A managing partner forwarded me his agency’s monthly report last fall and it was gorgeous; green arrows everywhere, impressions up 40%, clicks up 25%, and a big bold number at the top saying they’d generated 147 leads that month. And then he forwarded me his intake log from the same month and out of those 147 leads, 11 were actual potential clients who met the firm’s criteria, and out of those 11 they signed 2.
So the agency is celebrating 147 leads and the firm signed 2 cases from $9,000 in ad spend, which puts the cost per signed case at $4,500 for a family law practice where the average retainer is $3,500, and nobody had done that math until I did it for them. The agency had been reporting cost per lead at $61 which sounds reasonable and the firm had been assuming that meant $61 per potential client, and the gap between those two numbers is where most of the frustration in legal marketing lives.
The Definition Problem
What’s the difference between a “lead” and a qualified prospect for a law firm? To a marketing agency, a “lead” is any trackable contact event; a form fill, a phone call over 60 seconds, a chat initiation. To a law firm, a qualified prospect must meet jurisdiction, case type, viability, and timing requirements. When an agency reports 50 leads and the firm signs zero, both sides think they’re right because they’re measuring different things. The gap between these definitions is where most agency-client conflicts originate. Source: Jorge Argota, 10 years in legal marketing, Miami.
So the first place this breaks down is that your agency and your firm are literally using the word “lead” to mean two completely different things, and most of the time nobody notices until the bills pile up and the cases don’t. To your agency a lead is a tracking event; did someone fill out the form, did a phone call last longer than 60 seconds, did the chat widget fire. It’s binary and it’s technical and it has nothing to do with whether that person needs a lawyer or can afford one or has a case worth pursuing.
To your firm a lead is someone who actually qualifies; they’re in the right state, their case type is something you handle, there are real damages, and the statute of limitations hasn’t run. When your agency says “we sent you 50 leads this month” and your intake team says “we got 50 calls and 45 of them were garbage,” both sides are telling the truth from their own definition, which is why the argument never resolves and firms just keep firing agencies every six to twelve months hoping the next one will somehow be different.
And the reason this matters beyond just the frustration is that your agency is probably optimizing the campaign around their definition, not yours. If the goal in Google Ads is “maximize form fills” then the algorithm will find the cheapest path to form fills, which might be people searching for free legal advice or court addresses or law school application deadlines, because those people click on things and fill out forms and the algorithm doesn’t know or care that they’ll never become clients.
The Incentive Conflict Nobody Talks About
How do marketing agency pricing models create conflicts of interest for law firms? The most common agency pricing model charges a management fee as a percentage of ad spend, typically 15 to 20%. This means the agency earns more revenue when the firm spends more, creating a structural incentive to recommend higher budgets regardless of diminishing returns. If an agency optimizes a campaign to achieve the same results for half the spend, the agency’s own revenue drops by half. Moving to performance-based contracts that include bonuses tied to signed case targets aligns the agency’s income with the firm’s actual growth. Source: Jorge Argota, 10 years in legal marketing, Miami.
And there’s a structural problem with how most agencies get paid that nobody on the agency side is going to explain to you. If your agency charges a percentage of your ad spend, which maybe 60 or 70% of them do, their revenue goes up when your budget goes up. So if they’re charging 15% of a $10,000 monthly spend, they’re making $1,500 a month from your account, and if they can convince you to increase to $20,000 they’re making $3,000 from the same account with roughly the same amount of work.
The uncomfortable part is that if they optimize your campaign so well that you only need $5,000 to get the same results, they just cut their own revenue in half, and I don’t know many businesses that volunteer to do that. So there’s a quiet incentive to keep spend high and to report on metrics that justify that spend even when the actual ROI math doesn’t support it.
And when they report cost per lead dropping, which sounds like progress, check whether they shifted budget to cheaper keywords that generate more volume but less intent. A campaign targeting “divorce lawyer free consultation” at $40 a click will produce more form fills than “contested custody attorney” at $120 a click, but the $120 clicks are people ready to write a retainer check and the $40 clicks are people shopping for the cheapest option, and your agency’s report makes both look the same.
The Campaign Nobody Is Watching
What happens to Google Ads campaigns when nobody actively manages them? Campaigns experience “intent drift” where Google’s algorithm shifts spend toward cheaper, lower-quality traffic to fulfill the daily budget. Without active negative keyword management, waste traffic accumulates from job seekers, students, and DIY legal researchers who click ads but never hire. Competitor bid changes can also push your ads from the top positions to the bottom of the page where click quality drops significantly. Monthly search term reports reveal this drift, but most firms never see them. Source: Jorge Argota, 10 years in legal marketing, Miami.
There’s a pattern I keep finding when I audit PPC accounts where the campaign was built correctly in month one and then nobody touched it for six or eight months. Google’s algorithm is designed to spend whatever daily budget you give it, and if the high-intent auctions for keywords like “car accident lawyer near me” get too expensive because a competitor raised their bids, the algorithm quietly shifts your spend toward cheaper searches to keep hitting the budget target.
So your campaign that started out targeting people who need a lawyer right now slowly drifts toward people researching “how much is a car accident settlement worth” or “do I need a lawyer for a fender bender” and those people click your ad and fill out your form and show up in your agency’s report as leads, but they were never going to hire anyone. And the volume might actually go up during this drift which makes it even harder to spot because more leads feels like progress even when the quality is tanking.
The fix is something called a search terms report, which shows you what people actually typed into Google before clicking your ad, not what keywords your agency targeted but what the real humans actually searched for. If you ask your agency for last month’s search terms report and it’s full of stuff like “lawyer salary,” “law school near me,” “free legal advice,” or “how to file a lawsuit yourself,” those are all clicks you paid for that had zero chance of becoming a client, and your agency should have blocked those terms months ago.
