Legal · Family Law · Florida, United States
How Dane Family Law Cut Cost Per Lead 35% and Nearly Doubled Monthly Inquiries
Dane Family Law came to ads.expert with no paid search, no conversion tracking, and no way to tell which inquiries came from where. The firm now generates 71 inquiries a month at $48 each, in one of the most expensive verticals in search.
The firm had demand. It had no way to buy it, or to measure it.
Dane Family Law is a family law practice serving Orange and Seminole County, Florida, handling divorce, child custody, child support, paternity, and mediation. The firm had a website, a phone line, and a steady flow of referrals. What it did not have was any paid acquisition channel, and no measurement to support one.
When ads.expert came on board in May 2026, the account was a blank slate in the hardest possible way. There was no Google Ads history to learn from, no conversion tracking on the website, and no analytics configuration capable of telling the firm whether an inquiry had come from search, a referral, or a returning client. Family law is also one of the most expensive categories in paid search: click prices in the region run between $8 and $12, so a campaign that converts poorly does not lose slowly. It loses immediately.
The practical risk was not that ads would fail to generate clicks. It was that the firm would spend a month finding out, with nothing in place to explain what had happened.
Stand up a single bottom-of-funnel search campaign that produces inquiries a family law practice can actually work, at a cost per lead low enough to make paid search a permanent channel rather than a trial. Measure every inquiry type separately from day one, so that when something moves, the cause is visible rather than inferred.
Four things stood between the firm and a paid search channel it could rely on
-
01
No measurement of any kind
The website had no analytics configured for lead capture and no conversion tracking connected to Google Ads. Phone calls, form submissions, and consultation requests were all invisible. Without this, automated bidding has nothing to optimize toward and reporting is guesswork.
-
02
A small market at premium click prices
Two counties, a handful of practice areas, and average click costs between $8 and $12. There was no room to buy volume and sort it out later. Every wasted click was a meaningful share of a modest daily budget.
-
03
Broad, low-quality search demand
Family law queries attract out-of-area searchers, people looking for free or pro bono representation, and searches for adjacent practice areas the firm does not handle. Left unfiltered, this traffic converts at a rate that makes the channel look broken.
-
04
A conversion path we did not control
The inquiry form sat on the client's WordPress site, maintained by a separate web team. Any change to that form directly affects paid performance, and we would have no advance notice when one happened. This became the single most consequential risk in the account.
We built the measurement first, then bought demand against it.
ads.expert came on as a hands-on performance partner, not a campaign manager. Before spending at scale, we stood up the tracking that would show the firm exactly what its budget was buying, then built one focused campaign around it and refined it week by week.
Built the measurement layer before spending a dollar at scale
Installed GA4 and Google Tag Manager on the WordPress site, then configured three separate conversion goals: contact form submissions, consultation booking clicks, and calls from ads. Form tracking required a custom tag listening for the Elementor submit event, since the default configuration did not fire reliably. All three were imported into Google Ads as conversion actions within the first week.
Structured a single bottom-of-funnel campaign around intent
One search campaign, split into ad groups by practice area: Divorce, and Child Support and Custody. Each group pointed to the matching practice area page rather than a generic homepage. Presence-only geographic targeting on the two counties the firm actually serves, so budget was never spent on people searching from outside the service area.
Ran a search terms audit and built the negative keyword layer
A full search terms review in the first month produced two negative keyword lists: out-of-area cities on exact match, and off-topic practice areas plus competitor brand terms on phrase match. The account now runs 78 phrase match keywords against 293 negatives. Searches for free and low-cost representation were deliberately kept, because a share of them convert.
Added a dedicated competitor ad group
Built a separate ad group targeting 27 competing family law practices on exact match, routed to the contact page. Isolated from the practice area groups so that its cost per lead could be judged on its own rather than being absorbed into the campaign average.
Caught a website change that was silently costing the firm inquiries
In mid July the conversion rate fell from a steady 12 to 20 percent down to 4.6 percent in a single week, while clicks and impressions hit record highs. Because form starts and form submissions were tracked as separate events, the cause was visible rather than theoretical: 38 people began the form and only 18 finished it. The client's web team had added a consultation fee question to the form. We identified it, evidenced it, and had it removed. Without event-level tracking this would have read as a bad month.
Reported weekly against a fixed metric hierarchy
Weekly and monthly reporting with cost per lead as the headline measure, and the call and form split treated as a mix outcome rather than a target in itself. Every form submission is read and confirmed as a genuine inquiry before it is reported, a direct response to the firm's early concern about lead quality.
Google Ads
Google Analytics 4
Google Tag Manager
WordPress
Notion
In total, the account generated 217 inquiries on $12,806 of spend, a blended cost per lead of $59.01. The strongest single week closed on August 30 with 24 inquiries at $30.83 each and a 29.3% conversion rate.
See what else we have built
EdTech · Higher Education · United States
How QuantHub Turned $20K in Ad Spend into $842K in Qualified Pipeline at a 38:1 Return
B2B SaaS · Search Infrastructure · France
How Meilisearch Stopped Buying Noise and Started Building an Enterprise Pipeline
E-commerce Logistics · Turkey · UK · Germany
How OPLOG Turned a Fragmented Ad Presence into a $21.5M Revenue Engine Across Three Markets
Health & Fitness · D2C · United States
How Forty Forty Cut Its Cost Per Purchase by 66% and Tripled Revenue in 90 Days
We built this family law channel from zero with hands-on Google Ads management, measured on cost per lead across calls and forms. The heavy lifting sat in the structure: a search terms audit feeding our negative keyword and exclusions layer, matched to the right bidding strategy for a small, high-cost market.
Running ads with no idea what they're producing?
We can fix that.
We build and measure paid search channels for service businesses, so every inquiry is tracked, every dollar is attributed, and cost per lead becomes something you can actually manage.