Google Ads for criminal defense lawyers: the build order

For criminal defense lawyers the conversion that matters is a signed fee agreement with the retainer paid, and it lives in your practice management or intake system (Clio, MyCase, Lawmatics) — not in the ad platform. Google can only optimize toward what you send it, so whatever you pick here decides what the algorithm spends the next ninety days chasing. Pick the wrong one and every later step in this playbook is executed perfectly in the wrong direction.

This is the step we get called about most. If you do not have a developer for it, that is the normal situation rather than the exception — it is most of what we do, and it is worth fixing before the spend rather than after.

Google enables these on every new Search campaign, and none of them are keyword decisions — they are switches on the settings screen that decide where the money goes before a single keyword applies. Everything else in this playbook operates on whatever is left after they have taken their cut, so a reader who skips this step spends the rest of it optimizing a remainder.

For Criminal Defense · Target the counties whose courts you appear in with presence-only targeting, and put county-named searches in a separate campaign that can reach out-of-state family searching about your area.

A criminal defense firm can only take cases in the courts where its lawyers are admitted and appear. The twist is who searches: the person arrested is often in custody, and the parent or partner searching may live in another county or another state. Presence-only targeting is right for broad charge terms, but it shuts out the mother in another state typing 'DUI lawyer [county]'. Give county-named searches their own campaign that can reach people searching about your area, and keep everything else to people who are in it.

Most criminal defense leads are phone calls, and many arrive at night or at weekends from someone other than the defendant. Google counts an ad call once it passes the duration you set and cannot tell a mother booking a consultation for her son from a man asking how to post bail. Because Google treats commission of a crime as a sensitive interest category, remarketing lists and Customer Match are off the table, so the call rule and what intake sends back carry more weight here than in most practice areas.

One flat keyword list is why most accounts in this vertical cannot tell which half of the budget works. Sorting terms by the intent behind them means you can bid, write and judge each group on its own terms — a problem-aware search and a competitor search convert at rates that have nothing to do with each other, and averaging them hides both.

Exact match includes close variants — misspellings, plurals, reordered words, dropped function words. Phrase match now behaves roughly like the old broad-match-modified. Broad match reaches as far as Google judges useful, which with a good conversion signal is genuinely valuable and without one is an open tap. Start narrow, prove the signal, then widen — in that order, because widening is reversible and a mistrained bidding algorithm is not.

For Criminal Defense · Broad match on 'criminal' drifts into criminal justice degrees, criminal records and TV shows, and 'bail' terms slip in through any loose match. Keep charge terms on phrase and exact until signed retainers import.

Every vertical has a set of searches that look commercial and are not. In criminal defense lawyers those are job seekers, students, people looking for free help, and DIY researchers. Broad and phrase match will find all of them for you. Add this list at the account level on day zero — the first week of an unfiltered account is the most expensive week it will ever have.

Ad groups exist so the ad can match the search. The moment a group holds two intents, the ad has to be vague enough to cover both, and vague ads lose the auction on relevance before budget ever enters the picture. Build these groups, each with its own ads and its own landing page.

Google rewards assets that match the search and the page behind it. It penalizes — and increasingly disapproves — copy that promises something the page does not deliver. Every line below is written to be provable on arrival. Character counts are shown because assets over the limit are rejected at upload, which is where most copied-from-a-blog ad copy dies.

Local Services Ads put criminal lawyer services listings above the text ads on many 'criminal lawyer near me' searches and charge per lead. They bite hard in this practice: a missed call in your listed hours is charged once the caller stays on past 20 seconds, and the calls that matter most arrive at night. Search still wins the charge-specific searcher (DUI, drugs, assault, federal), the relative who reads a page before calling, and the county-named searches from out of state. Run both when the intake system shows signed retainers from both, and match on the caller's number: LSA leads carry no click, and one family can reach you through both channels in a single night.

Criminal defense demand follows arrests rather than weather. Weekends and holiday weekends, when DUI enforcement is often stepped up and announced, bring arrests, and calls cluster from Sunday night into Monday morning before first appearances. The rhythm is weekly more than yearly, so the ad schedule matters more than a seasonal budget plan.

Position is not bought, it is earned and then paid for. Google ranks you on your bid multiplied by how good it expects your ad and landing page to be, plus your assets — so a relevant advertiser at half the bid outranks a vague one, and then pays less per click at the same position. This is the mechanism underneath everything above: tight ad groups and honest ad copy are not tidiness, they are the discount.

For Criminal Defense · LSA takes the top of many searches, directories and shared-lead sites bid below, and Google shows no bondsman ads, so bail traffic flows to you. Win on charge-specific relevance and answered calls rather than the top bid.

Start on Maximize Conversions with qualified calls as the primary conversion: calls intake marks as a new matter with a pending charge in a court you appear in, sent back from the intake system or scored in call tracking. Criminal cases usually sign within days, often before the first court date, so the signed retainer can become the goal sooner than in injury law; import it with a value tier for misdemeanor, felony and federal matters rather than the charge itself. Keep DUI separate from other charges, and give federal and white-collar work its own campaign and budget, because those searches are rarer, the buyers compare firms longer and the fees sit in a different range. Smart bidding is a data problem before it is a strategy problem: with thin or wrong conversion data it will confidently optimize toward noise, and it does that faster than a manual account can lose money.

For Criminal Defense · Bid on intake-qualified calls first, then on signed retainers from Clio, MyCase or Lawmatics with misdemeanor, felony and federal value tiers. Remarketing and Customer Match aren't available in this category, so build no plan on them.

Most accounts are killed or rescued on evidence that could not have meant anything yet. The bidding algorithm is fitting a model, and a model fitted on two weeks of data is fitted on noise. This is the shortest honest schedule: what to look at each stretch, and — more usefully — what to ignore.

For Criminal Defense · Listen to a sample of calls from each campaign in the first month and tally bail questions, current clients and jail-phone calls. Fix the call rule before judging any campaign, and have the ads checked against your state bar's advertising rules before launch.

An account left alone drifts toward the cheapest clicks it can find, because that is what the system is built to do when nobody corrects it. This is the shortest routine that keeps it honest. It takes about an hour and it is the difference between an account that compounds and one that plateaus at month three.

For Criminal Defense · Compare calls counted by Google with matters intake qualified, by campaign and by hour. A campaign with many calls and few qualified matters has a negative-list or schedule problem before it has a bidding problem.