A law firm runs Google Ads.
The campaign was set up in an afternoon.
A short list of keywords, one ad group, traffic pointed at the home page.
Then they wait.
The phone should ring any minute.
Days start to pass.
The money leaves the account every month like clockwork.
And the cases coming back don’t look anything like what they’re spending to get them.
They’re playing a game where a single mistake costs real money, every hour, whether they notice it or not.
And most firms running Google Ads are making not one mistake but many small ones that compound into one very serious, very costly problem.
Mistake #1: They bid on the wrong keywords.
“Lawyer” is not a keyword. It’s a black hole. The person searching it might be a law student, a journalist, somebody looking for a job, or somebody who wants to sue their neighbor over a fence. You pay full price for all of them.
Mistake #2: They send the traffic to a page that was never built to convert.
Usually the home page. Or a service page written for Google, not for a frightened person holding a phone at 11pm. The click cost the same either way. The difference is whether it turns into a case.
Mistake #3: The ads and the page attract the wrong person.
If your copy says nothing about what kind of case you want, you will get every kind of case you don’t want. Small claims. Cases outside your state. People who called eleven other firms first. People who can’t pay.
Mistake #4, and this is the by far the biggest one that ruins accounts in 2026:
They never set up qualified conversion tracking.
Think about what that means.
Google’s bidding algorithm learns from the conversions you feed it. It then optimizes to get more of those, thinking that’s what you want.
After all, that’s what you told it.
Feed it every form submission and phone call, and it learns to find you more of whatever the majority looks like.
If the majority are junk, the machine gets better and better at finding you more junk.
Six months later you’re spending more per month than you were on day one and signing fewer cases, and nobody can tell you why, because the dashboard is green. Conversions are up. Cost per conversion is down. But you’re not making any money.
Mistake #5: They call the whole thing a failure.
“We tried Google Ads. It doesn’t work for us.”
Google Ads works.
It works so well that every firm in your city is bidding on the same twelve words, which is exactly why the clicks cost what they cost.
What doesn’t work is running a sloppy campaign in one of the most competitive PPC niches that exist and hoping volume covers the waste.
In a cheap industry, sloppy costs you a little. In a legal industry like personal injury and criminal defense, sloppy costs you a partner’s salary.
If you’d prefer to skip all the mistakes above, you need someone who knows exactly how to run a legal PPC campaign that brings in real cases.
This is what we do at Dominate Marketing.
