PPC for law firms: paying for instructions, not for people comparing fees at £15 a click

Where law firm accounts waste money

• Research searches billed as leads. "How much does a divorce cost", "can I be sacked for", "free legal advice". These searches match broad and phrase keywords, cost as much as a client search, and almost never instruct. Twelve months of search terms read line by line is the first task.
• One campaign for the whole firm. Family, employment and conveyancing share a budget, and the cheapest enquiries take it. Each practice area gets its own campaign, budget and landing page.
• A call counted as a client. Phone clicks and form fills are not instructions. Call tracking tied to the keyword, a qualifying form and the case management system feeding back which enquiries became matters are what let Google optimise towards clients.
• The firm's homepage as the landing page. Someone who searched for an employment solicitor should land on a page about employment law, with the solicitor's name, the first-step explained and the phone number at the top.
• Adverts that would not pass compliance. Claims about outcomes, "no win no fee" without the qualifications, comparative claims about other firms. The SRA Transparency Rules and the ASA set what can be said, and the adverts are written inside that.

What a click costs by practice area and city

Average cost per click from Google Ads keyword data for the UK, October 2026, for the search with the city attached. Market averages, not a forecast.

At these prices, 100 clicks on an employment search in London cost close to £1,900. If one in ten calls and one in four callers instructs, that is £760 per instruction before the fee. If a third of those clicks were research searches that should have been excluded, the real figure was closer to £500. That is the arithmetic the account is run on.

What management includes for a law firm

1. A campaign per practice area, with exact and phrase match, a negatives programme built from the research vocabulary of each area, and location targeting matched to where the firm takes clients.
2. Measurement to the matter. Call tracking, a form that asks the qualifying question, and the case management system (Clio, LEAP, Proclaim or a spreadsheet) feeding back which enquiries opened a file, imported to Google Ads as offline conversions. See conversion tracking.
3. A page per practice area, built by me, with the solicitor, the process, the fee basis as the Transparency Rules require, and a phone number and form that work on a mobile at lunchtime. See landing pages.
4. Brand and competitor terms decided, not defaulted. Whether to bid on the firm's own name depends on who else is bidding on it; competitor bidding is legal in the UK and usually poor value. Both reviewed monthly.
5. Microsoft Advertising once Google works: a professional audience on work devices, often at a lower cost per enquiry for legal searches. Microsoft Ads →
6. A monthly report in instructions and cost per instruction, by practice area, alongside the platform numbers so the two can be compared.

Who this fits

UK firms from a few fee earners to mid-size regional practices, spending roughly £2,000 to £40,000 a month, in practice areas where a client is worth several hundred pounds or more: employment, family, private client, conveyancing, commercial, immigration, personal injury where the firm handles its own intake. Claims management companies and lead resellers are not a fit. There is no law firm case on this site yet and none will be invented; the published cases show the method on other expensive auctions.

Questions people ask before hiring

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