Law firm PPC management: the work, week by week
PPC management is recurring labor, not a setting. In a legal account it means reading the search terms report, adding negatives, checking pacing and rewriting ads, on a cycle of about 4 fixed jobs a week. We do not manage ad spend, and this page describes the work so you can judge somebody who does.
Last updated: 5 August 2026
What does a week of PPC management actually consist of?
Four jobs, none of which takes long and all of which stop happening the moment nobody is assigned to them.
The first is reading what the account bought — not the keyword list, which somebody decided once, but the record of what people actually typed and what the firm actually paid for. The second is excluding the searches that will never produce an instruction the firm can take. The third is looking at how fast the month's money is going out against how much month is left. The fourth is checking that each advertisement still points at a page answering the search it was bought for.
That is the whole of the weekly work, and it is deliberately unglamorous. The reason it matters is arithmetic rather than craft. In Phoenix, criminal defense draws 8,100 searches a month and Google charges around $86.12 for one of those clicks, measured 3 August 2026 across 20 US cities. Arithmetic, not a forecast: twenty clicks a month on searches the firm cannot serve, at that price, is $1,722.40. Over a quarter it is $5,167.20, and it arrives on the invoice as an ordinary line rather than as a mistake.
The admission that costs us this page: we do not sell this service, and the work is not harder than it looks. Most of it is reading and excluding. What makes it expensive to skip is not difficulty, it is frequency.
Which jobs recur, and on what cycle?
Five cycles, and the failure is almost always in the second row rather than the first.
| Job | How often | What it produces | What breaks when it stops |
|---|---|---|---|
| Read the search terms and add exclusions | Weekly | A growing exclusion list | The account keeps buying the same wrong searches every week |
| Check spend against the month remaining | Weekly | A pacing decision | The budget is gone by the 19th, or two thirds of it is unspent |
| Confirm each ad lands on a page that answers it | Monthly | A list of mismatches | The click is paid for and the reader leaves |
| Rewrite the weakest ads and retire the worst | Monthly | Replacements, tested against the old ones | The same wording runs for a year with nothing to compare it against |
| Review structure, hours and geography | Quarterly | A short written change log | Settings made on day one govern a firm that has since changed |
| Export the account's own history | Annually | A file the firm keeps | Years of data leave with the supplier |
The middle rows are where legal accounts differ from most others. A firm's practice mix changes — a partner leaves, an area of work is dropped, a second office opens — and an advertising account does not notice. It goes on buying the searches it was told to buy in February.
Of the 40 legal-marketing suppliers we read in full on 3 August 2026, 8 claimed a guarantee of some kind and 1 offered work with no minimum term. A guarantee is a claim about the result. Ask instead for a claim about the cadence: how often each row above happens, in writing.
What will an automated campaign not do for a law firm?
Five things, and every one of them is a judgement about the firm rather than about the advertising.
Automation is good at the mechanical parts: adjusting bids toward a target, rotating wording, and finding related searches nobody typed into the keyword list. Those are real capabilities. The problem is that all of them optimize toward whatever they were told to count, and in a legal account the thing worth counting is usually not the thing that got configured.
- It does not know which practice areas the firm wants more of. Demand is not preference. In Denver the family and divorce category — the dataset treats family and divorce as one category — runs 3,280 searches a month at around $73.27 a click, measured 3 August 2026. A firm that wants employment work will still be shown the larger opportunity, and an automated campaign will chase it.
- It does not know where the firm is admitted. A radius drawn on a map is not a jurisdiction, and the account has no field for the difference.
- It cannot tell an inquiry the firm can take from one it cannot. Both submit the same form. Unless somebody feeds back which inquiries became matters, the system is being trained on volume.
- It will not decline a search because it is distasteful rather than unprofitable. That judgement belongs to the firm.
- It cannot read the landing page. It will send an expensive click to whatever address it was given, including a page that answers a different question.
Automation removes the manual work and leaves the decisions. A campaign running unattended is not running itself. It is running on instructions given by whoever set it up, on a day when the firm looked different.
What happens to a legal account left alone for a quarter?
It keeps working, spends the full budget, and reports numbers that look fine.
This is why unmanaged accounts survive so long. Nothing breaks visibly. Clicks arrive, the monthly figure is spent, and the reported conversion count does not fall, because the same form is still being submitted by the same mixture of people. What changes is the composition, quietly, in the direction of whatever is cheapest for the system to buy.
Three things to check on any account nobody has opened for three months: whether the exclusion list has grown since the account was built, whether any advertisement has been rewritten, and whether anything at all has been turned off. A supplier who has never turned anything off is maintaining an account rather than managing one.
We hold no measurement of how many hours suppliers actually spend on legal accounts, so there is no honest figure to publish here. What can be asked for is countable: exclusions added last month, ads replaced, and the date of the last structural change. Three numbers, requested monthly, do more than any hourly estimate.
Do we manage law firm PPC accounts?
No. Practice Sprint $1,450, build tier $2,900. Fixed, published, no minimum term.
The reason is the cadence above. This work needs somebody in the account most weeks, and what we sell is scoped work that finishes: the pages the clicks land on, and the organic side. A firm that needs matters this quarter should hire a specialist who does this daily, and saying so sends the work elsewhere.
We never charge per inquiry, per case or per matter. We charge for the work, by scope and time. Referral fees are restricted in prescribed legal business, including personal injury, and the restriction binds the firm paying as much as the party being paid. Lawyer advertising here runs through ABA Model Rule 7.2(b), adopted differently by state, and how it applies to a particular firm is for that firm and its own advisers to judge. We are not lawyers and we advise nobody on their obligations. We cannot promise a ranking, a position or a number of clients, and neither can anybody else.
What this is worth where you are
In Phoenix, 8,100 people a month search for criminal defense representation, and Google charges around $86.12 for one of those clicks. We hold the same figures for 52 cities.
The free report gives you yours, plus which of the pages a prospective client looks for are missing from your site, and which of 40 suppliers publish a price.
No call required. Our own prices are on that page.
Where should I read next?
On how any of this may be priced: ppc for law firm. On judging the supplier rather than the work: law firm ppc agency.
Where clicks cost most: injury lawyer marketing. Wider: lawyer internet marketing and digital marketing lawyer.
Frequently asked questions
What does PPC management actually involve week to week?
Four recurring jobs: reading the search terms bought, excluding the ones the firm cannot serve, checking spend against the month remaining, and confirming each ad still lands on a page that answers it.
How often should negative keywords be added to a law firm account?
Weekly, because the account buys new searches every week. An exclusion list that has not changed since the account was built means nobody has read the report either.
Can an automated campaign replace a person managing a law firm account?
No. The decisions it cannot make are the legal ones: which practice areas the firm wants, where it is admitted, which inquiries it can take, and what the landing page answers.
What happens to a law firm PPC account nobody opens for three months?
It keeps spending the full budget and reporting normal-looking numbers, while the mixture of searches it buys drifts toward whatever is cheapest for the system to find.
How many hours a month does managing a legal PPC account take?
We hold no measurement of that and will not estimate one. Ask instead for three countable things monthly: exclusions added, ads replaced, and the date of the last structural change.
Do you manage paid search accounts for law firms?
No. This work needs somebody in the account most weeks, and we sell scoped work that finishes.
Can a PPC manager be paid per inquiry delivered?
Not for a law firm. Referral fees are restricted in prescribed legal business including personal injury, and the restriction binds the firm paying as well as the party paid.