Case studies / Legal
Paid media & funnel developmentCheap leads are easy. Signed cases are the number that pays the firm.
Gray Broughton runs personal injury across three Virginia markets. Their constraint was never lead volume: it was intake hours. We rebuilt the funnel around the only metric that reaches the P&L.
Eight landing pages, not one.
Veteran led. Trial ready. The firm's positioning was already sharp: what it lacked was somewhere for paid traffic to land that matched what the searcher had actually typed.
A car accident search in Richmond and a workplace injury search in Roanoke are different intents in different markets. Sending both to the same homepage wastes the click twice: once on the mismatch, again on the visitor who leaves without calling.
Cost per lead is the wrong number.
Any agency can halve your cost per lead. Loosen the targeting, widen the match types, drop the qualifying questions: the number falls immediately and the reporting looks excellent. What breaks is intake, and intake is where a personal injury firm's real capacity constraint sits.
The number improves. The firm doesn't.
Volume rises, intake staff spend their days on callers with no case, and the cases that were worth signing get a slower callback than the ones that weren't. The monthly report shows progress while the firm feels none.
- Leads Up
- Cost per lead Down
- Intake hours consumed Up sharply
- Signed cases Flat
Fewer calls. Better calls.
Qualification moved into the funnel: case type, jurisdiction, timeline, and whether the caller had already retained counsel, so intake picks up on prospects who are actually signable. The lead count is lower than a loose account would produce. Everything downstream is better.
- Leads 70 / month
- Lead quality Screened
- Intake hours per signed case Down
- Cost per signed case $1,600
Three markets, one budget, no way to tell them apart.
Personal injury is among the most expensive categories in paid search anywhere in the US, and Virginia is no exception. Gray Broughton was competing against firms with far larger budgets in three separate metros at once.
Three constraints shaped the account.
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The clicks are expensive and unforgiving
In personal injury, a single click can cost more than a month of advertising in most other categories. There's no room to buy traffic and sort it out later: the sorting has to happen before the click is paid for.
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Richmond, Norfolk, and Roanoke aren't one market
Different competitive sets, different costs per click, different search volumes. Run as a single statewide campaign, the largest metro absorbs the budget and the other two never get tested.
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Intake capacity, not lead volume, was the ceiling
A firm can only work so many intake calls in a day. Every unqualified caller occupies a slot that a signable case needed. More leads would have made the problem worse, not better.
Three campaigns, not one state.
Each metro was budgeted, bid, and measured separately: so a market that worked could be scaled without a market that didn't quietly consuming the spend.
Richmond
The firm's home market and the most competitive of the three. Highest cost per click, deepest bench of competing firms.
Norfolk
Hampton Roads, with a large military and veteran population, where the firm's veteran-led positioning does real work.
Roanoke
Smaller volume, materially cheaper clicks, less competition. The market a statewide campaign would never have found.
What we built.
Qualification funnel
Case type, jurisdiction, timeline, and existing representation screened before intake picks up.
Eight landing pages
Segmented by market and injury type, so the page matches what the searcher actually typed.
Google Ads
Three metro campaigns, bid and budgeted independently, with aggressive negative keyword work.
Meta Ads
Demand generation and retargeting where search volume alone couldn't fill the pipeline.
Call tracking
Every call attributed to campaign, market, and keyword: so spend follows signed cases, not clicks.
Signed-case reporting
Reporting built on cases signed rather than forms submitted. The number the firm actually manages to.
What went into it.
Five of our services, on one account.
Other accounts worth a look.
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