LEGAL
Paid media for law firms.
Legal is the vertical where a single click can cost more than a month of ads in another industry, and where the gap between a lead and a signed case is widest. That combination means qualification and intake are not downstream concerns - they are the campaign.
HOW BUYERS BEHAVE
What search looks like in this vertical.
Searchers are often in distress and comparing several firms in one session, so response speed matters as much as message. Intent varies enormously within a practice area: someone researching a process and someone who was injured this morning look similar in a keyword report and behave nothing alike. Advertising is also constrained by platform policy and state bar rules, which limits what an ad may claim.
CAMPAIGN STRUCTURE
How we build the account.
- Campaigns by case type, not practice area
- Case types inside one practice area differ by an order of magnitude in value. Sharing a budget between them means subsidising the cheap ones.
- Intent tiering
- Immediate-need terms, comparison terms and research terms separated so bids reflect what each is worth.
- Geographic control at county level
- Jurisdiction matters, and metro-wide targeting buys clicks the firm cannot act on.
- Exclusion of competitor and directory noise
- Directory, job-board and legal-information traffic excluded deliberately rather than discovered later.
WASTE PATTERNS
Where the money goes in accounts we audit.
- Free-consultation terms attracting people looking for free advice rather than representation.
- Case types the firm does not take, bought because they sit inside the same practice area.
- Law-student, job and salary queries on broad match.
- Out-of-jurisdiction clicks from metro-wide radius targeting.
- Every form counted as a conversion when a large share are unqualified or duplicates.
WHAT WE REPORT
The numbers that decide whether this worked.
- Cost per signed case
- Ad spend divided by cases signed, for a stated case type and date range.
- Lead-to-consultation rate
- Share of leads that reach a scheduled consultation, tracked in the CRM.
- Qualified call rate
- Share of tracked calls over the qualifying duration that matched a case type the firm takes.
- Cost per qualified lead by case type
- Reported per case type, since blending them hides which campaigns actually work.
WHAT WE HEAR
The objections, answered.
“Our cost per click is already too high to make this work.”
High click costs are survivable when case values are high and qualification is tight. What is not survivable is paying those prices for traffic that was never going to sign.
“We tried PPC and got nothing but tyre-kickers.”
That is usually a qualification and intake problem rather than a targeting one. If the platform is optimising toward form fills, it will find you people who fill in forms.
FAQ
Questions from legal businesses.
How do you keep unqualified leads down?
Case-type separation, honest ad copy that states what the firm takes, qualifying questions on the form, and feeding signed-case outcomes back to the platform so bidding learns which clicks produced clients.
Can you guarantee a number of cases?
No. Anyone who does is guessing or misleading you. We can show cost per qualified lead by case type and how it has moved, which is the number a decision can actually rest on.
How do advertising rules affect the ads?
Platform policy and state bar advertising rules both constrain claims, disclaimers and some targeting. We write to those constraints rather than around them - a disapproved ad or a bar complaint costs more than the click ever saved.
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