Targeting Cook County buys you Schaumburg and Berwyn whether you meant to or not
The county line is the laziest geographic target available here and it quietly funds markets you may have no intention of serving.
Cook contains the whole city and a long list of suburbs including Evanston, Skokie, Oak Park, Berwyn and Schaumburg. Selecting the county selects all of it. A firm whose real catchment is the North Side plus a few near suburbs will spend a meaningful share of budget on clicks from thirty miles out.
Build the targets from where clients actually come from and where you actually appear. Pull the last hundred matters, map them, and let that shape the polygons. Radius circles drawn from your office address are a shortcut that ignores how people here move.
Keep DuPage, Lake, Will and Kane as their own campaigns if you serve them at all. They are separate auctions with separate competitive sets, and folding them into a Chicagoland budget means the loudest market eats the rest.
Set location options to presence rather than presence or interest. Otherwise you pay for people researching Chicago divorce law from another state, and family law attracts a lot of that.
Your negative list should start with the words for doing it without you
Most wasted spend in a family law account is not bad bidding, it is queries from people who have already decided not to hire an attorney.
The obvious block list is forms, fee waiver, free, pro se, do it yourself, online, cheap, and the names of the document filing services. Add legal aid and law school clinic. None of those people are going to sign a retainer, and several of them will click a lot.
Then block the adjacent professions and the research traffic. Paralegal, mediator training, salary, jobs, how to become. Family law also pulls students and people reading about celebrity cases.
Run the search terms report weekly for the first two months, not monthly. Broad match will find categories of waste you would never have guessed, and the early weeks are when it does the most damage.
Keep the list in a shared document with a note beside each entry explaining why it is there. Accounts change hands, and an unexplained negative list gets deleted by the next person.
The searcher whose spouse already filed converts this week
Intent inside the divorce category varies enormously, and the highest-value clicks are the ones where a deadline already exists.
Someone who has been served has a response deadline and a genuine reason to hire in days. Someone typing a general question about whether they should get divorced may be six months out, or may never move. Both look similar in a keyword tool. They behave nothing alike.
Structure around that. Give served, responding, emergency and post-decree enforcement their own ad groups with their own copy and their own bids. Keep the exploratory research terms in a separate, cheaper container where you can watch them without letting them set the account's cost per matter.
Match the ad copy to the state the person is in. A headline about a free consultation is weaker than one that says you can meet this week and explains what to bring.
Enforcement and modification traffic is consistently underpriced relative to what those matters are worth. Most competitors are still fighting over the front end.
Hold budget back in December so it is there in January
Even daily pacing across twelve months guarantees you are underspent in your best month and overspent in your worst.
Look at your own intake and filing records by month before you set a budget curve. Most firms find real seasonality, and the winter shape in this city tends to be sharper than a national template expects.
Set the annual number first, then distribute it against your own pattern rather than dividing by twelve. Google will happily spend a flat budget in a slow month and cap you in a busy one.
Pacing also needs a staffing plan attached. Buying more clicks in a week when nobody is answering the phone converts to nothing. Budget and coverage should move together.
Check the curve twice a year against matters actually opened. If the pattern shifted, the budget should shift with it rather than being re-derived from last year's assumptions.
Price a February drive from Naperville before you widen the map
Geographic reach on paper is not the same as a person willing to make the trip, and winter shortens the distance people will travel.
A prospect in Naperville or Elmhurst weighing a first meeting in the Loop is weighing a real journey. In January that journey involves weather, parking and a return trip in the dark. Plenty of otherwise good matters die at that calculation.
If you want the collar counties, either offer video consultations as a genuine first option or say clearly where you appear and why the trip is worth it. Advertising into a market you make hard to reach is a slow way to lose money.
Build the geography around travel realities rather than around county shapes. Two towns the same distance away on a map can be very different in practice.
Report cost per matter by area. A suburb that looks expensive on cost per lead sometimes looks fine on signed matters, and the reverse happens just as often.
A thirty day conversion window makes your best campaign look like your worst
Family law matters close over weeks, and the default measurement settings in most accounts cannot see that far.
A parent who calls in the first week of a separation may sign in three weeks or in four months. With a short conversion window, the campaigns that produce those matters get starved because the account never learns they worked.
Lengthen the window, and more importantly get signed matters back into the account. Import them from your case management system with the value attached. Optimizing toward form fills teaches the machine to buy you more form fills.
Count in stages: inquiry, consultation booked, consultation attended, matter opened. Most firms measure the first and argue about the last without ever seeing the two in between.
Cost per signed matter is the only number that settles a budget conversation. Cost per lead can move in the right direction while the practice gets worse.
Questions we actually get
- What should our monthly Google Ads budget be?
- We will not quote a number before knowing what a signed matter is worth to you and how many the firm can actually staff. The honest sequence is to establish your average matter value, decide what you can afford to pay for one, and work backward. Any agency naming a budget before asking those two questions is guessing.
- Are Local Services Ads worth running alongside search?
- For many firms yes, because they sit in a different position and are billed differently, but they run on their own rules and screening process and they are not a substitute for a search account. Treat them as a separate line with separate reporting rather than folding the numbers together.
- Should we bid on competitors' firm names?
- It is possible and it is sometimes profitable, but it is also a fast way to start a fight with the firm across the street and it can raise questions under advertising rules. Check the current rules with your own counsel, and be aware that competitor traffic in family law converts worse than it looks because many of those searchers are already referred.
- Is remarketing appropriate for a divorce practice?
- Handle it with real care or not at all. Ads following someone across devices in a shared household can create a genuine safety and privacy problem, and it is not hypothetical. If you run it, restrict it tightly, exclude sensitive matter types, and make sure the creative would be harmless if seen by the other party.
- How quickly will we know whether the account is working?
- You will see cost and click data immediately and learn very little from it. Signed matters take longer, which is exactly why the conversion window and the offline import matter so much. Plan on judging the account by matters opened over a meaningful stretch rather than by week two's cost per lead.
