• Analytics
  • Paid Media
  • SEO
  • Tag Manager

Legal Software Company, Smokeball, Grows MQLs with Paid Media Strategy

About the client

Smokeball provides legal practice management software for law firms. Founded by Australian technology leaders with 25 years experience delivering impactful legal technology products. Smokeball knew they could get more out of their digital marketing efforts and reached out to us for paid media and better data capture and reporting to help truly understand the impact of their activity.

Challenge

Quality AND Quantity

MQLs = More Quality Leads

Assessing Smokeball’s current position, key contact to In Marketing We Trust, Christopher Chow wanted to refresh digital marketing efforts and provide more marketing qualified leads (MQLs) via the ‘book a demo’ forms on the website.
Being in a competitive market, he knew there were fairly high costs to conversion, but wanted to reduce conversion costs or at least keep them at the benchmark.

Higher Position in Google Ads

Christopher was also looking to improve the position of their ads on Google, with the goal of having them show nearer to the top of the ad results. This was particularly important given Smokeball is directly targeted by competition.

Increase Search Impression Share

Smokeball was using a benchmark of 56% for search impression share (how many impressions your ads get vs the number of possible impressions) for ‘legal practice management software’ and wanted to increase their share.

Solution

Providing the Data to Make Data-Driven Decisions

Data Is the Story, We’re Just the Narrator

After an initial review of the Smokeball setup, we determined that more could be done to improve data collection and analysis for paid activity. We set up containers in Google Tag Manager, created a dashboard to capture the data and clearly display it in a way that showed how Smokeball was improving over time, against benchmarks.

Search and Rescue Display Campaigns

During the initial six months of engagement with Smokeball, we focused on both Search and Display ads and supplemented this activity with retargeting and audience prospecting. Existing ads were reviewed and either turned off or optimised and new keywords were added to attract more of the right people.

There was a lot of potential to streamline the existing paid media set up. Removing unnecessary complexity allowed us to give ads a better chance of reaching the right audience, in the right place, at the right time.

While Smart Campaigns are a good starter ad type for businesses that are new to paid media, in Smokeball’s case they were at a more mature stage of their strategy; and these campaigns were cannibalising their search campaigns. Because of this, we recommended they be turned off so we could instead focus our efforts and budget optimisation on Search and Display.

Results

Increasing Leads 13% Month-on-Month with Data-Led Activity

Smokeball Increased Spend After Confidence Grew in Paid Media

Over the initial six-month period we achieved significant results for Smokeball. Impressions reached 1.8 million, 10,379 clicks were achieved and the cost per conversion dropped 21.3% from the benchmark.

Given our initial success, Smokeball increased their monthly spend by 20% after this period. This paid off with clicks increasing 52% month on month, impressions increased 131% and conversions increased by 13% MoM.

In addition, we were able to rank first for ‘legal practice management software’, and increased search impression share for this term from 56% to 63%.

13% MoM

Increased conversions

21%

Reduced cost per conversion

52% MoM

Increased clicks

Achieved #1

Ranking for primary keyword

Testimonials