You are bidding against firms that can lose money for two quarters
The auction price in this category is set by advertisers with more patience than you, so pick the ground where that matters least.
Family law is one of the most expensive categories in search, and the reason is arithmetic. A single retained matter is worth enough that a well-funded firm can spend through a bad quarter and stay in. If you enter on the broadest terms with a small budget, you are choosing the fight where their advantage is largest.
Start where intent is narrow and volume is small. A term naming a matter type and a county will generally cost less per click and convert better than the head term, because the person typing it has already worked out what they need.
Decide up front what you will pay for a consultation that actually happens. Not a click, not a form. Work backward from what share of consultations become matters at your firm and what an average matter is worth to you. Those two numbers exist inside your practice management system.
Then hold the account to it. Any campaign that cannot be tied back to booked consultations is a hypothesis, and hypotheses do not get a permanent line in the budget.
A Georgetown parent will not drive past MoPac for a first meeting
Geography here is not a radius, it is a set of separate decisions about who will travel and who you will meet where.
The metro runs from Georgetown and Leander in the north to Kyle, Buda and San Marcos in the south, with the Hill Country suburbs of Lakeway, Bee Cave and Dripping Springs off to the west. A circle drawn around your office treats those as one market. They behave nothing alike.
Target where you actually want work, and be honest about which counties you file in regularly. Paying for clicks in a county where you take a matter reluctantly produces consultations that waste an attorney's morning.
Set targeting to people present in the area rather than people merely interested in it, or you will pay for research traffic from elsewhere. Then say the county in the ad. A parent in Williamson County who sees the county named will click, and one who sees a generic metro headline will keep scrolling.
If you want the outer counties without an office there, lead the ad with a video first meeting and say so. The offer, not the bid, is what closes the distance.
Put the retainer range in the ad copy and let the click volume fall
Qualifying in the ad text costs you impressions and buys back the intake hours you are currently burning on people who were never going to hire you.
A large share of the traffic on divorce terms is looking for a do-it-yourself packet, a fee waiver, or the clerk's office. They will click a friendly ad that promises a free consultation, and somebody at your firm will spend fifteen minutes finding that out.
Ad copy that names the kind of work you take, the counties you file in, and roughly what engaging the firm involves acts as a filter before the click. Volume drops. Cost per click may rise. Cost per booked consultation usually improves, which is the number that pays salaries.
Pair it with negatives, and treat the negative list as ongoing work rather than a setup task. Free, forms, pro bono, clerk, jobs, salary, and the names of online divorce brands are the obvious starting points. Read the actual search terms report every week for the first stretch.
Keep the claims plain. Advertising rules in this profession generally restrict outcome and comparative claims, and specific wording is worth confirming with your own counsel before it runs.
Performance Max will find you the cheapest impression in Central Texas
Automated campaign types optimize toward whatever event you feed them, on whatever inventory is cheapest, which is the opposite of what a family law account needs.
Broad automated campaigns are built to find volume. Point one at a form-fill conversion and it will find forms, often on display placements and app inventory where the person did not mean to click anything at all.
Keep the core of the account on search, with keywords you chose, in campaigns you can read. If you test an automated type, give it a real signal, which means a conversion that fires when a consultation is booked or a matter is opened, not when a field is filled.
Remarketing deserves separate caution here. Following a person around the web with custody advertising after they searched from a shared household device is a real risk to that person, and a bad look for the firm. Exclude sensitive matter types from display remarketing, or skip it.
Paid social has a place, but not as a replacement for search. It works better on modification, on enforcement, and on educational content than on the moment somebody decides to file.
Half your recorded conversions are existing clients calling the main line
Ad-reported conversions in a legal account are inflated by people who were already yours, and nobody notices until the numbers are compared to the intake log.
Call extensions and brand campaigns catch current clients, opposing parties, other lawyers, and vendors. All of them register as conversions. An account can show a healthy cost per conversion while the number of new matters has not moved.
Reconcile the ad platform against the intake record on a fixed schedule. Every call and form the account claims should be findable as a real person with a matter type, a county and an outcome. What does not reconcile gets discounted.
Send the good outcomes back into the account. Booked consultation is the minimum. Consultation attended is better. Matter opened is best, and it is worth the effort of getting that signal out of your practice management system even if it lags by weeks.
Report on cost per matter opened by county. A campaign in Hays County will look expensive on cost per lead and reasonable on cost per matter, and only one of those two views should decide whether it keeps running.
Pause the account the week the consultation calendar fills
Spend should follow your capacity to take work, not a smooth daily budget that ignores whether anyone is free to answer.
A family law firm has a hard ceiling: attorney hours and consultation slots. Buying inquiries you cannot see for nine days converts them into inquiries for the firm that answers on Thursday.
Pace to the hours somebody is at the desk. If intake is staffed weekday mornings, weight the budget there rather than spreading it evenly across nights when calls go to voicemail. If you add after-hours coverage, fund the evenings afterward and not before.
Expect seasonality, and let your own history set it rather than a general rule about January. Pull the last two years of matters opened by month out of your own system and pace against that pattern.
Build in a hard pause. When the calendar is full and the follow-up backlog is growing, the highest-return action available is turning the account down for a week and working the inquiries you already have.
Questions we actually get
- What should we budget to make paid search worth running?
- Enough to buy a meaningful number of clicks each week in one county on one matter type, sustained long enough to accumulate real conversion data. We will not quote a figure here, because click prices in this category move and any number we published would be a guess. The honest version is to price a booked consultation from your own numbers first, then size the budget to that.
- Are Local Services Ads worth it alongside a search account?
- They are a different product with their own screening and verification requirements, and they sit above the search results. Worth testing separately with its own reporting rather than folded into the search budget. Eligibility and license verification are worth confirming directly with the platform.
- Should we bid on competitors' firm names?
- It is technically possible and often expensive, and the clicks tend to convert poorly because the searcher already has a firm in mind. There are also professional conduct considerations around trademark and advertising language that are worth confirming with your own counsel before you try it.
- How do we know the agency running our account is doing anything?
- Ask for the search terms report and the negative keyword list, both changed within the last month. Ask which conversion action the campaigns optimize toward and whether it fires on a form or on a booked consultation. Ask for cost per matter opened by county. Vague dashboards answer none of those.
- Can paid search work for a solo practice or a two-attorney firm?
- Often better than for a large firm, because a small operation can answer fast and can afford to run narrow. Pick one county and two matter types, keep the budget honest, and pause when the calendar is full rather than buying inquiries nobody can reach.
