Marketing Review and Performance June 2018
The Personal Injury and Medical Negligence marketing landscape remains as competitive as ever, with the top 10 advertisers spending 8% more year to date than the same period last year.
Despite so many advertisers in the Personal Injury sector, only a handful of legal brands have consistently advertised every quarter over the last 15 months.
The top five advertisers account for over 62% of the money spent in advertising for Personal Injury enquiries.
Online marketing
Online marketing has become a pretty hot battle ground with not only the top 10’s 13% increase in spend, but an overall increase in the number of advertisers. May 2018 was the highest monthly online spend for the top 10 since July 2017 and spend was 33% higher than May 2017.
There have been 103 different brands using online advertising to try and drive enquiries into their business since the beginning of 2017. Within this group only 13 brands have had the ability to consistently advertise month on month and their overall spend accounts for 83% of all the money spent on Personal Injury related pay per click campaigns. Even within this list of top 13 advertisers, there is a massive gulf between spending power, with First4Lawyers in top spot spending 16 times more than the 13th largest advertiser. The top 5 advertisers alone accounted for 65% of total spend.
Despite 103 different brands trying to use Pay Per Click (PPC) as a source of enquiries there are on average 35 different brands per month competing for space on Google’s paid search.
Search volumes across the Personal Injury sector are on the decline, with 22% fewer searches so far in 2018 compared to the same period in 2017. As a result the average Cost Per Click (CPC) has increased by 8%. Yet, despite this, First4Lawyers have been able to increase their online impression share by 22% and are the most often seen Personal Injury brand on paid search.
The online Medical Negligence category is facing similar challenges with number of advertisers increased by 58% with ad spend up by 44%. Online advertising accounts for 42% of the marketing spent on Medical Negligence advertising.
At the same time the sector has seen a steady drop in the number of people searching for support with Medical Negligence, which in turn is driving up the cost of online advertising.
Since its peak in Q2 of 2017 the number of medical negligence related searches has dropped by 38%, whilst the average cost per click has increased by 33% since Q1 of 2017.
There are 7 regular online advertisers that dominate the online advertising space, accounting for 78% of the total money spent on pay per click campaigns.
With only four advertising spots at the top of page one on Google, it makes it exceptionally challenging to ensure you hit top spot with your adverts. Yet at First4Lawyers we run a range of advertising that ensures that we are hitting the top three spots in excess of 70% of the time.
TV advertising
Advertisers come and go on a regular basis, however the amount of money invested in TV is up 30% year on year.
Only First4Lawyers and one other legal marketing brand in the top 5 spending brands have been consistently on TV every month over the last 18 months.
Such is the importance of TV that we saw one of our main direct competitors return to TV after a long period off air, however they haven’t had a consistent monthly presence since returning.
Dedicated Medical Negligence TV advertising has become the reserve for a select few. Over the last couple of years we’ve seen a number of brands attempt to advertise on TV but end up running very short campaigns.
Currently there are only two Medical Negligence brands that have had a consistent monthly Medical Negligence TV presence over the last year.
