Google keeps pushing automation, broad match, and AI-driven adsâbut what if the old-school fundamentals still outperform the machines? Anthony Higman shares how his agency wins in the ultra-competitive legal space by studying the SERP, listening to every call, and challenging how modern PPC is supposed to work.
https://page2pod.com - In Episode 109 of the Page 2 Podcast, Jon Clark and Joe DeVita sit down with Anthony Higman, founder and CEO of ADSQUIRE and one of the worldâs top PPC experts. Anthony manages some of the most expensive keywords on the internetâlegal searchâwhere a single click can exceed $1,000.
In this deep dive, Anthony explains why his team intentionally resists automation, manually bidding on campaigns while closely analyzing search engine results pages (SERPs) to uncover Googleâs algorithmic changes. From running a lean five-person agency to managing high-stakes legal advertising campaigns, this conversation explores what it takes to dominate search in one of the most competitive industries in digital marketing.
Anthony also shares unconventional tacticsâfrom geo-testing SERPs and listening to every call lead, to running creative marketing stunts like Times Square billboardsâto maintain a competitive edge while delivering elite performance for law firms across the U.S.
If you're interested in PPC strategy, Google Ads optimization, legal marketing, or the evolving battle between human expertise and machine learning in advertising, this episode is packed with actionable insights.
đŻ In This Episode
⢠Why Anthony Higman still relies on manual bidding in Google Ads while most agencies rely on automation
⢠The realities of managing $1,000+ CPC keywords in legal search marketing
⢠How ADSQUIRE runs a five-person agency managing massive ad spend
⢠Why watching the SERP itselfânot just platform metricsâis critical for campaign strategy
⢠The hidden problems with Responsive Search Ads in legal marketing
⢠How Googleâs evolving match types and reduced transparency affect PPC performance
⢠Why Anthony uses YouTube, Display, and branding campaigns alongside high-intent search ads
⢠How listening to every lead call helps improve lead quality and campaign optimization
⢠The limitations of Local Services Ads for scaling law firm marketing
⢠Anthonyâs philosophy on building a small, nimble agency instead of scaling headcount
This episode is a must-watch for PPC specialists, digital marketers, and agency owners looking to understand how elite operators compete in high-stakes advertising markets.
đ Subscribe for more insights from top marketing experts:
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to Subscribe to the Page 2 Podcast for weekly conversations with leaders in SEO, PPC, and digital marketing.
đŹ Join the conversation:
Do you think manual PPC management can still outperform automation and AI in Google Ads? Drop your thoughts in the commentsâweâd love to hear your perspective.
đ Resources & Tools Mentioned
⢠ADSQUIRE Official Site
⢠Anthony Higman on LinkedIn
⢠Anthony Higman on X
⢠Adsquire's Mascot in Space
⢠ADSQUIRE Breaks The World Record For Most Law Firms On A Single Billboard
Jon Clark (00:00)
Welcome to the Page 2 Podcast where we uncover the strategies, systems, and tactical decisions that move brands beyond Page Two and into real visibility across search and answer engines. Today's guest is Anthony Higman, founder and CEO of ADSQUIRE, a Google Premier partner agency managing some of the most expensive keywords on the internet, legal search. In an industry where a single click can cost a thousand dollars, Anthony is running a five-person team, manually bidding, pinning headlines, listening to every call,
and intentionally resisting the automation wave most agencies have already embraced. Anthony built ADSQUIRE with a very specific plan. Stay small, stay nimble, and dominate high-intent search in one of the most competitive verticals in digital marketing. He's setting world records with billboards in Times Square, geotesting SERPs daily to reverse engineer Google's changes, and managing campaigns where one misstep can burn an entire month's budget in a single click. What we're unpacking in this conversation is bigger than legal marketing.
It's about whether manual strategy can still outperform machine learning at scale. It's about what happens when Google removes transparency, expands match types, pushes responsive search ads, and you decide to fight for precision anyway. Personally, I love this one because it's a reminder that the fundamentals still matter. Intent still matters. Message match still matters. And sometimes the best move in a platform-driven world is to slow down and look at the SERP like a user. If you learned something new today, take a second to subscribe to the Page2 Podcast. Leave us a rating or review,
and let us know what resonated. We'd love to hear your thoughts. All right, let's get into it.
Jon Clark (01:33)
Welcome to episode 109 of the Page 2 Podcast. I'm your host, Jon Clark, and I'm joined as always by my partner at Moving Traffic Media, Joe DeVita. Today we're joined by one of the world's top 50 PPC experts and the founder and CEO of ADSQUIRE, Anthony Higman. Welcome to the show.
Joe (01:42)
Hi.
Anthony Higman (01:50)
Thanks guys, pleasure to be here.
Joe (01:51)
Anthony, we got to jump right in with this space campaign. We're thoroughly impressed with this idea and having been in so many brainstorming meetings on ways to break out from the clutter. Tell us about the conversation you had with the team when you first came up with this idea.
Anthony Higman (02:08)
Yep. these are like what we call our big baller moves. We've done, we've done several of them. You know, we do legal advertising, so we're always looking for like big moves. Lawyers love big moves. We like being like first and like things that nobody's done yet. So that's what we were looking for. Like, Hey, what, what can we do to, to be the first at something?
and just kind of spitballing ideas and this one came up and it actually like wasn't crazy expensive believe it or not so we did it there was a little bit of work involved but we pulled it off and it was super cool, yeah.
Jon Clark (02:44)
It definitely sounds like an expensive effort. â
Anthony Higman (02:47)
It does.
Yeah. We also love that. Like doing things that sound crazy expensive, but are not.
Jon Clark (02:53)
So you also set a world record
with sort of a banner on a banner or sort of like a, I don't know, a billboard on a billboard in Times Square. This was recent, right? February, 2025-ish?
Anthony Higman (03:04)
Yeah.
