Law firms and legal services
One click in this sector can cost more than a meal out. That is bearable if you know what a matter is worth and unbearable if you do not.
You are a solicitor or a legal services firm. Work arrives by enquiry, is qualified by a person, and turns into a matter with a fee attached weeks or months later.
You are paying some of the highest click prices in advertising, the enquiry volume looks acceptable, and nobody has ever traced a fee earning matter back to the campaign that caused it.
What we keep finding
Four things that make legal advertising expensive.
Practice areas are averaged together
A conveyancing enquiry, a personal injury enquiry and a commercial dispute have nothing in common except a website. One blended cost per enquiry across all of them is a number that describes none of them and misdirects the budget in all three.
Unqualified enquiries are counted at full value
People outside your jurisdiction, matters you do not take, and people looking for free advice. In some practice areas they are the majority of enquiries and they are optimised toward as enthusiastically as the good ones.
The matter is opened weeks after the window closed
Default conversion windows expire long before a client instructs. The campaign that produced a twelve thousand pound matter shows a zero in the report, gets its budget cut, and the firm never finds out.
The enquiry handling is the weakest link and nobody listens to it
Legal enquiries are frequently answered by whoever is at reception, in a sector where the caller is anxious and comparing two firms. Call recordings usually explain more about a poor conversion rate than any campaign report.
How it starts
The first six weeks.
Slower than usual, because a sector with a long cycle cannot be understood from a month of forward looking data. The first phase is mostly archaeology.
Work backwards from billed matters
We take twelve months of opened matters with their fee income and trace each one back as far as the records allow. This alone frequently overturns the firm's belief about which channel works.
Define qualified, per practice area
Jurisdiction, matter type, value threshold and conflict check. Written down and agreed with the fee earners rather than with whoever runs the website.
Match the measurement to the cycle
Conversion windows matched to each practice area's real cycle, and matter opening fed back to the ad platforms with its value attached.
Then split the accounts
One campaign structure per practice area, with its own budget, its own targets and its own definition of a good month.
The qualification conversation is the most valuable ninety seconds in the firm and the least examined. It is usually where the money is being lost.
What we measure here
The numbers a firm runs on.
- Enquiry, qualified enquiry, matter opened and fee billed, as four separate events
- Everything split by practice area, never blended
- Attribution windows set to each area's real decision length
- Fee income imported back and sent to the ad platforms as conversion value
- Call recordings reviewed for qualification quality, with the common objections written down
- Out of area and out of scope enquiries excluded from the targets rather than counted in them
- Nothing client identifying sent to any advertising platform, ever
Questions people ask
The ones that actually arrive.
Is any of this compatible with our confidentiality obligations?
It is built to be. Nothing leaves your systems that could identify a client or a matter. What goes back to an advertising platform is an anonymous reference, a value and a date. If a technique requires more than that, we do not use it and we will explain why.
Our click costs are absurd. Is paid search viable at all?
In some practice areas, honestly, no, and we would tell you. Where the matter value is high enough it is viable even at those prices, but only once you can see which enquiries become matters. Running expensive search without that is the single fastest way to lose money in this sector.
We get most of our work from referrals.
Then protecting and measuring that comes first. Firms in this position often spend on advertising that is quietly intercepting referred clients searching for their name, which looks like acquisition and is not.
Can you help with content and SEO?
Yes, and in legal it is usually the better long term investment. It is slow, and we will be straightforward about how slow. A firm that wants results this quarter should be looking at the enquiry handling first, because that moves faster and costs less.
Proof
An Australian taxi company
More calls, at less than half the cost, by telling Google which callers paid.
Not a legal client. The relevance is the method: the same refusal to count an enquiry as a sale, applied in a sector where the cost of being wrong is much higher per click.
Read the case study- more booking calls
+27%
more booking calls
- lower cost per call
−56%
lower cost per call
- average cost per click
$2.10
average cost per click
Where this usually starts
Two pieces of work, in this order.
Businesses that sell the same way
Your turn
Bring the number you do not trust.
30 minutes. Most of these conversations start with somebody describing a report they have stopped believing.