A radius drawn from downtown buys clicks across the Mississippi you may not be able to file
The default thirty mile circle around the city center is half a plan, because a meaningful part of it is in another state.
Cross the Mississippi and you are in Illinois. Madison County and St. Clair County, the Metro East, run under an entirely different set of state rules. If you are not admitted there, those clicks cost exactly what the useful ones cost and return nothing.
Build the geography as a list rather than a shape. The City of St. Louis, St. Louis County, St. Charles County, whichever outlying counties you actually appear in, and the Illinois counties only if you are admitted to practice there. Admission requirements differ by state and are worth confirming with your own counsel before anyone writes ad copy about them.
Check the setting that controls whether the platform counts people physically present in your area or merely interested in it. The interest option quietly sells you the entire country, and family law attracts a lot of idle interest.
Then report by geography from day one. Without that split you cannot tell whether the account is working or whether one strong area is paying for three weak ones.
One shared budget for the city, the county and St. Charles funds whichever bids fastest
Shared budgets do not distribute themselves fairly, they distribute themselves toward the cheapest inventory, which is rarely the most valuable.
Put the city, the county and St. Charles County in one campaign and the auction decides your strategy for you. Whichever area produces volume soonest each morning eats the budget, and the areas you actually want are still queued at noon.
Separate campaigns with separate daily budgets end the argument. The City of St. Louis and St. Louis County are different governments and behave like different markets. St. Charles County is a third market with its own mix of matters, not an outer ring of the second.
Click costs differ across those lines and so does what a signed matter is worth. Averaging them together produces a blended number that describes nowhere.
Once the split exists, look for the trap: the cheapest geography is often cheap because the matters there are smaller. Cost per click is not the metric that decides where the money should go.
The word after divorce is what you are really bidding on
The noun tells you the practice area, the modifier tells you whether the searcher intends to hire anyone.
Divorce lawyer, divorce forms, divorce cost, how to file for divorce in Missouri: four different people with four different budgets, and one of them will never hire a firm.
Group by intent rather than by matter type alone. Hire intent, price intent, process intent, do-it-yourself. The structure makes bidding obvious and makes the negative keyword list write itself.
Bid hire intent hard, because that is the auction you are actually in. Buy price intent only if your landing page answers the price question honestly, since sending a cost searcher to a page with no numbers just buys them a bounce. Leave the do-it-yourself set alone unless you have a specific reason.
Read the search terms report weekly and treat it as a list of things to exclude. Broad match drifts toward volume, and in this practice area volume includes people researching the other side of their own case.
Somebody is bidding on your firm's name and you should decide what that is worth
Brand queries are the cheapest conversions in the account and the easiest place to fool yourself.
Competitors and lead brokers bid on firm names. If yours has any recognition in the county, someone is buying it. Defending it usually costs little.
Test whether the defense is doing anything. Pause the brand campaign for a couple of weeks and watch total inquiries rather than paid inquiries. If nothing moves, you were paying for clicks you would have received anyway.
Bidding on competitor names is a separate question with rules attached. Attorney advertising restrictions vary and the practice carries reputational cost in a market where opposing counsel is often someone you will see next month. Confirm with your own counsel before running it.
Whatever you decide, report brand separately. Blending brand conversions into the account average makes a mediocre non-brand campaign look healthy.
The click in February and the retainer in June belong on the same line of the report
Family law buying decisions stretch over weeks or months, so any report that stops at the click understates the account and misdirects the budget.
A parent searches, reads, waits, talks to a sibling, waits again, then calls. The click that started it is long out of the standard reporting window by the time money changes hands.
Connect the two ends. Call tracking on every ad destination, a consistent way to record where an inquiry came from at the moment of first contact, and a periodic match against your case management system to see which of those became consultations and which became signed matters.
Push that outcome data back into the platform. If the only event the account ever learns from is a submitted form, it will get extremely good at producing submitted forms and the people attached to them will get worse.
Judge the account on cost per consultation that actually happened and, where you can measure it, cost per signed matter, broken out by geography and matter type. A per-lead number in this practice area is close to meaningless.
Send the Ballwin click to a page that names the venue, not to your homepage
The homepage is a summary of your firm, and a person who just clicked a custody ad did not ask for a summary.
Match the page to the ad group. If the ad said custody modification in St. Louis County, the page headline should say the same thing in nearly the same words, and the reader should see it without scrolling.
Name where you file. A caller in Ballwin or Florissant is deciding whether you are a firm that appears in their venue before deciding whether you are any good, and they will not dig for it.
Keep the mechanics boring. A visible phone number, a short form, no chat window that covers the copy, and a page that loads fast on cell service. Paid traffic is the least patient traffic you buy.
One page per ad group sounds expensive and is not, because the pages built this way also serve organic search if you write them as real pages instead of as ad receipts.
Questions we actually get
- Should we run ads to the Metro East if we are not licensed in Illinois?
- Not for hire-intent terms. You would be paying for clicks that end in a referral at best. A better use of that demand is one honest page on your site, reached organically, that explains what you cannot handle and points readers in a useful direction. That page also tends to start a reciprocal referral relationship with an Illinois firm, which costs nothing.
- How much budget does a family law account here need to work?
- We will not invent a number, because the answer depends on your matter mix, how many venues you cover and what a signed matter is worth to your firm. The structural answer is more useful: a budget too thin to compete in one geography is better spent owning that one geography than spread across the city, the county, St. Charles County and the Illinois side at once.
- Are Local Services Ads worth it alongside a search campaign?
- They operate under their own verification and eligibility process, separate from the search account, and they behave differently in reporting. Worth evaluating on their own terms rather than folding into the same budget conversation. Confirm the current requirements directly with the platform and with your own counsel, since attorney eligibility rules change.
- How do we stop paying for people looking for court forms or the clerk's office?
- Negative keywords, reviewed weekly rather than set once. Search terms reports in this practice area fill with self-help, form, filing fee, courthouse address and case lookup traffic. Excluding those consistently usually does more for account performance than any bidding change, and the list is specific to your matter mix so it cannot be copied from a template.
- Does paid social have a role for a family law firm?
- It reaches people before they search, which suits matter types with a long lead-in such as modifications, rather than urgent filings. Handle audience and remarketing settings carefully, because an ad about custody appearing on a shared household device is a real risk and not a hypothetical one. Ad content also falls under attorney advertising rules, so run creative past your own counsel.
