Where It All Started

I was working with a client, managing his multiple accounts who was USA based. He had a colleague who was a lawyer. He was running ads by himself but didn’t see any results and was just spending without outcomes. So, I had a meeting with him as my client wanted me to handle that. We had a full discussion, and I asked him everything about his business, like what kind of services they provide, what their budget is, what their target location is, and their target audience. After all the discussion, he handed over the account to me.

My First Step

After getting the Google Ads account, the first thing I did was a complete account audit from scratch, and I found multiple issues. Firstly, their conversion tracking was not set up. Their location option was wrongly selected for a local business or any business not operating internationally, the location option should be set to presence instead of presence or interest. Otherwise, they get a lot of irrelevant traffic, as anyone searching from anywhere with their primary keywords or brand name would trigger the ad. This is a really big mistake in Google Ads that newcomers or people handling accounts by themselves usually don’t understand.

Their campaign structure was also not good. They had a very low budget but were running multiple campaigns, and their goal was traffic instead of leads. They were using the Maximize Clicks bidding strategy even though the campaign was old and had enough data. Still, they were optimizing for the wrong goal. They were running a total of 3 search campaigns, but their budget was just $35, which didn’t make sense. If the budget doesn’t allow, we shouldn’t go with multiple campaigns, as splitting the traffic means we won’t get enough data and will just waste budget. In this case, we should only run one campaign, or if the brand is getting some good branded searches, then we can go with 2 campaigns one branded campaign with the least budget and the other for general terms.

Going deeper, they were also using broad keywords, which were generating a lot of irrelevant searches. After this, I checked their landing page, and it was not good. They didn’t have any proper CTA, no clickable phone number, and no visible contact form. They just had a static page, which was too slow and not optimized for ads.

After all this, I sent them my suggestions for the account, how I would categorize the campaigns and my recommendations for the landing page. They made all the changes I asked for and created a high-converting landing page, as my client had their own developer team, which made communication easy for me.

Building a New Campaign Structure

Then I started setting up their account. First of all, I set up tracking for them. I always create 2 goals for one action to have a backup in case one stops working, so it doesn’t mess up everything. I did all the tracking with Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics 4. I also recommended using CallRail to do offline tracking, but they didn’t approve it, so I went with Google hosted and GTM call tracking.

I created just 1 search campaign, as their brand didn’t have any searches. I went with one search campaign to attract high intent users looking for services. The client provided lawyer services for family, children, divorce, legal notices, child custody, and 2 to 3 more services. I could have created different ad groups for each service, but I went with just 2 ad groups one for mobile and one for desktop, to see which platform performs best. I created only 2 because I suggested a static landing page with short descriptions for each service and call to action buttons under each one.

After launching the campaign, the first month was very tough. In the first week, I got really low traffic and was unable to spend the whole budget. But since everything was from scratch, I knew it would take some time. So, I let the Google algorithm gather the best data. I didn’t rely on the previous data since they didn’t have any relevant traffic and had no goals, so I had to start from scratch, which took more time.

The Turnaround & Key Results

In the first month, even though I used high intent keywords related to their services, I still got a lot of irrelevant traffic. Even after adding a general negative keywords list and negatives related to law firms, more than 40% of traffic was still irrelevant. Most of it was searches for lawyer names. For the first 2 to 3 weeks, I couldn’t figure out why this was happening despite having a tight structure. Then I did some research and collected a list of all the lawyers in that area. I searched with my keywords, and whoever appeared in Google Maps or on the first 2-3 pages, I created a list of them and added all their names as negative keywords (in phrase match), except my lawyer client name.

After that, my traffic slowed down due to too many negatives, but a few days later, it started increasing again. This time, the traffic was more than 90% relevant, and I got my first lead. I was really happy with that lead because, although I had worked with many businesses before, none of the accounts had taken me this much time to generate the first lead, but it was worth it. After that, leads kept coming, and the cost per conversion was very good. The average CPC was $7-$8, but still, my cost per lead was just under $40.

This was also a great learning experience for me, as it was the first time I handled a law firm account.