How I Cut Spend in Half and Doubled Signups for a Real Estate Law Firm
A real estate law firm was burning budget on broad-match keywords with broken conversion tracking. I rebuilt the account around intent, fixed the data, and cut spend in half while doubling qualified signups inside 90 days.
01 The numbers
- 50% Ad Spend Reduction
- 2x Monthly Qualified Signups
- 60%+ lower Cost per Qualified Lead
- 90 days Timeline to Result
02 The breakdown
The Setup
When this firm came to me, the account looked like most small-business Google Ads setups I see. One Search campaign. Broad-match keywords pulled straight from the Google rep’s recommendations. Conversion tracking firing on every form submit, including spam and bot traffic.
They were spending five figures a month and getting leads. They had no idea which leads were qualified and which were noise.
What Was Broken
Three things, in priority order:
- Tracking was wrong. Form submits were counting as conversions regardless of source, lead quality, or whether the form was actually completed. The “cost per lead” they were optimizing toward was fiction.
- Intent was muddy. Broad match was pulling in queries for unrelated legal issues, real estate agents shopping for marketing services, and DIY-contract researchers.
- Ad copy was generic. “Real Estate Lawyer Near You” headlines competing against four other firms saying the same thing.
What I Did
Fixed tracking first. Clean conversion actions tied to qualified phone calls via WhatConverts and form submits with required-field validation. Imported the new conversions, let the old ones decay out.
Rebuilt around case type. Split the single campaign into ad groups by case type, purchase disputes, contract reviews, title issues, and so on. Each ad group got phrase and exact match keywords. Broad got killed except in one isolated testing campaign.
Wrote ad copy that filtered. Headlines spoke directly to the case types the firm wanted more of and away from the ones they didn’t. Cheaper clicks, better leads, less wasted spend.
Built the negative list. 300+ negatives from the first 30 days of search terms, with weekly review automated via a custom search-terms review process.
The Result
After 90 days:
- Monthly ad spend was cut in half, a 50% reduction
- Signed cases increased by 40 to 100 percent month over month
- Lead quality improved measurably per the firm’s intake team
- Cost per signed case dropped by over 60 percent
The Takeaway
Most legal accounts I audit have the same three problems: dirty tracking, broad intent, and generic copy. You don’t need to spend more to grow. You need to spend on the right queries with copy that filters in the right people.
If this account had stayed on autopilot for another year, the firm would have burned five figures more on the wrong traffic. Catching it early was the whole game.
Want this kind of rebuild on your account? Book a strategy call.
03 More work
Other accounts, same approach.
236 phone calls scored in the first pass
Part two of the law firm engagement. The account had clean tracking and qualified-call conversions, but every conversion imported at zero dollars, so Smart Bidding treated a $2,500 document review and a $15,000 litigation case as equals. I built a call-scoring system that reads every recorded paid call, prices it with the firm's own numbers, and feeds real matter value back into bidding. $1.32M in case value was written onto qualified leads, and the value is verifiably arriving on the primary conversion actions Google optimizes toward.
Read the breakdown→
1 → 6 pmax campaign matrix
Fourteen months after the original rebuild, Sugar Babies was ready for the next layer. I expanded one Performance Max campaign into a six-campaign geo × value-band matrix, seeded 26 Customer Match segments into the bidding signal, refreshed all 300 search themes across the matrix, and shipped the catalog SEO foundation the matrix runs on.
Read the breakdown→Ready to talk
Want this kind of breakdown on your account?
Thirty minutes on the phone. One clear set of next steps. Same person on the call as on the work.