and some instances of links being placed on websites that were completely irrelevant and featured shockingly poor content. One law firm had an inbound link coming from the comments section of a celebrity gossip blog and another had the majority of their links coming from websites that look like this.

It’s important to remember that effective SEO  - like so many things in life  – requires time, effort, and money. Black hat SEO is not unlike injecting your firm’s marketing strategy with steroids. It may work today, but the long term consequences will not be pretty.

I’m a strong believer in alternative licensing mechanisms for digital works. In particular, I try to use material licensed under Creative Commons wherever possible. Full Disclosure: I volunteered and worked for Creative Commons organizations in the UK and Canada during my formative legal years. Without wading into the legal details of Creative Commons licenses, I’ve come to appreciate a much more pragmatic use: Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

CC Attribution Licence

All Creative Commons licenses require Attribution as a minimal requirement. This means that if you use someone’s work (whether audio, video, text, or images), you’ll need to credit them. Typically, this means something to the effect of “Photo credit to JeremyHL, Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike Canada 2.5.” If you’re using the work online, you’ll then add a link to the license terms. As part of attributing the work, you should also include a link back to the author wherever possible. 

Through these link-backs, you’re being compensated for your work. Depending on your sources of income, high organic search rankings may prove much more lucrative than trying to license your work commercially. We often consult on SEO strategies. One such strategy is to create something of value (pretty/useful/clever/functional) and license it under Creative Commons.

Just about any lawyer will tell you that their best clients come through referrals. Referral relationships tend to be among a successful lawyer’s most valuable assets.

Flikr Photo Credit to 401k, Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike

Members of the Law Society of British Columbia need to ensure that all referrals comply with professional conduct requirements.

As a quick summary, the BC referral rules are as follows:

Referral fees

2. A lawyer must not:

(a) pay any remuneration to a person, other than another lawyer, in exchange for that person referring a client to the lawyer, or

(b) act for a client if, to the lawyer’s knowledge, a person other than another lawyer was paid any remuneration by the client in exchange for being referred to the lawyer.

 3. A lawyer acting for a client who was referred to the lawyer by another lawyer may pay that other lawyer remuneration for the referral only if, at the commencement of the retainer, the lawyer fully discloses the remuneration to the client and the client consents in writing to its payment.

Annotations

As always, the annotations shed some light on the rules. Here you’ll find that a mutual referral relationships are permitted in situations where a lawyer receives referrals from a Credit Union and when the referral is being made as a coupon for “1 hour of free legal advice.” This seems obvious because referral fees are not being paid back to the financial institution.

But what about commercial referral services like legal directories that require monthly or annual subscriptions? These are permitted, subject to some fairly strict limitations. The constraints include:

• A lawyer who uses the services of a commercial lawyer referral service does not violate Rule 2 provided the following criteria are met:
• the service does not charge a fee to the client;
• the fee the lawyer pays is not for the referral for a particular client, but is a fee for the lawyer’s name to be placed or maintained on a roster of available lawyers;
• the service maintains a roster of lawyers to whom clients are referred after the service determines the area of law in which the lawyer’s services are required;
• the fee charged to a lawyer is a flat fee and does not reflect the number of referrals made; and
• when the client contacts the referral service, the service provides the client with information about several different lawyers who practice in a given area and leaves it up to the client to determine which lawyer, if any, to contact

Legal directories also tend to be structured according to practice areas. Accordingly, lawyers will also need to comply with the “preferred area of practice” requirements found in Chapter 14, Rule 16. Essentially, you can state a preferred practice area only if you regularly practice in that area.

Finally, a lawyer may accept referrals from a divorce center that provides materials on divorce as well as the names of qualified lawyers at no charge. This would be equally applicable if there was an an online resource for people going bankrupt that offered a roster of lawyers who practice bankruptcy law.

Commentary

It may come as a surprise to many BC lawyers that they can accept cash payment for referring a client to another lawyer (where the client consents in writing, in advance). In my experience, most lawyers manage referral relationships through thank yous, reciprocal referrals, and gift baskets. Most lawyers will favour a strong professional relationship over overt pricing. This is partly due to administrative simplicity and partly because clients do not expect to pay for a referral.  For now, professionals tend to prefer an expression of goodwill over a quid pro quo.

Flikr Photo Credit to swanksalot, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike

While it is possible to pay referral fees to other lawyers, BC lawyers cannot pay referral fees to non-lawyers. For example, I can’t pay a Realtor for referring me a residential conveyance. I would just have to ensure that the Realtor holds me in high regard. Traditionally, a series of business lunches may be involved. As with many details of the practice of law, the cash flow tends to run just beneath the surface.

With regards to commercial referral networks, including online legal directories, they have been generating referrals (in the online sense) for years. One of the key metrics when I review a law firm’s analytics is to review inbound referrals. LawOne.ca (disclosure: some Skunkworks staff are also associated with LawOne.ca) has been running since 2006. Not only do directory listings improve search engine rankings by establishing relevant inbound links, but they also tend to produce quality traffic to law firm websites. After all, Yellow Pages is little more than a directory system.

The above professional conduct rules prevent the commercialization of referrals in most cases. Law remains a handshake business even while it is increasingly conducted by phone and email. This structure means that firms have a hard time profiting off the overflow of their successful marketing efforts. For example, if you have a very successful website for your personal injury firm, you’ll have a hard time converting prospective clients who have employment law issues into a secondary stream of revenue (by referring them elsewhere). On the plus side, you’ll have a community of lawyers who are indebted to you. Let the wine flow.