Targeting is the process of displaying your marketing message in front of groups of people who are the most likely to need the services of your firm. The first targeting criteria is where your ads are displayed geographically. This may not be an obvious decision.

When You Should Use Targeting in Your Attorney Search Engine Marketing Campaign

If your market is local in nature, then you should advertise your firm at the local level. Your online legal marketing dollars are too precious to waste. Your budget should be focused on the best market for your firm. It is easy to specify that your search ads should only display in certain markets.

If your firm operates on a regional basis, then you should specify only geographic markets that are within the region you service. This brings up the question as to whether you should run a single campaign that covers all of your markets or run a separate campaign for each market. Having a separate campaign for each market gives you more control and better data, but it is more work.

The question as to how to divide your campaigns is also very important for firms that advertise on a nationwide basis. If you try to run a separate campaign for each of your markets, and you advertise nationally, then you will find yourself with an unmanageable number of campaigns. A better option here might be to set up larger geographic markets that encompass several cities or even states. You would still have some geography-based data to work with, although it would not be as specific as if you had a separate campaign for every individual market.

In Google, there is another advantage to geographic targeting, and that is that Google paid search listings display the market name if an ad has been specifically targeted for that market. For example, ads in a campaign targeted to the state of Texas will have the word "Texas" beneath the ad when viewed by Google users in that state. This points out that I am an advertiser specifically advertising to people in that particular state, rather than a nationwide advertiser.

You can also target your ads by time of day or day of week. This can be an excellent strategy if you pinpoint particular times when your ads perform well. It may be the case that during business hours you are competing against many other advertisers, which is driving click costs up past the point of profitability. In this case, you may be better served running yours in other times of the day. You may find that you can still buy plenty of traffic, but that traffic may cost much less on a per-click basis.

Similarly, it may be more profitable for you to run your ads on certain days of the week. You can make this decision based on reporting that shows your account performance at different times of day and days of week, if that reporting is available.

Targeted is an important piece of the lawyer search engine marketing equation. It takes time to figure out exactly when and where you should run your ads, but it is time well spent.

To learn more about attorney search engine marketing, check out the free articles at http://www.law-firm-internet-marketing.net.