You will not outspend the statewide advertisers, so buy a narrower slice of the Front Range
A small account visible for a tight keyword set every day beats a broad account that runs dry mid-month.
The generic metro terms are the most contested inventory in the auction and the least specific about intent. Bidding there puts your budget against firms with three times the spend and no reason to stop.
Narrow on two axes. Matter type, so you are buying the work you want rather than everything with the word divorce in it. Geography, so a practice that files mostly in Jefferson and Douglas owns those searches instead of paying to appear in Adams County where it never files.
Narrower keywords usually cost less per click and convert better, because the ad can say exactly what the searcher asked about. A person typing a parenting time modification query is not served by an ad about family law representation.
Set the budget so the tight set runs all month. Being present every day for twenty terms is worth more than being present for two hundred until the middle of the month.
Draw the target on the counties you file in, then cut the mountains loose
A radius from a downtown office crosses five separate jurisdictions and keeps going into the foothills.
Denver is one city and county, and the ring around it is not. A circle drawn from a LoDo address spends money in places with different courts, different buyer profiles and, for many firms, no intention of taking the case.
Target by county and by city rather than by radius. Exclude the areas you decline. Set targeting to people present in the location rather than people interested in it, so you are not funding clicks from someone researching a move.
Report by county from the first week. Without it you cannot tell whether Castle Rock clicks are expensive because the auction is competitive or because the ad is wrong for that reader.
Hold off on county-level bid adjustments until you have enough signed matters to justify them. Until then, separate campaigns per county keep the budget honest and the reporting readable.
Colorado publishes the forms, so much of the auction is people avoiding lawyers
A large share of family law clicks come from self-represented searchers, and your negative list is the only thing standing between them and your budget.
Court systems publish self-help material and instructions, and people use it. They search for forms, for filing costs, for the clerk, for how to do it themselves. Every one of those clicks bills at attorney prices.
Build the negative list before launch rather than after: free, forms, pdf, template, do it yourself, legal aid, pro bono, salary, jobs, internship, court address, and the online divorce brands by name.
Cut adjacent practice noise too. Immigration, criminal, probate and personal injury terms drift into a loosely matched family law account constantly.
Read the search terms report weekly for the first month, then monthly. Add negatives in batches and keep a dated log of what you added, so nobody re-litigates it in six months.
Performance Max spends a family law budget faster than it learns from it
Automated campaign types need conversion volume that a single-metro family law practice rarely produces.
Automation optimizes toward whatever you counted. Count form fills and it will find you people who fill in forms, including the ones nobody can help.
Start with search campaigns on exact and phrase match, a small keyword set, and bidding you can explain out loud. Add automated bidding once there is enough conversion history for it to mean something.
Broad match paired with smart bidding deserves the same caution on a small account. It can work, but only with a mature negative list and conversions that represent signed matters.
If someone proposes routing your whole budget into an automated campaign in month one, ask what the conversion action is. The answer usually explains the proposal.
The Castle Rock click should land on a Castle Rock page
Where the ad points is a conversion decision, and most accounts treat it as an afterthought.
Sending every ad to the homepage wastes the specificity you just paid for. The homepage sells the firm. The searcher asked a narrower question and wants it answered in the first screen.
Match the chain: keyword theme, ad copy, landing page. A custody ad aimed at Douglas County should land on a page that names the matter and the county and says what happens next.
The page needs to carry the matter, the county, what the first meeting costs and includes, one short form, a tappable phone number and a text option. Nothing else has to be there.
Do not build forty pages. Build the four or five that match the campaigns you are actually running, and keep them current with the ads.
Your own retainer math sets the bid ceiling, not an industry benchmark
The only defensible maximum bid is one you derive from what a signed matter is worth to your firm.
Pull the last twelve months out of your case management system by matter type: fees collected, how many consultations turned into signed matters, how many inquiries turned into consultations. Those are your numbers, and no benchmark substitutes for them.
Work backward from there. What you can afford per consultation attended, then per inquiry, then per click. The ceiling that falls out of that arithmetic is the one to hold to when a platform recommends raising bids.
Import offline conversions so the account is bidding toward retained matters. If that is not workable yet, at minimum record the campaign on every matter in the CRM and reconcile monthly.
Pace to intake capacity, not to an even daily spread. Turning the budget up in a week when nobody can answer the phone converts money into voicemail.
Questions we actually get
- What should a Denver family law firm expect to pay per click?
- It varies by matter type, county and time of year, and any specific figure quoted before an account audit is invented. The number worth knowing is your own: click cost only matters in relation to how many inquiries become consultations and how many consultations become signed matters. Those two rates decide what you can afford.
- Should we run Local Services Ads as well as search ads?
- They are a different product with a different qualification process and their own screening rules for legal advertisers, and they sit above search results. Many firms run both. Treat them as separate line items with separate reporting, because they attract different callers and the lead quality question is answered differently for each.
- Is paid social worth anything for family law?
- It reaches people before they search, which makes it better suited to slower matters than to urgent ones, and it carries real privacy risk when ads follow someone onto a shared household device. If you run it, keep retargeting off the sensitive matter pages and think carefully about what an ad appearing on a family tablet could cause.
- How much budget do we need to start?
- Enough to be present every day for a small keyword set in the counties you actually file in, which is a smaller number than most proposals suggest. Starting narrow and expanding once the conversion tracking is trustworthy costs less than starting broad and cutting later.
- How do we stop paying for people looking for free legal help?
- Negative keywords, reviewed weekly at first. Add the obvious ones before launch, then mine the search terms report for the ones you would never guess. Landing page copy helps too: stating plainly how fees work filters the click before it becomes a call your intake person has to end politely.
