This post is for my peers; other attorneys practicing divorce and family law in upstate New York. And frankly, I think this is for any attorney who wishes to use the internet for marketing.
Our friends at Yellowbook – the old-fashioned phonebook – have reinvented themselves as WebReach under the umbrella of “hibu, Inc.” They now sell search engine advertising. This also is known as “pay per click advertising”. These are the search results that come up in the highlighted box at the top of your Google search results.
I have tried this product and poured a few thousand dollars into it and have found it to be a complete waste of money.
I track every telephone call I receive from potential new clients and have done so since the first day I opened my practice 17 years ago. From this system I can tell from where the calls are coming and from where the clients are coming. With this system I know that after paying for about a year of this WebReach program I have no clients from it. This is despite the fact that according to the reports given to me by WebReach hundreds of people have clicked in my advertisement during their Google search for an attorney.
WebReach creates a complete clone of your website. The traffic generated by their pay per click program goes there and not to your actual website. This makes the Google Analytics or other tracking systems on your website ineffective in tracking these pay per click searches. Basically, they are asking you to trust them. Well I do not. They have not delivered any results.
I encourage my peers to avoid this pay per click advertising or any other WebReach or hibu product. They are a waste of your advertising dollars. I have been able to build a website and blog for about what the folks at WebReach charged me for one month of pay per click advertising. My website and blog have generated a significant amount of client leads and new clients. This is something that WebReach has failed to do.