Results
Law Firm: 66% Lower Cost Per Acquisition, With More Conversions
Cost per acquisition fell 66% while conversions went up. Those two numbers usually move against each other — cutting acquisition cost normally means buying less of the expensive traffic, which reduces volume. Getting both at once means the problem wasn't the bidding. It was that a large share of the budget was buying something that was never going to convert.
The situation
| At the start | |
|---|---|
| Practice areas | DUI and criminal defence |
| Monthly ad spend | $11,000, covering both practice areas |
| Cost per acquisition, DUI | $670 |
| Monthly conversions | 17 |
What we found
- Budget going to searches that were never going to convert. Match types, missing negatives, or campaigns picking up job-seekers, research queries and the wrong practice areas
- Conversion actions counting things that weren't leads, which teaches automated bidding to buy more of the wrong thing — the most expensive misconfiguration in paid search
- Location targeting set to "presence or interest", paying for clicks well outside the service area
- Intake losing enquiries the ads had already paid for — the gap most firms never measure
What happened
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost per acquisition — DUI | $670 | $227 | −66% |
| Conversions per month, both practice areas | 17 | 72 | +324% |
| Ad spend, both practice areas | — | $11,000 | Roughly flat |
| Blended cost per acquisition | — | $153 | — |
Read the first and last rows together, because they measure different things. The $670 and $227 are DUI specifically. The $11,000 and the 72 conversions cover DUI and criminal defence together, which is why $11,000 ÷ 72 gives $153 rather than $227 — criminal acquisitions came in below DUI ones and pull the blended figure down.
Two practice areas in one account is why that distinction matters. A firm publishing a single cost per acquisition across two practice areas with different competition, different search volume and different case values is publishing an average that describes neither. Splitting them is the only honest way to report it.
Is your situation similar?
This applies to a firm that's already spending on paid search and suspects the money isn't working — not to a firm starting from zero. The pattern to look for is cost per acquisition that climbs when you increase budget, which usually means you're bidding further into traffic that was never qualified.
It's the wrong reference point if your problem is that nobody answers the phone. Fix that first; it's cheaper and it improves everything downstream.
More on marketing for law firms · what we charge · see what a conversation looks like
Written by Jared DeValk, founder of Nashville Digital. Published with the client's permission. Last reviewed September 2026.