When it comes to the question of how much should a solicitor spend on Google Ads to generate new client enquiries, there are a number of factors to take into consideration. Let me run through these factors and then provide you with some numbers.
How Many New Clients Are You Looking For Each Month?
Enough new clients for one fee earner?
If you only want to generate a handful of enquiries for one fee earner (or yourself), and the area of law for which you want to generate these enquiries is not personal injury or medical negligence, then the answer can be as little as a few hundred pounds.
A few hundred pounds can generate a handful of enquiries leading to a couple of instructions.
If those instructions are worth £1,000 each in fees then the most important side question is answered; does Google Ads provide a return on investment? In this case, yes.
Google Ads should ALWAYS provide a return on investment. My starting point is a three to one return, but often it goes past the ten to one point, then it becomes much more fun.
Enough new clients for two fee earners or areas of law
If you want to promote a couple of services for your firm locally, such as family and conveyancing or probate, then the investment needs to rise towards £1,000 per month with Google Ads, so that you can generate enough visitors for each of the services which then leads to enough enquiries.
I often hear the following from a solicitor:
“I tried Google Ads and it didn’t work!”.<
This usually happens when a solicitor has not invested enough budget into a Google Ads campaign, so simply cannot expect to make it work.
With Google Ads, if you do not spend enough money to generate enough clicks to your website (I find the late 100’s to 200 clicks per month is the tipping point) then it is unlikely you will receive a consistent volume of enquiries.
Google Ads is ultimately a numbers game.
Generate enough clicks through to your website and you will generate enough enquiries for your services and enough of those enquiries will turn into new instructions.
Why Does Google Ads Not Work If You Are Spending Enough?
If you are generating this volume of clicks but not receiving enough enquiries, then these are the likely reasons for this:
- You are targeting the wrong keywords (the phrases people type into Google to find your services); or
- The page you are sending people to on your website is not good enough, for example it doesn’t answer the questions that your prospects are asking and it doesn’t include the following:
- An early review of your services in the content in the centre on the page;
- An early call to action telling people to call you (with the telephone number linked so that they can click it if they are on your website on their mobile phone which more than 50% of your visitors will be). It is a mistake to believe that your visitor will go to your contact page or scroll to the very top or bottom of your page to find your telephone number; you have to make it easy for them.
- A link to your enquiry form on its own page (not the contact page which has too many distractions). Again, I can tell you from testing that if you have an enquiry form on the right hand side of your page you still need to link to it on a separate page in your call to actions; it will generate more enquiries for your services.
I have reviewed hundreds of Google Ads campaigns for solicitors and it is always these reasons which prevent a solicitor from generating a return on investment (if they are spending enough on Google Ads each month).
Returning to that point, if you want to generate a substantial volume of enquiries for a service to feed a big team, you need to increase the budget to a few thousand pounds.
Personal Injury, Medical Negligence, And Other Highly Competitive Legal Service Areas
If you are using Google Ads to target these particularly competitive and, therefore, expensive areas of law, then to make any impact you are more likely than not going to need to invest five figure sums per month.
However, if you do this and do it well, you can still generate a substantial return on investment.
I have run Google Ads campaigns for solicitors spending five figures every month and they have worked very well.
I have run Google Ads campaigns for soolicitors spending six figures every month and they have produced a fantastic return on investment.
Summary – How Much Should Solicitors Spend On Google Ads Each Month
You can see that ultimately the answer ranges from a few hundred pounds each month to a few thousand, sometimes stretching to even larger sums for bigger law firms looking to feed an entire team of fee earners.
Ultimately the key factors are:
- How many fee earners you are looking to feed with new clients;
- How many areas of law you are looking to target; and
- How competitive the area of law is for the area(s) of law targeted.
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