👉 If people hear something often enough, it starts to feel true — even if it’s wrong or misleading.

• Illusory truth effect – Repetition increases perceived truthfulness.

• Familiarity bias – Things that feel familiar feel safer, more accurate, more trustworthy.

• Availability heuristic – People judge “truth” or importance based on what comes to mind easily (often because it’s repeated).

• Social proof – “Others seem to believe/say this, so it must be right.”

• Narrative dominance (more informal) – The story that gets repeated becomes the story.

I thought of this as I was recently skimming through reddit posts about PPC and also law firm PPC.

It became apparent that many people ascribe to the same advice.  Yet those same people post saying things like “PPC

doesn’t work for personal injury law firms”

What can we deduce?

Reddit users also saying:

1/ Consolidate your campaigns

2/ Just upload enough data and you’re good.

3/ Smart bidding is the way

I actually wrote a post challenging some of these assertions and because it offended someone who is drinking the koolaide, it got removed.

Meanwhile Reddit users also are saying:

“PPC doesn’t work for personal injury…”

More and more companies are struggling with PPC, law firms or not.  Yet they are all drinking the same koolaide and applying similar principles.

I know this because every account I audit has the same issues:

1/ Broad match keywords only

2/ Performance max campaigns spending a ton of money on proxy brand traffic

3/ Ad groups with unrelated keywords in the same ad group

4/ No RSA split testing

5/ Poor to no negative keyword management

The majority of PPC people either don’t know what to do, don’t care, or don’t have the time…

The “common” advice encourages laziness AND complete trust in the system.  Heck, if you can tell a client it is best to have 1 match type instead of 3, 1 ad instead of 2-3, no split testing, and so on, that’s a heck of a lot EASIER to manage that actually structuring and managing the account in a way that would lead to profitability.

So a lazy PPC manager on payroll at the average agency isn’t going to care.  Or they might care, but just have heard to same information so often (Illusory truth effect) that they apply best practices that aren’t actually the best.