So yeah, this one was we set the world record for most law firms on a single billboard and on the NASDAQ tower in Times Square. Yeah, this one was interesting because we came up with the idea, were like, OK, another another like first, right? Like there had been most brands on a billboard, but never most law firms on a billboard. So we were like, OK, let's do this one.
Jon Clark (03:22)
Mm-hmm.
Anthony Higman (03:30)
So we started doing it. We started getting all of these different logos together and making this billboard. And then we were almost done creating the billboard. And then we talked to our lawyers. And they were like, you can't do it. Because it wasn't all of our clients. It was just like big law firms. And the idea behind it was, all right, let's put
Jon Clark (03:46)
Hahaha.
That's what I was going to ask.
Anthony Higman (03:56)
all these law firms up on a billboard and then tag them on a social media post like after we do it to kind of get business and get attention out of it. And our lawyers were like, no, you can't do it because you're doing it to like get business on their logos.
Jon Clark (04:11)
Interesting.
Anthony Higman (04:11)
So
then we went back and forth with legal and they were like, well, you could do it just on like the news worthiness factor, but you can't like mention them in a press release or like tag them in social media. So we, went and we did it. And again, it was more for that, the clout and being first and like just a thing that nobody's ever done before. So also cool.
Jon Clark (04:34)
I mean, I have to imagine your current clients definitely appreciated, you know, the quote unquote free advertising for them as well. And even, yeah. So I to talk a little bit about don't know, I guess philosophy in managing page search. So you guys are a Google Premier Partner, I think top 3 % globally in managed ad spend, which is incredible, but your team is very small.
Anthony Higman (04:41)
Yeah, yeah, they're all on it. Yeah.
Jon Clark (04:59)
You know, think most agencies that probably are managing that volume of media spend are, I don't know, 20, 50 people. You guys are what, four or five?
Anthony Higman (05:07)
Yeah, five.
Jon Clark (05:08)
Talk to us a little bit about that decision. How do you manage burnout across the team? Are you very specific in the processes that you have that allow you to be that nimble? How does that work?
Anthony Higman (05:18)
Awesome question. It's a learning experience for sure. Things definitely break. We definitely do need to work more on process stuff. I think like, having less process in certain places allows us to be more nimble. We were super surprised
by the Google Premier Partner status. It just kind of like snuck up on us. Nobody really knows like how Google chooses Premier Partners. There's no like set thing out there that they say like this is you become a Premier Partner. We've like talked about it a lot internally. Like how do we get this, right? I do believe it is like new business,
amount of money like managed and then retention and we like slay in all of those regards. So like we keep our clients for a really long time like most of them have been here three plus years and we do continue to like get new clients I think just by like reputation. But yeah it to your question like my initial goal was to have a small team I said like I want a team of six to ten people and I want a
120
accounts. And so like we did kind of intentionally choose to be smaller. I don't want to be the biggest agency. It's not my goal yet. It might be, right now I'm just trying to reach that like initial goal. So like we're still hiring, just hired a new sales guy. And yeah, we have a lot of fun. We do a lot of crazy stuff and like get crazy results that I think kind of keep that momentum going.
Jon Clark (06:36)
Yeah.
Joe (06:49)
Your book of clients isn't only in Philadelphia, you'll talk with anyone in the world in the world probably, but mostly the country, I assume.
Anthony Higman (06:56)
Yeah,
so we do actually have a couple in Canada. We have them scattered throughout the United States. We're actually like tapped out in the Philadelphia marketplace. We really tried not to take on more than one in an area
of like a practice area and a geographical area, it definitely gets difficult. We found a deal with like some, some hard conversations and trying to work that out logistically because people do want to advertise with us, but that's like our general philosophy is like, we really don't want to like compete against ourselves. I'd rather take an underdog in a market and make them the top one than like raise everybody up to be the
Jon Clark (07:34)
I was going to ask you about that sort
of that, that conflict. Joe and I worked at Razorfish for many years and we would often encounter situations where we had a business, right? The agency had to make a decision around what client to go after or take on depending on what we had, under our umbrella already. Have you had to have any of those types of conversations where you sort of have to let one go in favor of something else or
Is it more of a loyalty thing, like you said, where you start with maybe the little guy and you help them become that big firm?
Anthony Higman (08:04)
Yeah, so that's like what I honestly love to do. Like what drives me and is my passion is that is taking somebody that's like successful but unknown and making them the top dog in the marketplace.
But yes, we've definitely had to have these hard conversations. We don't have exclusivity like in our contracts, but it is like, it's something that comes up during the sales process. And so most of the clients, like when it ever comes up, what we tend to do is like,
ask the first client. We're like, hey, look, we got this opportunity. This guy wants to do this. There's some potential crossover. So like we wanted to discuss it with you first and like kind of kind of see your thoughts on this. Most of them are like, no, not that guy. No. And so then that we have to make a choice. You know what I mean? And generally again, we are like
Jon Clark (08:52)
Right. Yeah.
Anthony Higman (09:01)
loyalty means a lot to me. So like our clients stay with us for a long time because again, we provide results for very responsive, but there's something to that. So we tend to go, okay, nevermind. We just, we won't take the opportunity.
Jon Clark (09:15)
Got it, got it.
Joe (09:15)
John and I,
we grew up on this expression of two is a conflict, three is a specialty. I don't know if you... So we have a lot of real estate clients, but none of them are focused on the same geographic area. So we can take learnings from one, apply it to the other. In your industry,
Anthony Higman (09:21)
Yeah.
I haven't heard that, but yeah, yeah.
Joe (09:35)
you got to I have to imagine an attorney that focused on medical malpractice wants to know you've dealt with dozens of businesses like his and you have a set of lessons you can apply to that business immediately.
