Inside the Perimeter and outside it should not share one campaign budget
The client profile, the competing firms and the willingness to drive all change at I-285, so the campaigns should change with them.
Run at least two campaigns. One for the intown market, Midtown, Buckhead, Decatur, Brookhaven and the areas around them. One for the northern suburbs, Sandy Springs, Dunwoody, Roswell, Alpharetta, Johns Creek, Marietta. Add a third only when the first two are funded properly.
Separate campaigns give you separate budgets, and that is the part bid adjustments cannot do. With one campaign, the cheaper geography quietly eats the budget and the expensive one starves, and the report shows a blended number that hides both.
A radius drawn from your office straddles the Perimeter and averages two different markets together. Build the geography from named counties and cities instead, and shape it around the drive you are willing to make.
Write the ad copy separately too. Somebody comparing firms in Alpharetta is weighing a different set of considerations than somebody a mile from your intown office, starting with whether they will ever have to make that drive.
Legitimation, modification and contempt each deserve their own ad group
Matter type predicts value far better than geography does, and the ad has to repeat the words the person typed.
Build tight ad groups around one matter each. Divorce, custody, support, modification, contempt, legitimation, relocation. Exact and phrase match, with a landing page per group that talks about that matter and nothing else.
The post-decree terms are usually the better buy. Somebody searching about contempt or a modification already has an order, already understands the process and is closer to hiring than the person typing divorce lawyer for the first time.
Georgia has vocabulary that firms in other states never bid on, legitimation being the obvious one. Those queries are cheaper because the national advertisers are not built around them.
Keep bar advertising rules in view for every headline and every landing page. What you may claim about experience and outcomes is worth confirming with your own counsel before the ads go live.
The morning crawl on I-285 is bidding time, not dead time
Look at when your inquiries actually arrive before you accept an even spread across the day.
Export the timestamps from the last six months of calls and forms. Most family law firms find two clusters they did not plan for: a morning window and a late evening one.
Commuting shapes both. People research from a phone before the day starts and again after the house is quiet, and a metro where the drive can take an hour makes that pattern sharper than it is elsewhere.
Set the schedule to spend more where the inquiries are and less in the flat middle of the afternoon. Then make sure the after-hours experience is honest: a form that states when somebody will call back beats a phone that rings out.
Recheck the pattern each quarter. Schedules drift as the mix of counties and matter types changes.
Say the county in the headline and the wrong counties stop clicking
An ad is a filter, and filtering before the click is the cheapest filtering available.
Name the county or the suburb in the headline of the campaign that targets it. Cobb County divorce attorney outperforms a generic metro headline for a Marietta searcher, and it quietly discourages the click from somewhere you cannot serve.
Put the consultation format and the fee posture in the description where you are permitted to. People who will not pay for a first meeting are better off not clicking.
Be careful with automatic location insertion. It will happily print a place you do not practice in, which wastes money and reads as sloppy to a local.
Match the landing page to the ad word for word. If the ad says Gwinnett, the page headline says Gwinnett, and the page names the court and the drive.
A metro budget spread across five counties buys nothing anywhere
Concentration beats coverage when the budget is small, and for most family law firms it is small.
Pick two counties and fund them properly. A campaign that runs out of budget by noon is not competing, it is participating.
Expand only when intake can absorb it. Buying more clicks than the front desk can call back within the hour turns budget into unread voicemail.
Pace across the month rather than letting the account front-load. Nothing is gained by owning the first ten days and disappearing for the last twenty, and the people searching in the last week of the month are not worse prospects.
When you do add a county, add it as its own campaign with its own budget and give it long enough to produce a readable number before judging it.
Feed signed matters back into the account or the bidding learns the wrong thing
Automated bidding optimizes toward whatever you told it a conversion is, and a form fill is not a client.
Map your CRM stages to the account. Inquiry, consultation booked, consultation attended, engagement signed. Import the later stages back into Google as offline conversions so the bidding chases matters instead of contact forms.
Use call tracking with a minimum call length so a fifteen second wrong number does not count as a lead. Record where permitted and check the recordings against what the report claims.
Judge the account on cost per consultation attended and cost per signed matter, by county. The cost per signed matter will be a multiple of the cost per lead, and seeing that multiple honestly is what stops arguments about whether ads work.
Expect the two campaigns to look different on that measure. A county that produces cheap leads and few signings is telling you something about the drive, the fee expectation or the ad copy, and it is worth acting on before you raise bids anywhere.
Questions we actually get
- How much should we budget to compete in metro Atlanta?
- There is no honest single number, and any agency quoting one without looking at your account is guessing. The useful way to set it is backward: decide how many signed matters a month you want from paid search, estimate from your own historical close rate how many consultations that requires, and pick a starting budget that can buy that many inquiries in one or two counties rather than a thin presence in five.
- Are Local Services Ads worth it for a family law firm here?
- Availability, eligibility and the rules differ by category and by market, and they change, so it is worth confirming the current position for your practice area directly with Google before planning around them. Where they do run, treat them as a separate channel with its own reporting rather than folding them into the search account.
- Should we run ads on Meta for divorce work?
- Targeting in sensitive categories is restricted on the major social platforms, and the specifics change often, so plan on confirming what is currently permitted before writing creative. In practice social tends to work better for post-decree matters and for staying visible to a slower audience than for capturing somebody who has already decided to file.
- Can we bid on a competing firm's name?
- Technically it is usually possible, but professional advertising rules and trademark policy both bear on it, and that is a question for your own counsel rather than for an agency. Even where it is permitted, the economics are often poor. The person searching a firm by name generally wants that firm.
- How do we know the ads are actually producing clients?
- Track through to signed matters, not to form fills. That means call tracking with a minimum duration, CRM stages that somebody actually updates, and offline conversion data going back into the ad account. Cost per lead is easy to report and easy to flatter. Cost per signed matter by county is the number that settles the question.
