Win cases without paying for the wrong click

Why does advertising for lawyers work differently than for other businesses?

Because you’re in the most expensive search market in the Netherlands, and there exclusion determines your return more than reach does. For the most sought-after practice areas you bid amounts per click that other sectors pay for a complete enquiry. That is no reason to stay away — the case values justify those prices, or they wouldn’t exist — but it does change where the profit sits.

In a cheap market you can buy your way out of sloppiness with budget. Not here. Every click from someone who could never become your client costs a multiple of what the same mistake costs elsewhere. Advertising for a law firm is therefore, at its core, a discipline of exclusion: who should not click on your ad determines your return more than who should.

What does Google Ads cost for a law firm?

Count on € 4 to € 15 per click, and more on the sharpest practice areas — personal injury and employment law are among the most expensive keywords in the country.

That price says little on its own. What counts is the cost per accepted case, and that depends on how much traffic you filtered out beforehand. A firm advertising on “lawyer” without exclusions pays the same click price for an audience largely made up of people who could never have become clients. A starting budget under € 1,000 a month buys too few clicks in this market to learn anything at all; realistic is € 1,500 to € 3,000 per practice area you want to grow.

Why is excluding more profitable here than reaching?

Because the search term “lawyer” attracts an audience that only partly consists of potential clients, and every wrong click here costs a multiple of what it costs elsewhere.

A sizeable share is looking for subsidised legal aid and — if your firm doesn’t take legal-aid cases — doesn’t belong in your costs. Others are looking for information, an internship, or a firm on the other side of the country.

Every campaign here therefore starts with the minus list: negative keywords around pro deo, subsidised legal aid and free legal help, a tight geographic boundary, and a landing page that makes immediately clear how you work and for whom. That last part is no formality — a clear page filters out the callers the search term couldn’t filter, and saves your front office the conversations that lead nowhere.

Should every practice area have its own campaign?

Yes — a dismissal case, a divorce and a shareholder dispute are three different markets that average each other out inside one campaign.

A dismissal case, a divorce and a shareholder dispute differ in everything: urgency, decision time, case value, and what the click price may be. In a single campaign with a single conversion goal, those differences average each other out, and the algorithm optimises towards the cheapest enquiry — almost never the case your firm wants to grow on.

A separate campaign per practice area, each with its own value per case, turns it into something you can steer. If you want to grow in corporate law, that line gets room and a higher allowed cost per case; if family law fills up on its own, that dial goes back down. The campaign follows the firm’s strategy instead of the luck of the auction.

When should your ads be running?

During the hours someone actually picks up the phone — in urgency-sensitive practice areas, response speed decides who gets the case.

In some practice areas — dismissal, criminal law, disputes that escalate — response speed decides who gets the case. Someone who is fired in the evening searches that same evening and speaks to a lawyer the next day. Not necessarily the best one; the first one who picks up.

That is why ads here run in sync with your actual availability. Urgency-sensitive campaigns are on during the hours someone answers the phone and off outside them, and the landing page promises only what the firm delivers. The opposite — being visible day and night and letting enquiries land on voicemail — is the most expensive form of advertising there is.

How do you measure ads without touching professional privilege?

By measuring only that there was contact and via which campaign — never what it was about.

The legal profession and advertising platforms are not natural friends: everything about a case is confidential, and none of it belongs in Google or Meta. The answer is not to skip measurement altogether — then you are steering blind in the country’s most expensive market — but to limit the measurement to what it needs: that there was contact and via which campaign, never what it was about.

Concretely: the form or call is the conversion, with no substantive fields in the measurement; the link between enquiry and case lives only in your own systems; and cookie consent is handled correctly before anything fires at all. The result is a campaign that steers on cases, while your professional privilege stays exactly where it belongs.

Do you advertise in your own city or nationally?

In the places clients actually come from — and that varies sharply by practice area.

Family law, employment law and criminal law are largely local: people want someone they can sit across from, and they search “lawyer ” or “divorce lawyer ”. Those searches are cheaper than the national variant and convert better, provided the town name genuinely appears on the landing page. Specialist corporate law or intellectual property draws clients from the whole country; there the specialisation is the findability, and a geographic limit is reach thrown away.

The practical rule: look in your own files at where clients came from over the past two years, and let the radius follow that. Nearly every firm advertises wider than its own case files justify — in this market, that is the most expensive assumption you can make.

What you can expect from me

I work a fixed number of days per week, fully dedicated to your accounts. You don’t get a junior who handles it alongside ten other clients. Everything runs in your own Google and Meta accounts, so you keep the campaigns, the history and the data — even if we ever part ways.