Anthony Higman (09:48)
Yeah, for sure. And, you know, we deal with all areas of law, like, our book of business tends to be 80 % personal injury, just because they're the ones that advertise the most. But we, I started at a medical malpractice law firm, like in the mail room, worked my way up to running all their paid ads. And it's funny, though, to like, a lot of times, like, we'll get one kind of a firm, like, whatever,
just a litigation firm or a business lawyer or employment lawyer, whatever it is, they'll start with us like doing that. This is also like a problem that comes up. They'll start with us doing that. And then like all of them want to like expand into other areas. And that's where it gets like even trickier. They'll be like, you know, we'll start with a med mal. They'll be like, all right, now we want to do car accident. We're like, ahh!
Jon Clark (10:25)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Creates new conflicts internally, right? Yeah.
Joe (10:37)
You mentioned you
started in the mailroom like I don't know decades ago when your career was just getting started. Are you still working out of that building? Did I read that somewhere?
Anthony Higman (10:47)
â
it's funny. literally it's right behind me to the right. I'm 20 paces from where I started, but now in our own, in our own like suite over here. And this, this building is also just like full of lawyers. And that was like randomly by happenstance. I started, I started this in, in my home office, like in a little tiny room.
And then I was like, I need an office. Like I can't be in my house because there's just like too many things to distract me. Started looking for an office Actually, I didn't even know he was lawyer. I found a posting on Craigslist for like a sub a sublease basically,
went and checked it out and he was a lawyer and he was like, you know what? This is gonna work out great. I'm gonna give you a discount and you're gonna market for me. And so like immediately it was like a client and then we got a couple other ones like in the building pretty soon after that.
Jon Clark (11:40)
That's amazing.
wanted to circle real quickly back to the philosophy because there was something that I thought was super interesting, which is, and I might get this percentage wrong, it was something like a third of your team's time, or maybe it's your time. You spend literally watching search results for changes, not necessarily in the UI. And having followed you on LinkedIn for the past few months and reading the blog more recently, I think I know one of the reasons why you do this.
But take us through, what is the value that you get out of that? Because I common sense would say, I need to be in the UI, actually optimizing the account, pulling data. But there's a lot to learn outside of that, right?
Anthony Higman (12:15)
Yeah, yeah, so what you said, platform metrics are obviously like very important, but like these days,
things are changing so quickly, right? And like, this has kind of always been my philosophy though is like, if you're just looking at platform metrics, you're, missing the bigger picture basically. I do preach that to the team and then I'm doing it constantly. A lot of times it'll start in, in platform metrics. Like I'll see like click through rate explode in the MCC, like across accounts. And I'll be like, why? Right?
or conversion rate goes up or whatever, some kind of anomaly happens and I'll dig into it. It's either that or we're looking at an individual client and then we're like, okay, this is what it says in account, but let's take it to the surface and see what's going on. And so we use this tool called Valentin App. It's a geolocation tool that you put yourself anywhere in the world and...
then look at the SERP like you're in that area. There's a couple of them, like BrightLocal has one too. And then I'll do it like on desktop and on my phone. And we just want to see like what's changing. Why is this anomaly happening? And you can pretty quickly put it together. And it'll be like, â Google, Google moved ads closer together or they're testing them in the middle of the page now, or like something changed or, â there's AI overviews at the top or like,
Jon Clark (13:16)
Mm-hmm.
Anthony Higman (13:38)
they're really pushing local services ads. And again, so like, it's strategic in that we'll make decisions based off of this. Now it's getting trickier nowadays because everything's kind of becoming more personalized and like what I see isn't what the team sees. So we'll do that too, like.
we'll sit around the table and be like, okay, let's all do this search. What do you see? What do you see? What do you see? And kind of like try to find the middle ground to kind of still be able to make strategic decisions. But I do think it helps. And I think a lot of people get too locked into platform metrics.
And they're like, why isn't this working? And try a bunch of stuff, but it might not be anything wrong with what you're doing. It might be a broader Google change that's happening outside. And they kind of just get like too focused and do a lot of stuff to the account that like might not be necessary. It could be like a temporary blip or like, again, just like a broader change. So that's why we do it.
Jon Clark (14:34)
I think that's so important. Joe and I both sort of preached to our team, like if you see metrics going up or down to your point, it doesn't necessarily mean that there is impact to performance one way or the other. It literally could be a the way that Google's serving results within the landscape of the search result. We've seen that impact click through rate consist pretty significantly across SEO, of course.
But let's start with when you take on an account for the first time. You're launching a new account campaign. What is sort of the first thing that you do when you're setting up that account?
Anthony Higman (15:06)
Like a brand new account, like we're building a new one. We do have like a pretty general process. We are building, like we're building out landing pages is probably like the first thing we focus on. We do like an extensive research process on the firm,
Jon Clark (15:08)
Yeah, like, yeah, exactly.
Anthony Higman (15:21)
trying to find anything and everything that's out there. I do lot of news searches for all the lawyers, if there's anything that stands out. We're getting USPs, all that kind of stuff. And then again, building the account, we do have a process. We are always doing local services ads and Google ads. So a lot of times it's like getting all those accounts set up and then we do have individual process on how we build out accounts.
Jon Clark (15:36)
Mm-hmm.
Got it, got it. I'm always curious about when that point in time is where you actually start to make optimizations, right? Because so many of the platforms, Google, Facebook, right? They all have these learning periods now, depending on the bidding method that you choose. So when do you actually start to get in and make adjustments to the account based on the data that you're seeing? Is there sort of a ramp up time where you just sort of need to understand what's happening with the new account and then you start to dig in with optimizations?
Anthony Higman (16:03)
Yeah.
So now like right away, like immediately we're making changes. We are all like there isn't really the learning periods that everybody else goes through with manual. And I pray to God they never get rid of it, but they're probably going to. But, again, like, no, I know, I know. I'm like, please God, please.
Jon Clark (16:15)
Okay.
Yeah, it's not looking good for that.
