Case studies / Legal
Traffic & DUI defence · Four years$15 a lead in one of the most expensive legal markets there is.
Ticket Crushers defends traffic violations and DUI charges across California. Those two practice areas have opposite economics, one is cheap volume, the other is some of the priciest clicks in Google Ads. Running them from one budget is what produced 5,882 leads in a year at $15 each.
A California defence firm covering two very different practice areas.
Ticket Crushers, A Law Corporation defends traffic and speeding violations alongside DUI and DWI charges, serving clients across the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California.
We were brought in to run Google Ads across both practice areas at once, two businesses with opposite economics sharing a single advertising budget.
Two practice areas. Opposite economics.
A speeding ticket and a DUI are both traffic matters, and that's where the similarity ends. One is a low value case searched for in high volume at manageable click prices. The other is a serious charge worth many times more, searched for far less often, and contested by every criminal defence firm in the state. Run them as one campaign and the expensive half quietly consumes the budget.
Cheap clicks, high volume, low case value.
People get tickets constantly and most want the cheapest competent option. Search volume is large, clicks are affordable by legal standards, and the case is worth a few hundred dollars. The economics only work at volume.
- Search volume High
- Click cost Manageable
- Case value Low
- Needs Volume
Expensive clicks, low volume, high case value.
Among the costliest keywords in Google Ads, because every criminal defence firm wants them and a single case justifies a large acquisition cost. Fewer searches, far higher stakes, and a click price that will eat a shared budget if nothing stops it.
- Search volume Low
- Click cost Among the highest
- Case value High
- Needs Protection
Rising costs in a crowded market.
Ticket Crushers serves clients across the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California, defending traffic and speeding violations alongside DUI and DWI charges.
The firm was already advertising. Four things were making it expensive.
Legal advertising costs were climbing
California legal keywords are among the most contested in the country, and cost per click was rising faster than the account was improving.
Campaign structure couldn't separate the two practices
Without clear separation, the higher cost DUI terms competed for the same budget as the volume traffic work, and expensive keywords always win that contest.
No dedicated landing pages
Traffic arriving from very different searches all landed in the same place, so the ad's promise and the page's message rarely matched.
The conversion is a call, usually a quick one
Someone with a court date wants to speak to a person now. An account measured on form fills would have missed most of what it produced.
Five parts, run for four years.
Set up once, then maintained. That's where most of the gain came from.
Separate the practice areas, and the budgets
Traffic and DUI split into their own campaigns with their own budgets, so the expensive keywords couldn't absorb spend meant for the volume work. Each practice area judged on its own cost per lead rather than hidden inside a blended figure.
Both practices funded, neither starving the other.
Rebuild around high intent search
Tightly themed ad groups, controlled match types, and continuous search term review, so budget went to people with a citation in hand rather than to research queries that share the same vocabulary.
Cost per click down 64 percent while the budget grew.
Build landing pages per offence
Dedicated, conversion focused pages matched to what the visitor searched for, rather than one page serving every kind of case. Someone facing a DUI needs different reassurance from someone with a speeding ticket, and the page has seconds to provide it.
The ad's promise and the page's answer aligned.
Optimise for the phone, on mobile
Search and call campaigns built for someone reading a citation on their phone, with the number prominent and call tracking on every inbound. Calls made up nearly four in five of all leads.
4,637 calls alongside 1,245 form submissions.
Scale the budget only as efficiency allowed
Media grew from around $5,000 to $8,000 a month across the year, but only behind improving cost per lead, so additional budget bought additional cases rather than additional clicks.
14 percent month on month growth in lead volume.
$88,000 of media. 5,882 leads.
- Phone calls 4,637
- Form submissions 1,245
- Total leads, 12 months 5,882
- Monthly media $5,000 to $8,000
- Cost per lead $15
Fifteen dollars a lead is a strong number in any legal category. In California, where a single DUI click can cost more than that on its own, it only happens because the two practice areas were funded separately and the volume work was allowed to do what volume work does.
That $15 is a blended average across both practices. The traffic ticket leads cost well under it and the DUI leads cost well over. That's exactly why a single campaign would have hidden the difference and a single budget would have let one side consume the other.
Two numbers we're not publishing
An earlier version included a 37% increase in conversions and 14% month-on-month growth in leads. Those figures did not reconcile, so we removed them rather than publish numbers we could not substantiate consistently. The same review raised questions about a reported 27% increase in paid traffic alongside a 64% reduction in CPC.
We’ve kept only figures that reconcile with the underlying account data and invoices. The result is a more conservative case study, but one we can stand behind.
From the attorney.
"Yauheni is a wizard. If you want the phone to ring, and the sales to flow, DiscoverMyBusiness is the way to go."
Adam Cohen · posted publicly on Google during the engagement, which has now run for more than four years.
Four things for any multi-service firm.
Never share a budget across unequal economics
If one service has expensive clicks and another has cheap ones, a shared budget flows to the expensive side automatically. Separate campaigns, separate budgets, separate targets.
Blended cost per lead hides the answer
An average across two practice areas tells you nothing about either. Always ask for the figure per service before deciding where to spend more.
Scale behind efficiency, not ahead of it
The budget here rose 60 percent only as cost per lead fell. Raising spend before the account is efficient buys more of whatever wasn't working.
Count the calls
Nearly four in five leads here arrived by phone. In urgent categories, an account measured on forms is measuring a fraction of itself.
What went into it.
Six of our services, over four years.
Do you know your cost per lead by practice area?
If your firm advertises more than one service from one budget, the expensive side is almost certainly taking spend from the cheaper one. A blended average will never show it. Give us read only access and we'll break it out. Findings are yours to keep either way.
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