Google Ads for Law Firms

We measure cost per signed case, not cost per click

Most agencies report clicks, impressions and cost per lead, because those numbers are available inside the ad platform and they usually look good. None of them tell you whether the campaign made money. A form fill from somebody looking for free advice and a call from a client with a seven figure claim appear identical in a standard report.

We build the measurement layer first. Every form and every booking on your site captures the gclid, which is the click identifier Google assigns to the visitor. When your intake team marks that person as a signed case in your CRM, we import that signal back into Google Ads as an offline conversion. From that point Google is bidding toward cases you actually signed, not toward form fills. This is the single largest performance lever available in a legal account and most firms have never had it turned on.

• gclid captured on every form and every booking
• Offline conversion import wired to your intake outcomes
• Call tracking with recording review so bad leads get diagnosed, not guessed at
• Reporting that shows spend, signed cases and cost per signed case side by side

How we structure a legal search account

Account structure is where most of the waste lives. We separate campaigns by intent rather than by convenience: people searching for a specific practice area near them, people comparing firms, people searching for a competitor by name, and people researching a legal question with no intention of hiring anyone. Those four groups deserve very different bids and very different landing pages.

Each ad group points at a dedicated landing page whose headline mirrors the search term word for word. Message match is a Quality Score input, and in a market where clicks run into three figures, a Quality Score improvement is a direct discount on every click you buy for the life of the campaign.

• Intent-separated campaigns with practice-area level budgets
• Exact and phrase match discipline instead of broad match sprawl
• Negative keyword lists built from legal search behavior, not generic templates
• One landing page per ad group, with the calendar embedded on the page

Local Services Ads and the rest of the Google surface

Search is one placement. For many practices, Google Local Services Ads sit above the paid results and charge per lead rather than per click, and they require Google Screened verification, bar membership checks and background screening. We handle that application, keep the profile responsive enough to hold ranking, and dispute the leads that are not real.

We also run Performance Max and remarketing selectively. A visitor who read your case results page and did not call is worth reaching again for a fraction of a cold search click, but only if the audience is built from meaningful pages instead of your whole site.

What the first ninety days look like

Weeks one and two are audit and build. We review your existing account, your search terms report, your landing pages and your intake response times, and we tell you plainly which of the four is actually limiting performance. Often it is intake, and we will say so before we recommend spending another dollar on clicks.

Weeks three through six are launch and pruning. Search term reports are reviewed at least weekly while the negative lists mature. From week seven the account has enough conversion history to shift bidding toward signed cases, and reporting moves to a monthly written review with a call.

Who this is for

This works for firms that can answer the phone. Paid search produces calls at unpredictable hours, and the firm that answers in under a minute signs a materially higher share of them than the firm that returns a voicemail the next morning. If your intake has gaps, we will help you fix them as part of the engagement, because otherwise you are buying clicks for a competitor.

It works less well for a firm that wants to spend a few hundred dollars a month in a saturated metro. We will tell you that during the audit instead of taking the retainer.