Anthony Higman (16:34)
I think everybody, when they decide that they want to market, let's say they're new, or even if they're not new, they're switching. They don't want downtime in getting ads out there results coming in, they want things fast, everybody does. They're not like, Oh yeah, 60 days, no problem. This is the real world. They're businesses, they need leads. So again, like,
Jon Clark (16:54)
Thank
Anthony Higman (16:57)
our build process is super fast. We say sign up, we're going to be ready in seven to 10 days and then we launch, and
we're trying to get leads coming in in like the first five to seven days after that, like, basically two weeks, we kick off an account. Probably that day we're already adjusting bids and like trying to get it moving and trying to find ads serving in the wild. And so manual like really it...
Again, why I hope it never goes away is it does, it cuts out those learning times, like for the algorithm to make sense of everything. And it lets us get to the top of the page, like super quick, by doing what we do, looking at metrics inside the platform. And we walk bids up, so like we always start them kind of low and we're just trying to get them to like the best position, but not like pay crazy for them unless we have to.
Jon Clark (17:48)
Right.
Yeah. I had a question about that side of it because the legal industry is historically known for, you know, having some of the highest CPCs in the industry. I think, what was it? The Mesothelioma keyword was like the highest CPC for many years. How do you think about like managing that budget? Is it really about the starting low with the CPCs and seeing how you can sort of play in that market without having to pay top dollar?
again, some of these CPCs are hundreds per click. So even estimating an initial budget to start with, must be a tough conversation with some clients who maybe have never advertised before.
Anthony Higman (18:17)
Yeah.
Yeah, it definitely is. Legal is one of the most competitive, highest cost per click industries that there is. I have some accounts where literally you're paying over $1,000 for a click. And I know a thousand is the limit, but like with bid adjustments and stuff, like you can end up paying over $1,000 for a click.
Jon Clark (18:30)
Yeah.
Anthony Higman (18:43)
Depending on the competition, the market practice area. It's a really great question. It's always kind of case by case, depending on like the budget and the competition in that area. But to your point, like it's hard. Like sometimes honestly, to even get results, like you really do have to be high up on the page and
a client's spending $5,000 a month, like you can burn twice the daily budget in a click basically. So, yeah. So we do like, again, like our approach is comprehensive in how we advertise. this will be funny because I'm very anti like PMAX, but like I've kind of always done PMAX,
Jon Clark (19:10)
Which is insane. Totally insane.
Anthony Higman (19:27)
to be honest with you, but like I feel like I started PMAX before PMAX was PMAX, but we always do it in individual campaigns. So we're running YouTube, we're running display,
we're testing like the new ones, but, we always run like this kind of broad suite of things targeted in different ways. And then we have like a research campaign, a high intent campaign. So like the high intent campaigns always the 80%, which takes up like the majority of the budget. But then we have like these kinds of boosters like on the side that kind of do tend to increase results after like 60, 90 day mark.
Like, and we're targeting them all to the kind of the same keywords that we're targeting in the high intent stuff, but it is that high intent game. So again, it's, it's a challenge, it never ends. Budgets do get a little bit wonky and like, we try to explain that when we're signing up a client and like, Hey,
we're, we're white knuckle managing these accounts. And so like, so like there's a chance we go 10 % under or over by the end of the month. And we just try to explain like how we're doing this, why, and like how it's different than what other people are doing. And most of them are pretty understanding of that because again, like what we're doing still gets wild results. Like they're cool with it, yeah.
Joe (20:47)
I got like three follow ups.
Anthony Higman (20:49)
Yeah.
Jon Clark (20:49)
So do I.
This is great.
Joe (20:51)
I'm going go back to the local service ads for just one second, because it's a pretty rudimentary campaign management platform, way less advanced than Google Ads. We use it mostly with home services clients. And I think what we struggle most with is scaling How do we spend more on this platform? Is it very different in legal because the cost per lead is so much higher?
Anthony Higman (21:16)
It's not, believe it or not. We also have similar problems with local services ads is they only like they can't get past a certain amount of spend. Like there's definitely some things you can do, but again, they don't scale past a certain thing. And I believe this is kind of how Google is showing them.
My point to local services ads has always been they're serving for the same keywords that we're bidding on in, PPC. So Google can't kill the golden goose for this thing until they can, right? And so I
Joe (21:52)
in the actual
Anthony Higman (21:53)
they don't serve them nearly as much as they serve a PPC ads in our experience of kind of looking at the broader picture. I think they serve them maybe 15 % of the time. I do know a lot about these, like they tend to serve them during higher conversion hours. They serve them on more like near me searches. So like these are a couple of things like that we know are happening, but again, it's like 15 % of what they serve PPC ads for.
Jon Clark (22:18)
I had a couple questions about the way that you approach, you know, PMAX before it was PMAX. You mentioned that you were sort of running across these platforms
with independent campaigns. And I was curious if you are using them in sort of a remarketing ladder of sorts. Like are you using YouTube for maybe the discovery or the research and then you're using maybe a paid ad to pull them back in or a display ad to pull them back in. Is that how you're sort of structuring that or are they really just designed to work independently?
And sort of the multiple touches over time will sort of lead them to a conversion.
Anthony Higman (22:51)
Yeah, awesome. Awesome question. Yes and no. To answer your question is like so in in in like injury law, it's a sensitive ad category, right? So you can't remarket it. You just can't. So so like that's that's always been a struggle, right? And to answer your question, yes, like the display portion of what we're doing at YouTube, right? To a certain extent
Jon Clark (22:56)
It depends.
right, right.
Anthony Higman (23:18)
is meant to kind of get around remarketing in a way. Like we're bidding on the same keywords, right? Like we're doing like custom segments bidding on the same keywords and kind of both these things on YouTube and display. It's difficult though, because like in injury law, it's...
Jon Clark (23:22)
Mm-hmm.
Anthony Higman (23:34)
It's a short conversion window, right? So like a lot kind of has to align for these things to work in a remarketing perspective, but it can be a longer window. Like I always like say there's kind of three different types of people, people that like just want to get their things solved. They want to call somebody like that day people that are doing a little bit more research and people are doing a lot of research. I think that this works more in that last bucket of people kind of like doing a lot of research as they may
see kind of more of our display strategy and more of our YouTube strategy than those first two audiences. But it, it, it, to us, it's more of a branding play, to be honest with you, like all law firms brands, they're all heavy brand. I'm sure you guys, it's the same as me. Every billboard is a, is a lawyer billboard these days. So again, like, we look at it more from that side than a remarketing side. Again, the stars do align sometimes where it does like match up like that.
