What Data Taught Me About Law Firm Budget Allocation

Law firm budget allocation wastes money when you don't prioritize intent. Here's the 5-step system we use at Sterling Lawyers.

Poor campaign segmentation drains budget on low-value service lines and research keywords instead of revenue-driving divorce cases.

Most firms waste their budget on low-value keywords, while high-intent divorce searches remain underfunded. We segment campaigns by service profitability and purchase intent. It’s not about budget size—it’s about allocation.

These five budget rules maximize ROI through intent-based targeting and service-line segmentation. Weekly data reviews prevent waste. This paid search framework drives revenue, not just activity.

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📄 CHAPTERS  

0:00 - Paid Search Budget Allocation Strategy for Family Law Firms

1:21 - Start With Highest Intent Keywords First

5:00 - Align Your Ad Spend With Service Profitability

9:15 - Set Minimum Campaign Budgets to Maintain Visibility

11:41 - Separate Brand vs Non-Brand Campaigns for Better ROI

15:01 - Make Data-Driven Budget Decisions Weekly

18:28 - How Often to Review Your PPC Campaign Budget 

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Chapters

• 0:00 Paid Search Budget Allocation Strategy for Family Law Firms
• 1:21 Start With Highest Intent Keywords First
• 5:00 Align Your Ad Spend With Service Profitability
• 9:15 Set Minimum Campaign Budgets to Maintain Visibility
• 11:41 Separate Brand vs Non-Brand Campaigns for Better ROI
• 15:01 Make Data-Driven Budget Decisions Weekly
• 18:28 How Often to Review Your PPC Campaign Budget

