The exact-match core of a divorce account is smaller than it looks
A well built family law account is a short list of phrases someone types with a decision already made.
Start with the retention-intent terms: divorce attorney, family law attorney, child custody lawyer, each paired with the county and the main cities you serve. Exact and phrase match only at the start. Broad match in this vertical spends fast on people researching, venting or looking for forms.
Split by matter type into separate ad groups so the ad copy can actually match the search. Someone typing a custody modification query and someone typing an uncontested divorce query want opposite reassurances, and one generic ad serves neither.
Keep the high-value modifiers in their own groups where the economics justify a higher bid: high asset, business owner, military, contested. Those matters fund the account.
Add competitor terms only after the core is profitable, and expect the click quality to be lower than it looks.
Negative keywords do more for a family law account than bidding does
Most of the money lost in a legal account is spent on searches that could never have become a client.
Build the negative list before launch, not after the first invoice. Free, pro bono, legal aid, forms, PDF, how to file myself, self service, salary, jobs, internship, law school, and every variant of do it yourself.
Add the entertainment and information noise: celebrity divorce news, statistics, quotes, reddit, and the names of television lawyers. It sounds trivial until you read a search terms report.
Filter geography aggressively. Family jurisdiction follows residence and filing county, so clicks from outside Palm Beach County are usually worth less to you even when the searcher is nearby, and Miami-Dade and Broward clicks are being bid on by firms who practise there daily.
Review search terms weekly for the first two months, then fortnightly. In this vertical the negative list is the account, and it never stops needing attention.
Local Services Ads sit on a different rulebook to the search account
The Google Screened placements above the search ads price and qualify leads differently, so they need to be judged separately.
Local Services Ads for legal categories are generally sold per lead rather than per click and require a screening and licence verification step. Availability and eligibility for specific legal categories change, so confirm the current position with Google before you plan a budget around it.
The lead quality is mixed, the dispute process for bad leads is real but slow, and the ranking factors are closer to a map listing than to an ad auction. Responsiveness and review volume matter.
Run it as a separate line item with its own cost per signed retainer. Blending it into the search account hides which one is actually working.
Do not shut down search ads because the screened placement is cheaper per lead. They reach different people at different moments, and the cheaper lead is frequently the worse one.
Paid social reaches the client months before the search does
People do not decide to file the day they search; they decide over a long, quiet stretch when nobody is bidding on them.
Search only catches the moment of action. In family law the preceding period is long, and that is where paid social earns its place: video and short written creative from a named attorney, running to a broad county-level audience rather than a narrow interest stack.
Platform targeting on sensitive personal characteristics has been restricted over the years, and family law creative can trip ad review. Write it as calm, useful information from a person, not as a divorce pitch. Practically, the ads that survive review tend to be the ones that would also survive a client reading them.
Retargeting is where paid social pays for itself in this vertical, with an important caveat: a divorce ad following someone around their phone can be seen by the person they live with. Cap frequency, keep creative generic enough to be safe, and give people an obvious way to opt out.
Professional network targeting is worth testing for referral flow rather than direct clients. Financial advisers, CPAs, therapists and other attorneys refer family matters constantly, and reaching them by role is cheaper than reaching a divorcing spouse by guesswork.
Bid by courthouse catchment, not by a thirty mile radius
Palm Beach County is long, and a single radius around downtown wastes money at both ends of it.
The circuit's family work is dispersed. The Judge Daniel T. K. Hurley Courthouse sits in West Palm Beach, a North County Courthouse operates at 3188 PGA Blvd. in Palm Beach Gardens with a North County domestic relations division, and there are further courthouses in Delray Beach and Belle Glade.
Those catchments have different client economics. Bid them as separate location groups with separate modifiers and separate budgets so the north county spend does not quietly subsidise a segment that never retains.
Set targeting to presence rather than presence-or-interest. Otherwise you buy clicks from people in other states researching Florida divorce, which is a large and useless audience.
Pace the budget for weekday mornings and Monday in particular. Family law enquiry volume is not evenly spread across the week, and a daily cap that exhausts by noon on your best day is a self inflicted wound.
Cost per signed retainer settles arguments cost per lead cannot
A channel that produces cheap leads and no retainers is more expensive than the one that looks costly on the surface.
Instrument the whole path: click, call or form, consultation booked, consultation held, retainer signed. Offline conversion imports back into the ad platform, so that bidding optimises toward the stage that pays you rather than the stage that is easy to count.
Family law converts largely on the phone. Without call tracking and a disciplined intake log, you are optimising blind, and the platform will happily find you more of whatever is cheapest to produce.
Expect wide variance by matter type. A contested high asset dissolution can justify a cost per retainer that would be indefensible for an uncontested filing, which is why matter-type ad groups exist.
Give any change four to six weeks of data before you judge it, and accept that some questions will never reach statistical certainty at one county's volume. Judgement, applied consistently and reviewed against the retainer log, beats waiting for significance that will not arrive.
Questions we actually get
- What should a family law firm in West Palm Beach budget for paid search?
- We will not quote you a figure we made up. The honest way to set it is backwards: take your average retainer by matter type, decide what you can pay to sign one and still be pleased, then run a deliberately narrow exact-match account for six to eight weeks to find your actual cost per lead in this county. That number, not an industry benchmark, sets the budget. Anything below the level where the core terms can compete on your best days is money spent proving nothing.
- Should we run ads for domestic violence injunctions?
- With care. The searches are urgent and the matters are real, but the intent is often information rather than retention, and the creative and landing page carry safety implications, including who else might see the browsing history or a retargeting ad. If you take that work, run it in its own campaign with its own copy, its own budget and no retargeting.
- Is paid social worth it, or should everything go into search?
- Search first, always, because it captures people already acting. Once the search account is stable, moving a portion of budget into county-level paid social and retargeting usually widens the top of the funnel in a way search cannot, because family law decisions form over months. Judge it on assisted retainers over a long window, not on last-click attribution, which will always flatter search.
- How do we stop wasting money on people looking for free legal help?
- Negative keywords, built before launch and reviewed weekly, plus exact and phrase match rather than broad. Also worth doing: put your consultation fee policy on the landing page. A page that is clear about what a consultation costs filters out the traffic you do not want before it costs you a call.
- Can you guarantee a number of cases per month?
- No, and we would walk away from anyone who does. What we will commit to is a defined account structure, a weekly search terms review, offline conversion tracking through to signed retainer, and a monthly read on cost per retainer by matter type. If the economics do not work after a fair test, we will tell you that rather than spend your budget proving it slowly.