But to us, it's more 80 % intent, 20 % branding, and just kind of keeping it top of mind on these kind of keywords. So it's relevant and just kind of increasing the brand perspective.
Joe (24:40)
Most of the campaigns you manage, are they within the Google ecosystem? I think I read that you have a good partnership with Vistar, where you can do the digital billboards. Are there other platforms that are typical for you guys?
Anthony Higman (24:54)
We'll do remarketing.
That allows us to get around some of the remarketing again, it's like very, very tiny spend. What do you know, if you went to the website, you're going to get remarketing ads and those are people that are coming in through Google. So we do try to remarket on that side, most times. Vistar is an interesting one. We can't sell it to be honest with you. So, so we love it.
Jon Clark (25:17)
Interesting.
Anthony Higman (25:20)
I use it all the time. Like we use it for our business consistently.
I always keep a digital billboard running at city hall down here because that's where the lawyers get a court, so like that's always running. And then we like to do like cool stuff with the Vistar things. So like that's how we got on the NASDAQ tower. It's how we broke the world record thing. We'll do it for clients sometimes, like we'll put them up on the NASDAQ tower and then like use it as a Google ads asset, like just get pictures of the billboard. So we do, we like creative stuff with it, but I think, it's
Jon Clark (25:49)
that's cool.
Anthony Higman (25:52)
It's a hard sell for lawyers unless it's like an event based thing. And then we have, we sold a couple of them with that kind of stuff, like a motorcycle rally or something like that, you know, like something that like there's going to be a lot of people at and they're cool doing the digital ones. Most lawyers want the static ones. And then when they buy they get digital thrown in as like a bonus.
And so like, it's hard to be like, Hey, we can do these digital billboards and like them just buying into digital billboards from us. But again, we like to use it creatively and like always kind of test different things and do cool stuff. We also like every time we hire somebody new on their first day, they're always on a billboard. So like we throw everybody on a billboard and that's cool. It's fun for everybody.
Jon Clark (26:37)
That's a pretty cool perk. Like, hey, go take a picture of yourself on the billboard downstairs. Are radius targeting around those types of events, like post event where you can, I don't know, get device IDs and stuff like that. And I don't know what a big motorcycle event might be, Sturgis or like Daytona. Is that something where you would
Anthony Higman (26:39)
Yeah.
Yep. Yep.
Jon Clark (26:57)
then work with a motorcycle lawyer to say, hey, more than likely these folks have a really high affinity to owning a motorcycle. Can we serve an ad to this cohort?
Anthony Higman (27:06)
We've done that in the past. I don't, I don't think it's crazy effective, like, like the geo-fencing thing you're talking about. I think it's way too tiny and not effective like for the cost. And then we've tried to do creative things like with Google ads in that capacity too. And I feel like it, it just is like, it just misses the mark basically.
Jon Clark (27:14)
Yeah,
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Let's talk about match types. I can imagine that's been a bane of your existence since you started doing this with how expansive, exact match, phrase match, broad match, modified, all these different match types. And I think when Joe and I were sort of coming up in this industry, the the scag approach, right? The single keyword ad groups were sort of like the holy grail of
managing for performance, especially for higher cost terms or higher converting terms. Are you using anything like that sort of manage how you're rolling out ad types? Do you lean into exact match still more than others or is phrase match sort of where you're, I don't know, investing more of your time now?
Anthony Higman (28:08)
So to the single keyword ad group thing, we're still trying, but it's almost impossible these days. You can really try to map something to where you want, but, it's clear and, and clearly Google stance and like, don't do that anymore. So in, in some ways we still do try to make it work, but it's becoming less and less effective.
I have always been a phrase match and exact match guy. But to your point, over the past five years, they've gotten considerably worse and worse. I always say, I'm like a Google critic, but I always half get, like, why they're doing certain things and like,
they do in a lot of ways make sense in certain aspects. I think they're just like really early to seeing data because they have so much at scale that they are making these changes like for the greater good in 90 % of cases. it's not, let's call it
Jon Clark (29:08)
there you go.
Anthony Higman (29:11)
But, but yeah, so like at the same time though, it does make me like super angry a lot of times because of just the weird queries that we will see that match to a keyword. And especially like if they get a click and it's like a competitor's phone number or like a competitor term, like that, that still really does grind my gears, but I also do again
slightly get what they're doing there. I think I do. I always think I do. It's always like a little bit different than what I actually think. I think that like as time goes on and people search behavior does tend to change want things quicker. What Google is trying to do is shorten the gap between when they introduce new brands. So what they know is that when somebody is searching, they're looking at all brands and they're making a short list and they're contacting them.
So they're trying to introduce these brands shorter in the cycle, basically. But it still grinds my gears because again, it just the intent doesn't match up all the time. I'm not saying it can't work. It can in some cases, but it'll burn a lot of budget before it works. Like somebody could just be looking for that other brand to call them. And like we're super on our leads, like,
we have a person here that his job is literally only to listen to calls and like, look at forums. Like that's it. That's their, that's their sole responsibility. And so, you know, they'll be like, Hey, so-and-so got four mistake calls on whatever. And this also helps us actually a lot. Like nowadays, you know, search term visibility is getting blurrier. And I think that's going to also continue.
So when this happens and like, get a shout out by the lead quality person, we'll just proactively add those negatives or we'll like, again, take it to the SERP and do those searches and try to get an ad to trigger. We won't see it in the account. And we'll just like, so like we're like blindly, managing campaigns now, but like how we can still basically.
Jon Clark (31:06)
didn't actually have a question prepared for this, but I was curious, like, are you conquesting at all as part of these efforts or is that sort of like, you know, given that you're working in the legal space, do you expect a cease and desist letter basically immediately?
