Google AdWords and Microsoft Advertising are two common ways law firms advertise online. For law firms who use this advertising approach, when individuals type in relevant keywords in the search engines about legal services in a particular area, the law firm or lawyer shows up in the paid advertising in the search results.

If a lawyer or law firm advertises on Google, their ads are will air on Google and its affiliate search engines. If a lawyer or law firm utilizes Microsoft, their ads will be on Bing, Yahoo and their affiliates. Paid advertising through Google and Microsoft is different than the organic rankings. With organic rankings, search engines employ complicated algorithms to determine where webpages rank based on complicated factors such as the content, the trust flow of the webpage, the age of the domain and other factors.

With paid advertising through Google and Microsoft, however, the law firm or lawyer bids positioning in the paid advertising section on the top or bottom of the search results. Google and Microsoft then charge the attorney or law firm for every click on their ads. A daily budget is also set. Once the daily budget is depleted, the ads then go down for the day.

Paid advertising on Google and Microsoft is not cheap. When this originally became popular in the early 2000s, the cost of Google and Microsoft Advertising was significantly less than the traditional alternatives like radio, television or the phone book. But that is not true today. Given the popularity of the internet, the cost of advertising online is now as much or more than the traditional advertising options.

However, one additional problem with running Google and Microsoft Ads, beyond the cost, is fraudulent clicks. The unfortunate reality is that some will click on the ads of a lawyer or a law firm with no intent on hiring that lawyer or law firm. They might be a competitor, former employee, an advertising agency or a bot. The clicks are only designed to cost the law firm money and diminish the impact of the ads.

When there are ad clicks that are fraudulent, this can cost a law firm or lawyer a lot of needless money. Wasting money on fraudulent clicks can be frustrating. It can deplete a budget quickly on a given day or week. It can also hurt the entire impact of the advertisements.

Thankfully, there is software out there that is supposed to help with filtering out fraudulent clicks. One of the most popular ones is ClickCease. There are also other alternatives that claim to offer the same protection one can check out.

The cost of ClickCease is $15 to $50 per month. However, the amount of money ClickCease can save per month could far surpass that amount. For some lawyers and law firms, it can literally save them thousands of dollars per month on useless clicks. It can also result in delivering more solid leads.

If somebody in a law firm is running the Google or Microsoft Ads, they ought to look at ClickCease or the various alternatives. Additionally, if a law firm is hiring a marketing company to run Google or Microsoft, they ought to talk to them about what they are doing to prevent fraudulent clicks.

In the end, most attorneys and law firms do not want to waste their advertising dollars on fraudulent clicks. For those using Google of Microsoft ads, they ought to seriously consider using ClickCease or one of the alternatives.