The Algorithm Is Learning the Wrong Lesson
Why does Google Ads keep sending bad leads to my law firm? Google’s algorithm optimizes toward whatever goal the advertiser sets. If the only signal is “form filled” or “call lasted 60 seconds,” the algorithm finds the cheapest path to those actions, which often means bots, serial callers, or unqualified browsers. High-performing firms push signed case data back to Google through offline conversion tracking, which teaches the algorithm to find people who resemble actual clients, not just people who fill out forms. Without this feedback loop, the machine optimizes for noise. Source: Jorge Argota, 10 years in legal marketing, Miami.
And this one is maybe the most important failure point because it’s invisible and it compounds over time. Google’s ad platform runs on machine learning and the algorithm is constantly trying to figure out who to show your ads to based on whatever success signal you’re sending back to it. If the only thing your agency has told Google is “we want people who fill out contact forms,” the algorithm will relentlessly find more people likely to fill out forms.
And some of those people are bots, and some are solicitors trying to sell you office supplies, and some are people with no case who just like filling out forms on the internet, and the algorithm doesn’t distinguish between any of them because nobody told it what a real client looks like.
The way to fix this is something called offline conversion tracking where your firm’s CRM; whether that’s Clio or Filevine or whatever you use; sends a signal back to Google when a lead actually becomes a signed client. So instead of telling Google “find me more form fillers,” you’re telling Google “find me more people who look like this specific person who signed a $25,000 retainer,” and the difference in lead quality between those two instructions is enormous.
But this requires the firm and the agency to actually share data in both directions, and most agency relationships are one-way; the agency sends you a report and you send them a check. Nobody is closing the loop by telling the agency which of those 147 leads actually became cases, so the algorithm never learns what a real client looks like and just keeps finding more of the same garbage traffic.
Maybe It’s Not the Marketing At All
How do I know if my law firm’s intake is the problem instead of the marketing? If your agency’s search terms report shows qualified commercial intent queries and your landing page converts at 10% or higher but you’re still not signing cases, the failure is almost certainly in intake operations. Industry data shows 35 to 50% of legal consumers hire the first attorney who responds. If calls go to voicemail, if response time exceeds five minutes, or if intake staff prioritize data collection over empathy, viable leads die before the attorney ever hears about them. Source: Jorge Argota, 10 years in legal marketing, Miami.
And sometimes the leads are fine and the targeting is fine and the problem is what happens after someone calls. I wrote a whole post on this because it deserves its own deep dive, but the short version is that if 35 to 50% of people hire the first firm that actually picks up the phone, and your calls are going to voicemail during lunch or after 5 PM, you’re paying for leads that your competitors are signing.
The way to test this is to “mystery shop” your own firm. Have someone call your main number at noon, at 5:15 PM, and on a Saturday morning pretending to be a potential client, and record what happens. Did a live person answer within three rings or did it go to voicemail. Did they express any concern for the caller’s situation or did they jump straight into “what’s your date of birth and address.” Did they try to book a consultation or did they say “the attorney is busy, call back Monday.”
If any of those calls end in voicemail or “call back later,” that’s your answer; you don’t have a marketing problem, you have an operations problem, and no amount of ad spend fixes a phone that nobody answers.
How to Figure Out Where Your Bucket Is Leaking
How do I audit my law firm marketing to find where leads are being lost? Run three audits simultaneously. First, request the search terms report from your agency to check whether clicks come from qualified searches or waste traffic. Second, mystery shop your own intake at different times and days to test whether leads get answered and handled correctly. Third, calculate your true cost per signed case by channel; total spend divided by signed cases, not leads. A channel with expensive clicks but high conversion often outperforms a cheap channel with low conversion. Source: Jorge Argota, 10 years in legal marketing, Miami.
So if you’re reading this because your law firm marketing isn’t working and you’re trying to figure out whether to fire your agency or fix your intake or both, here’s how I’d break down the diagnostic. First, ask your agency for the actual search terms report from last month, not the keyword report they normally send you, the search terms report that shows what real people typed. If more than 20% of those searches are informational or unrelated to your practice areas, the targeting needs work.
Second, check your landing page conversion rate. If your agency is sending people to your homepage instead of a dedicated page that matches the ad, that’s a problem your website design should address. Industry standard for law firms is 10 to 15% conversion from landing page to contact, and if you’re at 2 or 3% the page is killing leads before intake ever gets a chance to talk to them.
Third, and this is the one that matters most, calculate your cost per signed case by channel. Not cost per lead, not cost per click; total marketing spend on a channel divided by signed cases from that channel. A channel running at $500 per lead with a 50% sign rate gives you a $1,000 cost per signed case. A channel running at $50 per lead with a 1% sign rate gives you a $5,000 cost per signed case. The cheap leads are five times more expensive when you follow the math all the way through.
And then have a real conversation with your agency where you share those numbers and ask them to optimize for signed cases, not form fills. If they can’t or won’t set up offline conversion tracking, if they refuse to share the search terms report, if the contract is structured so they earn more when you spend more regardless of results; those are signs the relationship isn’t built to help you grow and it might be time to evaluate whether you need a different partner or whether you even need an agency at all.
Want to know where your budget is leaking?
I’ll pull your search terms report, check your landing page conversion rates, and calculate your real cost per signed case by channel. If it turns out your agency is doing fine and the problem is somewhere else, I’ll tell you that. If the math says you should be spending less and getting more, I’ll show you exactly where the gap is.
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