Pay-per-click advertising changes so fast that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with developments. Keeping up with the evolution of the law is easy by comparison. Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest come out with new products and pricing plans on a daily basis.

It’s truly inspiring (and confusing) to watch the innovation in the advertising space. The recent expansion of AdWords extensions to include text from customer reviews is fascinating. The enhancements to quality score are mildly perplexing. It’s fairly overwhelming if you’re watching closely.

I’ve written about the challenges of getting good results from pay-per-click ads. Most lawyers using these services complain about their return on investment. I think they’re usually right to complain, and the results often are far less than promised by the vendors involved.

However, our firm is getting excellent results. I couldn’t be more pleased. We’re seeing an ever-increasing return on investment. Our marketing costs keep going down, and our revenues keep going up.

What’s the Secret to Our Success?

The secret to our success was abandoning the pay-per-click management firms we tried in the past. We didn’t get what we wanted from them for a variety of reasons. It’s tough to know exactly what they were doing wrong because they kept the data away from us and ran our ads on their accounts. We never saw the complete data picture directly from Google and the others.

We wanted an in-house expert to handle our accounts. However, we couldn’t afford the salary and benefits involved in getting an excellent person internally. These folks are making a killing doing what they’re doing.

Our Solution

We were able to get someone by sharing the cost with other firms. We started a small cooperative effort among five firms and shared the cost of bringing someone on and making sure he was trained and current on the latest techniques. That worked for us, and it continues to work as we expand into each of the latest approaches. We’re getting remarkable results from target Facebook remarketing (the technology is absolutely fascinating).

Our small network is continuing to grow. We’re adding firms one at a time to be certain we don’t overload our guy. If you’re interested in jumping on board, let me know. I’ll hook you up with our guru, and we’ll see whether he can help you out.