PPC for Law Firms: What Google Ads Really Costs UK Solicitors

Enough to buy a month of clicks that tells you something, which in legal search means a four-figure budget from the outset. One anonymised UK firm ClickGuardian protects declares a £10,000 monthly Google Ads budget and runs at a £17 average CPC across its practice areas. That is about 588 clicks a month, or roughly 19 a day. Its protection subscription is £79 a month, which is the ratio worth holding in your head for the rest of this page: the budget is 126 times the cost of watching it.

Work the arithmetic forwards from those 588 clicks and the cost per case falls out of it:

Whether £1,360 is good or ruinous depends entirely on practice area, which is why a single industry benchmark for legal PPC is useless. A personal injury instruction with a five-figure expected fee absorbs £1,360 comfortably. A £900 fixed-fee conveyancing matter does not, and a conveyancing firm hitting that cost per case has either a targeting problem or a channel that will never pay. Immigration sits in between: a £4.50 CPC means the same £10,000 buys 2,222 clicks, so the enquiry rate can be much lower and the numbers still work.

The 5 per cent enquiry rate and the one-in-four instruction rate above are illustrative rather than promised. Substitute your own. If your reception converts one enquiry in three rather than one in four, the same 29 enquiries produce nearly 10 instructions and the cost per case drops to about £1,030 without a penny of extra ad spend, which is usually a cheaper improvement to buy than more clicks. Our ROI calculator runs the same arithmetic against your own spend and conversion figures.

As a starting budget, take your target number of instructions a month, divide by your instruction rate to get enquiries, divide by your enquiry rate to get clicks, and multiply by the CPC for your practice area from the table above. A family law firm wanting four new divorce matters a month, converting one enquiry in four at a 5 per cent enquiry rate on £8.00 clicks, needs 320 clicks and therefore about £2,560 a month. Anything materially below that is not a campaign, it is a sample too small to learn from.

For most firms under 30 fee earners, hire an agency, and the reason is staffing rather than skill. A firm that size rarely has a marketing manager. What it has is a practice manager or a partner who picked up the Google Ads login because somebody had to, and who is being asked to maintain a negative keyword list between client matters. A £10,000 monthly account needs perhaps four hours of genuine attention a month. Those four hours never come out of a fee earner's week at a sensible price, because an hour of partner time costs more than the agency retainer does per hour.

The case for in-house is real above roughly 30 fee earners, or wherever a firm already employs somebody whose job title contains the word marketing. At that size the account is usually large enough that a percentage-of-spend retainer costs more than a part-time specialist, and the institutional knowledge of which enquiry types convert is worth keeping inside the building. The middle path, an agency running the account with an internal owner who reads the reports and challenges them, tends to beat both.

If you are going to hire, hire someone who has run legal accounts before. Legal PPC has specific failure modes (the recruitment query problem, the free-advice query problem, call tracking that has to distinguish a genuine enquiry from a misdial) that a generalist learns at your expense. We have compared the UK specialists on a separate page: the best law firm PPC agencies in the UK, with the criteria we used and the questions to ask before signing.

If you are an agency reading this: traffic quality is the part of a legal account you cannot fix with better keyword work, and it is the part clients ask about most. ClickGuardian runs a white-label programme so you can report protected traffic under your own brand across your client book. The details are on our partners page.

How much should a law firm spend on Google Ads in the UK?

Work backwards from instructions rather than picking a round number. Target instructions divided by your instruction rate gives enquiries; enquiries divided by your enquiry rate gives clicks; clicks multiplied by your practice area CPC gives the budget. Four divorce matters a month at a 5 per cent enquiry rate, one instruction in four, and an £8.00 CPC comes to about £2,560 a month. Personal injury at £18.00 a click needs materially more to reach the same number of enquiries, and conveyancing at £10.00 rather less.

What is a good cost per case for personal injury PPC?

There is no universal figure, because the only test that matters is cost per case against expected fee per case. The worked example on this page produces about £1,360 per instruction from a £10,000 budget at a £17 average CPC, a 5 per cent enquiry rate, and one instruction in four. For a personal injury matter with a five-figure expected fee that is comfortable. Run the same arithmetic on your own numbers before accepting anyone's benchmark, including this one, and be sceptical of any agency quoting a cost per case without first asking what your fees are.

Why is my law firm's cost per lead so high?

Usually one of four things, in this order: broad match buying jobseeker and student queries at claimant prices, a negative keyword list under 100 entries, location targeting still set to "Presence or interest" so you are paying for people outside your catchment, and invalid clicks. Check them in that order, because the first three are free to fix and take an afternoon between them. If cost per lead is still high after all four, the problem has usually moved to the landing page or to how quickly enquiries are answered.

Are competitors clicking my ads?

The incentive certainly exists. In a local legal market with a fixed number of claimants and clicks at £16.00 to £18.00, exhausting a rival's daily budget is cheap and the benefit is immediate. What we will not tell you is that we have measured it happening, because we have not run that analysis. What is measured across the accounts we track is that about 29 per cent of paid clicks are invalid, a figure that counts bots, scrapers, and click farms without attributing intent to any particular party. The practical answer is to make the account resilient rather than to try to identify a culprit.

How do I get a refund for invalid clicks?

Google filters some invalid traffic automatically and credits it back, which you can see by adding the Invalid Clicks and Invalid Click Rate columns to your campaign view. Beyond that, you can raise a case with Google Ads support setting out the date range, campaigns affected, and the pattern you have observed. Two caveats worth setting expectations by: credits are partial and arrive after the fact, and the click still consumed your daily budget on the day it happened, which is the part no refund gives back. That is the argument for blocking rather than reclaiming.

Is legal PPC worth it compared with SEO?

They answer different questions. Paid search buys a position this afternoon at £4.50 to £18.00 a click and stops the moment you stop paying. Organic rankings for terms like "conveyancing solicitors" and its 9,800 monthly UK searches take quarters to earn and then cost nothing per click. Firms that need matters this quarter run paid; firms building a book over years run both, using paid search to learn which queries actually convert and feeding that back into what they write.