Anthony Higman (31:21)
Great question. So that does happen. Legal is like really big, but it's really small. If that makes sense, like all the lawyers know each other. And so like, when somebody sees somebody bidding on the brand, they will reach out to that lawyer and be like, Hey, listen. Yeah. And be like, Hey, listen, can you add the negative? so like you stopped bidding on our brand and like,
Jon Clark (31:25)
Mm-hmm.
directly, right?
Anthony Higman (31:40)
They still don't understand. I think a lot of people don't like that. What Google is doing there is matching all brands in the entire United States to regular keywords. So that's like definitely creating a lot of confusion. People will reach out and do that. Be like, Hey, we saw your bidding on our brand. Then half the time we're like, no, we're definitely not. It's Google's doing this, but Google does things like just complex enough
to where it doesn't make sense to people, no matter how hard you try to explain it. You know what I mean? Like, and then in some cases, yeah, we are conquesting, but it's like, it's a small percentage. It's more like the bigger players that are to eke out as much market share as possible or like get into the next thing or find like a new opportunity. So it's on the smaller side. I'd say like 5 % of our clients do conquesting campaigns, but we do do it in some, in some.
Jon Clark (32:10)
Yeah,
Got it, got it. I wanted to talk a little bit about ad copy. There's so many challenges with the legal space in general around claims and how you structure the ad in general. But also there's the complexity of responsive search ads and multiple titles and descriptions and sort of relying on AI or automation to sort of
pair those together into a format that works well. Also know that you're not super pro automation, right? You sort of like that manual control we do as Talk to us a little bit about how you approach ad copy, both maybe in terms of the messaging, but also how you're thinking about putting ads together that you still have some control and management.
Anthony Higman (33:11)
Another great question. We pin everything. I still have accounts and campaigns that have expanded text ads actually. They outperform every responsive search ad by a thousand miles. The cost per conversion, the conversion rates are just like astronomical compared to responsive search ads.
Jon Clark (33:14)
Okay,
crazy.
Anthony Higman (33:34)
When they sunsetted expanded tax ads, we said, all right, wait, pause, let's take a break here and think about this. And we made a million different campaigns, basically like took that as a strategy break to be like, okay, let's like build out all these things in preparation for this, which is the only way that we still have
expanded text ads running because like little by little they have like like you can't copy them or move them anywhere. So like yeah, you can't do anything. But again, we still do have these running they slay. The responsive search ad thing has definitely been a struggle especially with legal and I think this is like really something that I scream about I've screamed to Google about.
Jon Clark (34:04)
You can't edit them anymore, right? Yeah.
Anthony Higman (34:18)
Jenny Morgan, like the ads liaison, like she, she's super cool, and she does like listen and hear out my crazy rants and, it'll kind of chime in about certain stuff. But I think this is a really big problem for legal that Google doesn't understand, or maybe they just don't care about is that, is that like all of these areas of law are extremely nuanced and different.
And this is where responsive search ads just kind of screw it up. What I've seen from a broader perspective is that what responsive search ads tend to do is turn every lawyer ad into the same ad.
And so like what ends up happening is like you'll have 15 headlines and descriptions, but all that these responsive search ads turn into is like lawyer name, free consultation. So like that's generally like what happens. And again, you lose a lot there because like when somebody is looking up like medical malpractice lawyer, again, like what, and like what makes me angry about it is like the best practice has always been show the person what they're looking for,
right? Whatever the person's typing in, like you want that to be H1. Right? And so like what responsive search ads do when you're leaning into that and trying to get like good ad strength is again, you can't pin anything and everything turns into general lawyer ad
Jon Clark (35:20)
Mm-hmm.
Anthony Higman (35:34)
which really does like lower results. It brings in like a lot of garbage and clients get upset about this. And so we are like constantly stuck in this middle ground of like trying to figure out how to get better ad strength by like any means possible, but we can't. And so then that also means generally that like we might pay more on a cost per click than somebody that's not, but it's worth it because the lead quality and the lead specificity
is a thousand times better when we're running them like with the lowest ad strength possible.
Jon Clark (36:06)
Right, right. Are you using dynamic keyword insertion still? Like is that still really a thing?
Anthony Higman (36:12)
We never really have to be honest with you. I'm not necessarily anti-AI, but I think that in a lot of cases, maybe I'm a little bit anti-AI, and this is kind of why I'm anti-automation too, anti-AI. I get it. I see the writing on the wall, but I think that not all the time, but a lot of times it can just not match up, and that's a bad experience, and can still waste money.
I know what you can do and how you can kind of limit that. But again, we tend be very specific and try to limit as much as possible any like weird outliers if we can.
Jon Clark (36:47)
Got it, got I was curious about your comment around, you know, you can add some boosts in your campaign structure. Does that apply to like day partying I don't know, device types or is it based on performance?
Anthony Higman (37:02)
Yeah, performance. So we do have a we're looking at data. And again, since we're still manual, we can still do all this cool stuff, which I love. And it's the same thing that AI is doing in some regards, but in some ways it's a lot different. So we will like after a certain amount of time, review data, review geos, review times a day, that kind of stuff, devices. And we will be able adjust on those things.
Jon Clark (37:10)
Mm-hmm.
Anthony Higman (37:28)
Where it goes off the rails, I think, is like, when you make these bit adjustments, it's gonna lean in towards that, right? Like, it's gonna lean in towards it. And same thing that AI is doing. It's gonna lean in towards these things, like higher conversion times, what devices people are on, what geos people are looking from.
And I don't know, to be honest, all of the pieces and how AI is managing this, but I find that like,
you could do these bit adjustments, they work until they don't work. And then you kind of have to take them off and reset basically, because like things change like, and, and the way that you layer in these bit adjustments again, does change the dynamics of your campaign and how they spend and all that kind of stuff. So we do have a timed process where we're looking at these things and that we're maybe removing them and recalibrating and kind of getting like a back to a baseline to see generaly
Jon Clark (38:02)
Hm. Yep.
