Tampa, FL · nationwideClient: A personal injury legal brand, a lawyer referral service rather than a law firm, which is why the account competed against every PI firm in its markets but was not eligible for Local Services Ads. Name withheld at their request; happy to discuss on a call. Markets: Multiple. One home market, then expansions into others. Period: 2014 to 2022. Peak spend: Multiple six figures a month across Google and Microsoft Ads. The budget grew to that level over several years; it did not start there. Outcome: An eight-year engagement in one of the most expensive keyword categories in the country, and the client's Google reviews grew from a handful of poor ones to several hundred at a 4.8 average.
Where it started
In 2014 the client had no landing page and no Google Ads account. We built both: a single page for the core injury intent with a click-to-call hero and a short form, and a Search account structured by practice area and by market. That first structure, themed campaigns with one intent each, is still the template we use.
Scaling to multiple six figures a month
Personal injury is the highest cost-per-click category in paid search, and the client's home market is one of the most contested in it. Growing from a starting budget to multiple six figures a month over several years came down to four things:
- Structure that could take the money. Every practice area, every market and every intent stage (immediate need, research, brand) in its own campaign with its own budget and bid target, so an increase went where it was earning and nowhere else.
- Landing pages per intent. Car accident, truck accident, slip and fall, wrongful death, each with its own page, its own proof and its own tracking. No generic "injury lawyer" page.
- Call handling as part of the campaign. In PI, the lead is a phone call and the intake team decides whether it becomes a case. We tracked calls to keyword level and worked with the client on answer rates and intake scripts, because a missed call at these click prices is money burned.
- Expansion by cloning. Each new market was launched from the proven home-market structure, with local pages, numbers and copy. The template held every time.
The reviews problem
When we started, the client had a small number of Google reviews and most of them were bad, which in a category where every competitor shows stars in the ad is a direct hit on click-through and conversion. We built a follow-up process that reached clients after their case closed and made leaving a review easy. Over the following years the profile grew to several hundred reviews at a 4.8 average, and the star ratings in the ads did the rest.
What we'd do differently
We would have moved offline conversion import, feeding signed cases back into Google's bidding rather than just calls, in sooner than we did. And for the law firms we work with now, the review base this account built is exactly what Local Services Ads ranking rewards; this client could not run LSA, but a firm with that review profile should be in it from day one.
How it ended
In 2022, after eight years, the account was at its strongest: record call volume week after week, at the peak budget, across every market. The owner's family decided to bring paid search in-house and run it themselves. We handed over the structure, the pages, the tracking and the documentation, walked the new team through it, and stepped back. That's the arrangement we set up every account to allow: you own it, and if you ever decide to run it yourself, you can. We'd add one thing from experience, said plainly on every kickoff call: an account at that scale is a full-time senior job, and the handover is the point where the results either hold or begin to drift, depending on who takes the seat.
A word of caution about taking it in-house
This account is the largest example of something we've seen many times over the years, and it's always the same shape. The account is running well, someone on the client's side has watched it work and concluded it must be easy, and the business decides to save the fee and give them a shot. It happens when things are going well, never when they're going badly, which is the part that still surprises us. One of two things follows. Either the new person makes changes and the account goes backward, or nobody has time for it and the account goes dormant, forgotten until the business decides to try again. Google Ads isn't easy, and the reason isn't complicated. A well-run account looks calm from the outside because the structure, the negatives, the bidding signals and the tracking are doing the work quietly. Someone new to it sees a few settings that look improvable, makes a few changes, and the account starts learning from the wrong signal. Cost per lead climbs, so they make a few more changes, and within a quarter the account is spending more for less and nobody can say which change did it. That last part is the trap. Google Ads doesn't react the way you'd expect, and the effect of a change often shows up days later and looks like something else. If you can't say why the account moved, you can't move it back, and most accounts that go sideways this way never recover, because every attempt to fix them is another guess.
What separates an experienced manager isn't knowing more settings. It's having made thousands of changes over many years and watched what each one did, including the ones that made things worse. That's how you learn what Google rewards, which isn't always what the interface suggests. It's also worth knowing that the free help Google offers by phone is a sales channel staffed to grow spend. The advice is often generic and sometimes wrong for the account in front of them, and following it is one of the more common ways an account gets knocked off course. The same thing happens on the organic side: a Google Business Profile that ranked for years can be suspended in a week by one edit that breaks Google's guidelines, and it can take months to get back.
None of this is an argument against owning your account. You should own it, and we build every account so you can take it over. It's an argument for being clear about what taking it over means: a senior person, in the account every business day, who knows why every setting is the way it is before touching it. If that person isn't on your team yet, keep the one you have until they are.
What this means for your account
The same structure, page discipline, call tracking and review process run on every account we manage, whether the budget is a few thousand a month or a few hundred thousand. Google Ads management, Law firm marketing, Pricing.
