The Causeway and the river decide your geo targets, not a radius
Distance in this metro is measured in bridges, so a circle drawn around your office buys clicks from people who will never make the trip.
A twenty five mile radius from a downtown office covers open water, marsh, and three parishes with different courts, different competition and different buyers. The map tool does not know that.
Build the target from the places instead. Orleans Parish. Jefferson Parish with Metairie and Kenner named. St. Tammany with Mandeville, Covington and Slidell. The West Bank and Algiers as their own line if you want that traffic.
Set location options to presence rather than presence or interest. Otherwise you pay for people researching Louisiana divorce from another state, and the account will look busy while producing nothing.
Give each parish its own budget. Bid adjustments inside a single campaign hide which market is actually paying for itself, which is the one thing you need to see.
Emergency filings and uncontested matters should never share a bid
Urgency is the strongest value signal in a family law account, and matter type is how you capture it.
One ad group per matter: divorce, custody, support, modification, protective orders, adoption. Split further where the economics diverge, for instance a contested matter involving a business or significant property.
Urgent searches convert on the phone within the hour. Slow research searches convert over weeks. Same account, different bids, different landing pages, different follow-up.
Uncontested and low-fee filing searches are worth buying only if the firm genuinely wants that work at a price it will honor. If not, those words belong in the negative list, not in a campaign nobody wants to report on.
Write the ad to the matter. A headline naming custody modification repels the person starting a first divorce, and repelling the wrong click is the point.
Most of the divorce auction is people hunting for forms, not for counsel
The highest-return hour in a family law account is spent building the negative keyword list, not adjusting bids.
Recurring offenders: forms, paperwork, filing fees, free, pro bono, legal aid, do it yourself, clerk of court, and the online divorce brands that bid across every legal term in the language.
Add local ambiguity. Jefferson, Orleans and Washington are place names in other states too, and broad match knows it even when your geography does not.
Add employment and education terms. Paralegal jobs, law school, internship, salary. They drain a legal account quietly.
Read the search terms report every week for the first two months, then monthly. Nothing else in the account returns as much per hour of attention.
A West Bank click and a Covington click are worth different money
Case mix, travel and competition vary by parish, so one blended cost target hides which market is actually profitable.
Start from what an opened matter is worth to the firm by matter type. Work backward through your own consultation and engagement rates to a maximum click cost you can defend out loud.
Report cost per opened matter by parish. Cost per lead flatters whichever campaign produces cheap form fills and punishes the one producing serious phone calls.
Expect St. Tammany and Orleans Parish to behave differently, and do not assume in advance which is better. Cheaper clicks on the Northshore can still cost more per matter once travel and no-shows are counted.
Your matter records hold the only honest scoreboard. Import them into the ad platform as offline conversions where the system allows it, and reconcile by hand each month where it does not.
The landing page has to match the matter, or you pay twice for one click
Sending every ad to a general family law page throws away the targeting you just paid for.
One page per ad group. A custody ad lands on a custody page that names the parishes you file in and shows the next step without scrolling.
Keep the form short and put a tap-to-call number where a thumb naturally rests. Most of these clicks arrive on phones, frequently at night.
Page weight behaves like a bid multiplier. A page that takes several seconds on cell data loses the most impatient share of traffic before anything renders, and you paid for every one of them.
Track which page produced which call. Dynamic number insertion is the inexpensive version and it works well enough to settle most arguments.
Bidding harder cannot buy you a second intake person
The account can only deliver as many conversations as the office can answer, and spend past that point buys nothing at all.
Before approving a budget increase, count last month's unanswered calls and the web inquiries that waited more than a day. Fix that number first and the same spend produces more matters.
Pace to the hours somebody is actually at the desk. If nobody answers after six, either fund coverage for those hours or stop paying for the clicks that arrive in them.
The order that usually works: answer the phone, tighten negatives, match the landing pages, then raise budget. Reversing it is how accounts get expensive without getting better.
Google applies verification requirements to legal advertisers, so build time into the launch plan and confirm the current rules with the platform and your own counsel rather than with a blog post.
Questions we actually get
- What should a family law firm expect to spend on Google Ads here?
- We will not quote a number before seeing your matter values and your intake capacity, because a budget invented in advance is guesswork. The honest method runs backward: what an opened matter is worth by type, what share of consultations become engagements, and how many calls your office can actually take in a week. That produces a defensible ceiling on click cost and a budget that fits it.
- Should we run one campaign for the whole New Orleans area?
- Generally not. Orleans, Jefferson and St. Tammany parishes have different competition, different travel realities and often different case mixes. Separate campaigns with separate budgets let you see which parish pays for itself. A single blended campaign averages them and hides the answer, which is usually the point at which a firm concludes that paid search does not work.
- Are Local Services Ads worth it for a family law practice?
- They sit on a different set of rules from the search account, including verification steps for legal advertisers, and both eligibility and requirements change. They are worth evaluating alongside search rather than instead of it. Confirm current eligibility and any professional advertising constraints with the platform and your own counsel before committing budget.
- How do we stop paying for people who just want the forms?
- Negative keywords, reviewed weekly at first. Terms around forms, filing fees, do it yourself, legal aid and clerk of court account for a large share of wasted spend in family law accounts. Ad copy that names a specific matter type also filters traffic before the click, which costs nothing.
- What number should we judge the account by?
- Cost per opened matter, broken out by parish and matter type. Cost per lead measures form fills, and form fills are the easiest thing in the account to manufacture. If your case management system can feed matter outcomes back to the ad platform, do that. If it cannot, reconcile the two by hand each month and accept a small lag.
