One account cannot serve a Dallas docket and a Fort Worth docket
Dallas and Fort Worth are separate markets with separate downtowns and an hour of freeway between them, and one campaign averaging both tells you nothing useful.
A radius drawn around your office looks tidy on a map and spends badly. Thirty miles from a Dallas address reaches into Tarrant County, where a different set of firms has been buying the same clicks for years and where your attorneys may not want to appear anyway.
Set geography to the counties you file in, as separate campaigns with separate budgets. Dallas County in one. Collin and Denton together or apart, depending on volume. Tarrant only if a partner genuinely drives there, and never because the map looked incomplete.
Check the targeting method as well as the shape. Platforms will show your ads to people merely interested in a location unless you restrict to people actually present there. A family law account with that setting wrong pays for browsing from other states, and the resulting inquiries are unworkable.
Separation also gives you the ability to turn one county off. When Denton is producing inquiries nobody follows up on, you want to be able to pause Denton without touching the campaign that is working.
Emergency filings and long modifications do not belong in the same campaign
Urgency changes everything about how someone searches, clicks and behaves, so it should change how you buy.
Someone searching for help with an immediate safety issue converts within minutes, ignores your bio page, and needs a phone number in the first line of the ad. Someone considering a modification of an existing order may take months and will read three pages before calling.
Put those into different campaigns with different ad copy, different landing pages, and different budgets. Blending them produces an average cost per inquiry that describes neither and an ad that speaks to neither.
Match intent inside the ad. For urgent matters, say what happens when they call and how fast. For considered matters, say what the first meeting costs and what it covers. Vague reassurance performs worse than a concrete detail in both cases.
Keep claims about outcomes out of the copy entirely. Attorney advertising rules are strict, they vary, and a promise of results is the fastest way to create a problem worth more than any campaign. Anything close to the line is worth a review by your own counsel.
Exclude the DIY searcher, the job seeker and the other Arlington
In this category the exclusion list does more work than the bid strategy.
A large share of the divorce and custody auction is people who want paperwork rather than counsel. Forms, fees, filing instructions, how to do it without a lawyer, the clerk's office. Those clicks cost the same as a real inquiry and never sign.
Place names cause a second class of waste. Several North Texas city names exist in other states, and broad matching does not care which one you meant. Arlington and Irving are the obvious traps, and there is a Dallas in Georgia. Geographic targeting alone does not solve it, because someone sitting here can search for a lawyer somewhere else.
Add the recruiting queries. People looking for jobs at law firms, paralegal programs and internships click on legal ads constantly. So do students and other attorneys researching a topic.
Build the negative list before launch, then mine the search terms report weekly for the first two months and monthly after that. Discipline here reliably saves more money than any change to bidding, and it takes an hour.
Collin County clicks are contested, so decide what a consultation is worth first
Set your ceiling from your own economics before the auction sets it for you.
The northern corridor has drawn years of corporate relocation, which produces exactly the buyer paid search is best at reaching: someone with means, no existing attorney, and an urgent need. Every firm in the metro has noticed. Clicks there are contested.
Work backward from your own numbers, which you already have. What share of consultations sign. What an average matter is worth to the firm. How many consultations a partner can take in a week. Those three figures produce a defensible maximum for a booked consultation, and everything in the account should answer to it.
Do not import a benchmark from an article. Costs in this category vary enormously by county, matter type, hour and competitor behavior, and any number quoted without your own data is a guess wearing a suit.
Once you have the ceiling, the bidding question gets simple. Bid to it in the counties that clear it, and stop funding the ones that do not, no matter how good the click volume looks in the report.
Your own month-to-month pattern should set pacing, not an even daily budget
Family law demand is uneven across the year and across the week, and a flat daily budget quietly underfunds your best days.
Most firms have a rhythm they can describe from memory but have never plotted. Certain weeks bring a jump in calls. Certain months are slow. Pull two years of intake records and chart them before you set a pacing plan.
Weekly patterns matter as much. Inquiries often arrive at hours nobody is at the desk, and paying for a click at nine on a Sunday night only works if something answers. Either staff the hours you buy or buy the hours you staff.
Avoid the common failure of spending the monthly budget in the first two weeks. Search platforms will happily do it, and the second half of the month goes dark exactly when a competitor's budget also runs out and the auction gets cheaper.
Review pacing monthly against consultations attended, not against clicks. A month with fewer clicks and more attended meetings is a better month, and only pacing tied to real outcomes will show that.
Feed signed matters back into the account or you are optimizing for form fills
Automated bidding gets better at producing whatever you tell it counts, so tell it the truth.
A form submission is not a client. Left alone, the platform will find you more of whatever is easiest to submit, which in family law means a great deal of noise: wrong county, wrong matter type, people who want free advice.
Connect the outcome back. When a consultation is booked, and again when a matter is signed, push that event back into the ad account from your case management system or intake tool. Bidding then optimizes toward the thing you actually sell.
Set up call tracking properly, since most family law inquiries arrive by phone. Track by campaign, record where permitted and where your own policy allows, and review a sample every month.
Report on cost per booked consultation by county. It ends arguments that cost per lead cannot. A county producing cheap inquiries that never attend is more expensive than one producing few that always do, and only the county-level view shows it.
Questions we actually get
- How should we split budget between Dallas County and Collin County?
- Start by splitting them into separate campaigns with separate budgets, then let attended consultations decide the ratio over the first sixty to ninety days. Do not set the split from population or from a guess about which is wealthier. The counties behave differently in the auction and your firm's reputation is stronger in one than the other, which shows up in results long before any demographic argument does.
- Is Local Services Advertising worth running alongside search?
- For many family law firms it is worth testing, because it sits above regular search results and charges differently. It also runs on its own eligibility, verification and dispute rules, which are separate from your search account and change periodically. Treat it as its own channel with its own reporting rather than as an extension of search, and confirm current requirements before you build a plan around it.
- What should we do about competitors bidding on our firm name?
- Bid on your own name. It is usually inexpensive and it keeps a competitor from buying the click of someone specifically looking for you. Bidding on their names is legal in most respects but produces poor results in this category and can attract complaints. Spend the energy on your exclusion list instead, which will save more money than either tactic earns.
- Can we run paid ads if nobody answers the phone after five?
- You can, but you will pay for calls that go unanswered, and family law callers rarely leave a message before trying the next firm. Either restrict the schedule to hours you cover, or put a real answering service in place with a script that captures matter type, county and a callback window. Paid demand is the most expensive traffic you will ever buy, so it deserves the best intake coverage you have.
- How much should we spend to start?
- Enough that a single county campaign can gather meaningful data within a month, which depends on click costs in your matter types and cannot be quoted responsibly without looking at your account and your market. What we will not do is spread a small budget across four counties and two matter types, because every segment then produces numbers too thin to act on and the account never gets out of guessing.