Anthony Higman (38:23)
just what the market is before then we again kind of layer them back on because I think like
I have a ton of critiques about AI, I think that's like what AI is, is going to do and what it's doing. And again, that's like in Google's favor. If the AI is going bid everybody up during the highest conversion times, then what's going to happen? The cost per click is going to raise for everybody, like results are eventually going to dwindle when new competitors come in. So like there's all these crazy aspects. I think like people don't put a lot of thought into, you just get lost in campaign metrics.
Jon Clark (38:36)
Mm-mm.
Anthony Higman (38:55)
But like I think a lot about these things is like what's what's the pro? What's the con is? Is this really for the greater good or is it really just gonna like drive everybody towards the same things to like increase prices in some weird way?
Joe (39:10)
You've had a lot of time to fine tune the reports that you present to clients to show them what's working and what's not.
We don't work with any attorneys right now. We have in the past the two crazy extremes with these clients. we had a small practice. There was three guys in the firm. Every week they wanted to talk to us and want to know every single detail about the campaigns. We had another pretty large firm with like 200 would go three or four months without like taking our call. So like you got this huge extreme of want to talk to you, don't want to talk to you.
Jon Clark (39:38)
You
Joe (39:44)
You said something really early in this episode the conversion window is really short. When I need an attorney, I need it It's a decision I'm ready to I want to make very quickly. But most of the advertising spend are in these huge branding campaigns that aren't
they're not intended to drive a lead that day, right? You're gonna spend tens of thousands, hundreds of thousand dollars trying to generate awareness for your firm in hopes that you get a call when the time comes. How do you put those together in a report to a client?
Anthony Higman (40:15)
Yeah, to your point, like we have the same thing. It's so varied in ones that never talk to us and ones that like talk or like, I don't want to say annoying, but just want to just want to know everything and like all the things you're doing and why. I love both of them. I think like a lot of times when people
like here's my experience with reporting and it's funny because we've gone the gamut here in how we report like I used to do these crazy reports like with our little brand guy where I would like introduce a new metric every month and like explain it and like really like walk them through the story.
And I took so much time to like build these reports out and we quickly learned that nobody even opens or reads the reports. And then when they want something, they want something, right? And so like, that's kind of the balance that we found is like, we try to be open and responsive and like open to meetings and, and explaining, but now we pretty much automate reports
and send them and they still don't open them when they want something they want something when leads are down they want to talk or like but also i found like again there's like these two camps right and and they're similar like a lot of like the smaller clients will want to talk a lot because like they just don't know about but generally and then another another side of that is like if results are there they don't care and they don't want talk,
right? if results dwindle or aren't there, they get nervous and they want to know, and they want to know what's going on. The other side of that coin is like, ones where results are there, but they start asking a lot of questions about like how things work is like they're doing really good and they want to know how they can expand it. And so I actually love when people get interested in Google ads. Cause a lot of them, like it's just beyond them. And like, it's really hard
Jon Clark (42:02)
you
Anthony Higman (42:10)
for to explain to somebody that like just doesn't know this thing, like all the weird stuff involved in it, right? I say it all the time, like, I literally like can't even explain some of these things. It's just wild, but I do like really like when they get interested and it is generally because like they got an enormous case or like something cool happened.
And it starts that conversation where they kind of like start to nerd out with me on stuff. And then it's like a collaborative process and we come up with like new ideas. But I do find you're right. Is that like, again, they don't care until they care or they care too much. It is like this wild spectrum, but it's, like you said, like for us, it's like 80 % of them don't talk to us
Jon Clark (42:36)
Hmm.
Anthony Higman (42:52)
because we're providing the results and they don't really care. They're just like looking at their dashboards in terms of like business and stuff, right? And then there are like 20 % that really do want to talk all the time and like have new ideas and want to know stuff, but it's smaller, it's the 80-20.
Jon Clark (43:08)
I wanted to quickly ask about the transcripts, right? So you're monitoring calls, you're getting all these transcripts in I think you mentioned somewhere that you use CallRail for your call tracking. Great tool. Are you using any AI to like analyze those calls at scale or would that fall into some sort of like HIPAA compliance issue?
Anthony Higman (43:26)
Yeah, so there definitely are, like there's consent laws in the United States. But you can just enable a call like a
message that tells them the call is being recorded. Same thing with LSA, right? Like LSA for any sensitive ad category, or all of them are recorded and they say something, a whisper message in the beginning. For legal, it's this is a Google call and it's not attorney-client privilege, right? CallRail, again, we do like if it's a two-party consent state, this is being recorded for quality assurance.
Jon Clark (43:35)
Mm-hmm.
Anthony Higman (43:55)
The AI stuff in CallRail is cool. Some of our clients have call transcription. We give clients CallRail, we always pay like the base costs included in our management fee, but transcription is expensive. So we don't have transcription on literally most of the accounts. I also think again, like AI, there's a lot that's cool about it. But I think that...
a lot when you automate something, you stop paying attention to it. So like with with transcriptions, like with like notes on a on a web on like a Meets call, right? Like, I don't know, do you really go back and look at them most times? Like, probably not, right? Like, it's a good like backup to have. But I think like when you automate stuff, you kind of really do stop paying attention to it. And weird things can happen in certain situations. So again, we're like human first. So like,
Jon Clark (44:22)
Mm.
Anthony Higman (44:46)
So our, our QA person is literally listening to calls and like taking notes and like passing those along to us. And I think like, it's super awesome and kind of elevates us above other people that aren't paying as much attention to this. We don't leave it to the clients because like, obviously they can listen to their calls, but like what our QA personal point out is like, Hey, so until got a new receptionist and they're doing this or like,
you know, ABC law firm didn't answer calls for the last three days. So like all these little things or just little weird stuff is like what they'll point out and we'll pass that on to the client and they love it. They're like, Oh my God, thank you so much for pointing this out. And we do it like early, so like,
It just catches stuff before it has a chance to snowball and affect their lead quality. And again, I think it's important because like, can get a business, a ton of leads and they can drop the ball and then still blame it on you somehow weirdly. So like, it's something I've learned over the years is like, you have to be just as worried about lead quality as they are because there's just so many things that can happen.
