Legal is the most expensive keyword inventory on the internet and it punishes sloppiness fast. We run tight, heavily negated accounts against one number — cost per signed case — and build the landing pages ourselves.
Google Ads buys attention from people already looking for a lawyer. That is its whole advantage over every other channel, and the reason it costs what it does: in a contested practice area a single click can cost more than a month of hosting, and you will buy a great many clicks for every case you sign. Everything therefore turns on the chain between the two — who sees the ad, what they land on, whether they call, whether they qualify, and whether they sign.
The click is the only part most agencies optimise, and it is the least important link in the chain.
Doing it properly means four things: campaigns segmented by case type rather than by practice area, because a soft-tissue claim and a catastrophic injury cannot share a bid; aggressive negative keyword work to keep the account away from searches that will never convert; landing pages built for the ad rather than a homepage that has to serve everyone; and conversion data fed back from your intake, so the bidding optimises toward cases rather than form fills.
Four failures, in descending order of how much they cost.
Left unchecked, Google will happily spend a legal budget on people researching their own case, looking for free advice, chasing jobs at your firm, or searching for a case type you do not take. Without a serious negative keyword list this is where most of the money goes.
An expensive click for a truck accident lands on a page about the firm, and the visitor has to find their own way to the relevant information. Every step between the ad and the answer costs a share of the people who clicked.
If the conversion Google is told about is a form submission, Google will find you the cheapest form submissions available — which are usually the least qualified. Bidding optimises toward whatever you measure, so measuring the wrong thing actively steers the account wrong.
The account looks fine on cost per lead while intake is missing calls, calling back hours later, or failing to convert people who were ready to sign. Without call review you cannot tell the difference between a bad campaign and a good campaign with a leak at the end.
Five stages. The first sets the target everything else is judged against.
What each case type is worth to the firm, how often enquiries sign, and therefore what you can afford to pay for one. That produces a target cost per signed case — the number the whole account is then run against.
Campaigns segmented by case type and geography so budgets are not shared between cases worth vastly different amounts, with match types and negatives set tightly from day one rather than cleaned up later.
Built and hosted by us, one per case type, so the page answers the exact search that was paid for. We do not hand expensive traffic to a site we cannot change.
Call tracking and offline conversion imports so signed cases — not form fills — are what the bidding learns from. This is the step that separates accounts that improve from accounts that merely run.
Recorded calls reviewed against what actually signed, feeding back into negatives, bids and page copy. The loop that most accounts never close.
Not tiers or upgrades — this is the work.
Campaign management across formats, with Performance Max kept on a short leash — it will spend broadly unless it is constrained deliberately.
Setup, Google Screened verification, ongoing management and active disputing of leads that should not have been charged.
Continuous, not a one-off list. The single highest-return maintenance task in a legal account.
One per case type, built and tested by us, so the page can change as fast as the account does.
Signed cases pushed back into Google so bidding optimises toward revenue rather than form submissions.
Recording, scoring and intake feedback, because the last thirty seconds of the chain decides whether the spend produced anything.
Paid search is the one channel where the economics can be worked out in advance, on paper, before any money is committed. It is a short chain and every link is measurable.
Start with what a signed case is worth to the firm. Divide by the margin you need, and you have the most you can pay to sign one. Then work backwards: of the people who click, some contact you; of those, some are cases you would take; of those, some sign. Multiply those three rates together and you get the share of clicks that becomes a case. Divide your maximum cost per case by that share, and you have the most you can afford to pay for a click.
Compare that figure to what clicks actually cost in your market. If the market number is higher, no amount of campaign management will save it — and you deserve to be told that before you spend, not after.
This is why we insist on case economics before touching the account, and it is why the improvements worth making are usually not the ones firms ask about. Lowering cost per click is one lever among four. Raising the share of callers who qualify, or the share of qualified callers who sign, moves the same equation and is frequently cheaper to fix — which is why intake keeps appearing in a conversation about advertising.
The rates in that calculation are specific to your firm, your market and your case mix. We measure yours during the audit rather than working from industry averages, which vary too widely to plan against.
One number leads. The rest explains it.
Case value and click cost move independently. Pick yours.
Enough to buy a statistically meaningful number of cases in your market, which depends entirely on what a case is worth to you and what clicks cost in your area. Legal keywords are among the most expensive inventory on the internet, and personal injury in a major metro is at the extreme end of that. The right way to arrive at a budget is backwards, from case value and target cost per signed case, not from a round monthly number. We model it during the audit.
Local Service Ads sit above ordinary search ads, carry a Google Screened badge, and charge per lead rather than per click. For many practice areas they produce a lower cost per case than paid search, which is why we usually set them up first. They are not a replacement: inventory is limited, they only cover certain practice areas and locations, and the lead quality needs active disputing. Run both, measured separately.
Partly the market — you are bidding against firms with large budgets for cases worth a great deal. But usually there is a controllable share on top: broad match picking up searches unrelated to your practice, no negative keyword sculpting, campaigns mixing case types with wildly different values into one budget, and landing pages so weak that Google charges more for the same position. The market portion is fixed. The rest is the job.
No. A percentage fee pays the agency more for spending more, which is a direct conflict with lowering your cost per case. It also makes the honest recommendation — spend less here, this campaign is not working — the one that costs us money. We price the work, not the spend.
You do. The account is created under your firm, you hold administrative access throughout, and it stays entirely yours if you leave, with every campaign, conversion action and piece of historical performance data intact. Agencies that run clients inside their own manager account are holding your bidding history hostage — years of learning that cannot be rebuilt.
No. Anyone guaranteeing case volume is either quoting a number so low it is meaningless or does not intend to honour it. Auction costs move, competitors change their bids, and case flow varies. What we commit to is a target cost per signed case, transparent reporting against it, and telling you plainly when a campaign cannot reach it rather than spending your money proving the point.
It happens, and Google filters a portion of it automatically and credits you. Beyond that we monitor placement and IP-level patterns and exclude the sources that show up repeatedly. It is worth watching and worth acting on, but in our experience it is rarely the main reason an account underperforms — poor campaign structure usually costs far more than fraudulent clicks do.
Leads within days of launch, which is precisely why paid search is the counterweight to SEO's slow start. Reaching an efficient cost per case takes longer — typically a couple of months of negative keyword work, bid adjustment and landing page testing before the account settles. Early numbers are almost always worse than the eventual ones, and we would rather tell you that upfront than have you judge the channel on its first fortnight.
A free growth plan: we audit your ad accounts, work out your actual cost per signed case, and show you whether the market you are bidding into can clear your economics.
Two different conversations. Pick the one that fits and we'll take you straight to the calendar.
