In one of paid search's priciest categories, leads at a fraction of the cost.
A local paralegal practice specializing in landlord-tenant matters was spending on Google Ads with little to show for it. We rebuilt the account from the ground up, and turned the budget into a steady stream of qualified enquiries at $23.46 a lead.
Active Search campaign, March 20 to June 17, 2026. Real account data, no cherry-picked weeks.
Why these numbers matter
Legal is one of the most expensive categories in all of paid search: the cost to win a click, let alone a lead, is among the highest there is. Delivering qualified leads at $23.46 in that environment isn't normal; it's the product of a focused method.
We'll be straight with you: a landlord-tenant paralegal is a lower-stakes practice than, say, a personal-injury firm, so part of that low cost is the practice area, not just the management. But the 14.3% conversion rate is clearly earned. That comes from campaign structure, negative keywords, and intent-matched landing pages, the parts that travel to any service business.
The challenge
The practice was already paying for Google Ads, but the setup was working against them. Budget was spread across Performance Max and a handful of unfocused campaigns, and the leads that did come in were often the wrong people entirely, callers who believed they'd reached the Landlord and Tenant Board, not a paralegal they could hire.
Every one of those calls cost money and staff time, and none of them turned into clients. The account didn't have a traffic problem; it had a focus and lead-quality problem.
The method
The same repeatable approach we'd run for any service business, not a legal-only trick.
Scrapped Performance Max for focused Search
The account had been leaning on Performance Max and a scatter of half-built campaigns, spend going out, very little coming back. We retired Performance Max (0 conversions) and rebuilt around a single, tightly-targeted Search campaign aimed at people actively looking for a landlord-tenant paralegal.
Fixed the lead-quality leak with negative keywords
A big share of early calls were people who thought they'd reached the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB), not potential clients. Those calls burned time and budget. We layered in negative keywords to filter out LTB and government-seeking searches, so the phone started ringing with real prospects instead of wrong numbers.
Optimized toward cost-per-lead, not clicks
With clean traffic flowing, we let a Target-CPA bidding strategy do its job, concentrating budget on the searches that actually convert. The result is a campaign that's currently capped by budget, not by demand: there's room to scale.
The outcome
Over the 90-day window, the rebuilt Search campaign brought in 79 tracked leads at $23.46 each, with a 14.3% conversion rate and a 5.97% click-through rate that signals tight, relevant targeting. Just as importantly, the leads coming through are the right ones: people who actually need a paralegal, not LTB wrong numbers.
The campaign is currently limited by budget, not demand, which means the most exciting part isn't where it is today, it's how much room there is to scale it.
This is Study 01. We're adding new results here as we deliver them.
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