Google Ads for family law firms: the build order

For family law firms the conversion that matters is a signed retainer agreement, and it lives in your practice management system (Clio, MyCase, PracticePanther), with intake in Clio Grow or Lawmatics where you use one — 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 Family Law · Target the counties your lawyers appear in, with presence-only location options, and keep outer counties in their own campaign. Remarketing and customer lists are not available for divorce and custody ads, so plan the account without them.

A family law firm's geography is the set of courthouses its lawyers appear in, not a circle around the office. Consults can happen by video, but hearings cannot be moved to suit the firm, and a custody client two counties away means hours on the road for every appearance. Target the counties where you already appear, set location options to presence only, and give each outer county its own campaign so you can see what it really costs per retainer.

Most family law leads start as a call, and the calls are long whether or not they lead anywhere: people tell their story before intake can ask a question. A duration rule cannot separate a parent with a custody emergency from someone who wanted a form, an existing client checking a court date, or the other spouse asking questions the conflict check will later flag. Count calls on the intake outcome where you can, and keep the raw call count as an observation column.

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 Family Law · Broad match on 'divorce' drifts into free forms, court records and divorce statistics. Keep divorce and custody terms on phrase and exact until qualified consults are importing from intake.

Every vertical has a set of searches that look commercial and are not. In family law firms 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.

Family lawyer services listings in Local Services Ads sit above the text ads and charge per lead, including a missed call once the caller stays on the line past 20 seconds. They take many callers who want to talk to someone this week. Search does something LSA cannot: it carries a click ID onto your website and into the intake record, so a retainer can be matched to the ad even when the client called from a borrowed or blocked number. Run both if the practice management system shows both produce retainers at a cost you accept, and record the source at intake so one client is not claimed twice.

Family law demand is planned more than seasonal, but it follows the family calendar. People often wait until after the holidays or the end of the school year before acting, and custody and parenting-time questions build before summer schedules and the start of school. Your own intake dates are a better guide than any national chart.

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 Family Law · Family lawyer listings in LSA sit above you, with online divorce services and directories bidding alongside. Win on matter-specific ads, consult terms stated plainly and calls answered by intake, rather than on outbidding the top of the page.

Start on Maximize Conversions with the primary conversion set to a consult that intake has qualified (right matter, right county, conflict check cleared), sent from Clio Grow, Lawmatics or your call tracking rather than counted by a timer. Import signed retainers as soon as they flow, inside the 90-day import window, and add a value per matter type: the retainer deposit or a conservative figure for contested divorce, custody, modification and prenup work, never the fees a case might bill over the next year. Keep uncontested or flat-fee divorce in its own campaign, so cheap, fast paperwork matters do not set the bids for contested custody. 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 Family Law · Move off clicks once qualified consults are counted, then to value-based bidding when signed retainers import from Clio, MyCase or PracticePanther with a conservative value per matter type.

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 Family Law · Listen to a sample of calls from each campaign in the first month. If many are existing clients, form seekers or out-of-county callers, fix the conversion rule before judging any keyword.

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 Family Law · Compare consults booked, consults held and retainers signed by campaign from the practice management system. A campaign with many calls and no retainers has a counting problem before it has a keyword problem.