Jon Clark (45:42)
Totally.
One of the first rules is answer the call immediately and or call back like immediately, right? Like it's that speed to conversation that really impacts the overall conversion rate. Well, let's jump to a couple of quick rapid fire to wrap things up. I was fascinated about the US â SBA Emerging Leaders Program that you took part in. I didn't actually know that was a thing.
What's the most important thing you took away from that experience?
Anthony Higman (46:17)
it'd be having a business plan probably and to like keep editing that business plan. But that was an awesome experience. I actually like,
Jon Clark (46:19)
Mm.
Anthony Higman (46:25)
was in that when I started ADSQUIRE, I started it with a, with a different organization and then had resigned and started ADSQUIRE. And I actually got, most of my first clients from the SBA program. So, so I was like, Hey, I started my own business and I was always talking about Google Ads and they were like, Oh, yeah, okay. And, so I got like three clients, like from the SBA program. It was awesome program, it was definitely like,
intense was a seven month, like, probably five hours a day, three days a week. But awesome program. And yeah, it was more of the, it's like an accelerated MBA. So it was more like the core
Jon Clark (46:54)
What?
Anthony Higman (47:00)
core business stuff that I did carry with me that has kind of helped me like structurally and like it was hiring all that kind of stuff. But yeah, it helped me a ton. And I would say probably the biggest thing is like planning, having a plan, editing that plan.
Joe (47:16)
Was there a decision you made early with ADSQUIRE that you think you're still reaping the benefit from today?
Anthony Higman (47:22)
Just the plan, again. Like, I haven't reached it yet actually, which is, which is funny. We're like so close to reaching the first goal. We're five years in. I thought I was going to do it in two years was like the plan. So we've had to edit the plan a couple of times, but
having that plan, having that goal again, I don't know what I'm going to do once I reach that goal. I'm going to, you know, reevaluate and kind of decide what the next step is. But like my eye is on the prize. It's, all I think about is, is reaching this one goal and I'm definitely going to do it. And super soon.
Joe (47:54)
Is there a bad decision you made early
with ADSQUIRE you're still learning from?
Anthony Higman (47:59)
Yeah, actually, that's a good one. Don't do business with friends. Partners, yeah. So I had â like minority partner in the beginning, who was a friend of mine. I'm not saying like it's impossible to do. I think a lot of people do make it work, but
Jon Clark (48:04)
Friends as clients or friends as partners or both?
Anthony Higman (48:18)
there's always this weird kind of power dynamic and like, unless you're a hundred percent aligned on literally everything, it's never going to work out. And so I found that out fast. And honestly, like that was kind of a hard one to recover from.
Definitely like put me into some weird trouble, but I'm not friends with the person anymore too, which is like kind of the biggest loss. You know, he was a good buddy of mine and now like we hate each other. That's the one thing.
Jon Clark (48:44)
Got it, yeah.
Joe (48:44)
There's a great book, The Hard
Thing About Hard Things, if you haven't.
Anthony Higman (48:47)
I haven't,
I'm gonna check that out.
Jon Clark (48:49)
What's the best ad extension for legal businesses?
Anthony Higman (48:52)
my favorite is call outs actually.
Jon Clark (48:56)
Okay. And then curious about impression share for branded terms. Do you target like 90%, 95%, 100 %?
Anthony Higman (49:02)
Yeah, like ideally I want to brand. I think again, it's getting weirder and harder with what Google is doing. And then people that do that on your brand. So my main goal again, I want to show more than everybody else. It's not necessarily a impression, a search impression number that I have in mind. I just want to be the highest search impression chair.
And then depending on like what those dynamics look like, if somebody is bidding, then we just always want to be the number one thing that shows up.
Jon Clark (49:32)
Got it, got it. All right, last one in this section, Coca-Cola or Pepsi ads, which one is better?
Anthony Higman (49:36)
Coca-Cola, but I don't know, the AI stuff is kind of giving me weird stuff, but But it's actually Coca-Cola is the reason that I am in marketing at all. My dad used to like buy us the old-school Coca-Cola bottles when we were little like at this hardware store I was always fascinated by just that bottle,
Jon Clark (49:40)
â Yeah, that's right.
Anthony Higman (49:58)
like, the bottle is so unique that it's like a brand, it's a brand identity thing. And then like I had, when I was a kid, then like kind of through that, I had always like collected Coca-Cola memorabilia. Cause I was just fascinated by what they did with their brand and like how it was like this tradition and like, again, just the different brand perspectives of that and collecting it is what got me into marketing in first place.
Jon Clark (50:04)
Totally.
It is incredible, like something so commonplace as a bottle. Like you see that structure and you almost automatically associate it with Coke. It's pretty, pretty incredible. Anthony, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for being so candid and taking us through your process. Let our listeners know where they can find you and if you'll be speaking anywhere next.
Anthony Higman (50:31)
Yeah.
Absolutely. So, on social media, I'm just Anthony Higman on every channel, probably most active on Twitter and LinkedIn. They can also find us at our website, adsquire.com. And then I need to get on that actually. I do want to get more speaking gigs this year, but we've hit this weird kind of like
crazy busy time to where like it's really hard for me to to do those they're they're time consuming when when you like do this do the speaker I do have a goal and I want to probably speak at one or two more this year but I don't know what they're gonna be at.
Jon Clark (51:07)
Yeah.
Okay, well we'll put those links in the show notes and thanks again for joining us on the Page 2 Podcast. And for the listeners, if you enjoyed the show, please remember to subscribe, rate and review. We'll see you next week. Bye bye.
Anthony Higman (51:26)
Thanks guys.