Transcript

0:00

If your ad dollars aren't driving the right clients, it's not your budget, it's your strategy. Learn how to prioritize high and ten keywords that are going to drive the right type of clients and stay within budget. Welcome back to the Sterling Family Law Show, the podcast designed to help family lawyers build the firm of their dreams. Today we are taking a deep dive into paid advertising. We have our head of paid advertising, James Patterson, with us, along with the co-founder of our law firm, Sterling Lawyers, and the president of our agency, Rocket Clicks, Tony Karls We are here to break down what the ideal campaign budget should look like, where to spend those dollars, how much to allocate towards different types of campaigns. This is a deep dive into the weeds as it relates to how family law firms can thrive in their paid search campaigns. All right, gentlemen, we are back. And we're going into the weeds on paid advertising, spending and budgets for family law firms. Today we're going to talk about the five budget allocation strategies that family law firms need to use in order to thrive. James, our first is start with the highest intent keywords. Talk to us a little bit about this. Yeah. So, when we really think about budget allocation across any paid media channel or mix that you guys are active, I mean, really what we're trying to hit on with this first rule is prioritize what drives the most revenue for your business, right? So from a paid search perspective, when we think about keywords, right, is if we're doing a good job building out campaigns or segmenting those based off of intent, what the users actually looking for. So if you're doing that part well, you have multiple campaigns based off of different user search intent. What what we're really saying with this first rule is let's maximize that highest intent. One first. So some examples of that would be divorce attorney near me, higher custody lawyer. Milwaukee. So what you're really looking for there, right. Is those near me? Geo type, variations to the keyword along with some form of bi variation. So what we think about what that is like higher, even some things like best, you know, divorce lawyer, those types of things. Or it's very apparent that the user is like, I'm ready to make a decision. I needed divorce lawyer, and I want the best one or the closest one to me. Whatever the case may be, if you're targeting this group and again segmenting well within your account, you should be spending the majority of your budget here first and then treating it almost like a waterfall. From there is trickling budget down to, lower content keywords, similarly, and other channels that you might have in your mix. We feel strongly that, you know, there is there is a lot of search volume in that high content category and page search. We see a lot of success with, law firms, really targeting well, in that space. But from there, depending on kind of, you know, where users are in their journey. Things like social media and programmatic ads are definitely going to play a role in here as well as it relates to especially prospecting. You know, essentially trying to get ads in front of people that are maybe somewhere in the middle or close to that end in terms of their intent, and making sure that, again, that really based off of the data you're getting back and, and, signals that you're seeing in the account, placing a budget where, where you're seeing the best results there. Yes, I was going to caveat all this with the assumption that our listeners are in the weeds looking at the data. Right. We're talking about prioritizing your dollars in the right way. You have to know where that data is coming from and how you're leveraging it to make the right decisions. Yeah, I would just like, create, create an opportunity for visualizing this. We typically break our keywords down into a couple different buckets. And then in an A, since, since the eyes come around, we also look at. Is there an eye overview or not? So what we're really looking for is and this first section is like very high purchase intent keywords that don't have an eye overview because that's going to generate the most quality traffic for you. Then you're going to look at more commercial oriented terms, that are they have commercial intent but they're not ready to buy. And then all the way up at the top would be your research oriented terms. And those are very much research oriented. They're not going to convert, but they're great top of funnel, especially for your petitioners that are in the process of researching for, you know, to two plus years sometimes, in terms of what they're going to do to move forward with a divorce action. So the obviously, the things that towards the bottom of the funnel, the purchase keywords, they're going to generate revenue for you, they're the lowest hanging fruit. And that's where we want to spend our dollars. First. And Well said. Alright James moving on to number two align budget with service profitability which also seems intuitive right. You want to spend your money where you're making money. Yeah, you would think so. Where we do see a lot of this stuff overlaps, right? We've we've had our revenue roadmap in the past about, campaign segmentation. And we're looking at like how good a cap strategy looks like. Really great segue way from what Tony was talking about. And his last message there. What we do see sometimes is one, campaigns aren't segmented correctly here to break out things like service specific keywords by intent, like we're talking about here. They'll pull those numbers together and allow the account to, you know, essentially spend where the search volume is, where Google Ads thinks it's going to drive the conversion that's set up in the campaign. And what can happen is ultimately a service line that you do offer that is not your primary service line or most profitable one. Do you even really want to focus on ends up taking a lot of your budget away from, you know, specific terms like divorce lawyer and things like that, and then send you're getting stuff for guardianship or whatever the case may be for your law firm. Or it's like, yeah, we you know, we might want to get some visibility here, but we certainly don't want to be spending, even close to the majority of our budget on those searches. So just making sure that, again, in having a really good campaign, segment strategy so that you have all of your campaigns, split up by, you know, what, what service lines you have, and then by intent, we'll help you make sure that you don't give up in this space, because I think it just there's a lot of overlap. There is like where the the issue is, is like, I don't think any you know, law firm Warner goes and you know, working with their agency or doing that themselves and go you know, yeah, you know, I'm totally fine with us spending, you know, a bunch of money on things that aren't our biggest focus for our law firm. But it happens in a kind of sneaky way if, if you're not paying attention. So I think that's that's really the biggest message with number two is make sure your account set up for success. That way you can then you actually can do this. And it's like, well I want to spend X amount of percent on child custody searches and I want to spend X amount on divorce. Like you can be a lot more strategic and have more control that way. Yeah. If you're listening James. And it's been a while since you've taken a look at your account or done some of these kind of maintenance hygiene activities, use this as the, motivation to kind of do so because, like you said, over time waste creeps in, plaque builds up, and the more you can maintain a healthy account, the more profitable your account will be. Yeah. I mean, the the, unpleasant truth for people in the, in the advertising space is it's so much easier to run an account that is set up purely, because it's, there's there's less buttons to push and there's less things to, to move around when you have a really highly segmented account that's built out with lots of search intent and service and, and service line intention, it's harder to manage, but the results are better. And like, typically we're law firms, they fall prey to not really understanding this and then being sold, you know, $1,000 per month or lower, manager paid search account. And all they're going to do is turn on Pemex and run some general crap at it, and it's not going to work. And then you'd be like, paid search doesn't work. This is I mean, we do this all the time. It's like, yeah, it doesn't work when you set it up like a buffoon. So let's set it up better, like a professional would. So you get the results. You should get. You get what you pay for here. What you pay for exactly. All right, James, number three, don't invest. Don't over invest in brand terms. I know we see this a lot right now. Well, people are just going to search for me by name. Yeah. So I mean, I don't want to get a loss. And investing in brand terms is definitely a factor, but something that we recommend with the majority of our clients. It's good to have visibility there. The biggest thing when when clients are thinking about like, well, you know, they already know I am I'm not obviously in the organic search results. The, the the advantage that you still have in going after brand terms is you're going to get rank advantage, right? So if you have competitors bidding on your name, you're automatically going to get that first buy. You can have a low CPC. So as a result low cost for leads. So it's going to be really efficient that way. You can also control the messaging. Right. So like with in the SEO game right. Google takes some liberties on what it showing in the search results from, you know, the metadata that you put in there and stuff. Sometimes the messaging that maybe you prefer to say isn't the one that you're seeing in your search results with ads, you have full control of that. So there's there's a little bit more control there. But kind of get to the point here is like there is a balance here, right? Because at the end of the day, yes, they do know your brand. You do want to control, you do want to bump out your competitors, but striking the right balance of how much you're investing here can can be something you really want to think about. Generally speaking, from a percentage standpoint, somewhere between 2 to 10% of your overall paid search budget is probably a good mark. Obviously looking at important, important KPIs like impression share and pressure loss to rank things like that budget, will help, you know, indicate if maybe you do have a little bit more runway to get in there. Are you seeing a lot of competitors showing up for your brand new searches? Those will be all, you know, obviously, more nuanced reasons why maybe you'd be a little bit more invested there, but ultimately. Right. Like when we were talking about rule number one, like the end of the day, you know, net new leads, that you want to get after that, have this really high intent. If you're spending too much in brand, you might be then not spending enough in your most important service line, keywords that are categorized by intent and stuff like that. So you're just going to be mindful to how much you're spending there. Hey, family law firm leaders. My partner, Tony Karls just released his book where he lays bare our precise blueprint for growing sterling lawyers from 0 to 17 million. This is the blueprint that we still use daily. And Tony explains it in very simple terms. The truth is, this is not simple to do. Success requires and demands hard work. But if you have the patience and the work ethic to do it, your family law firm will succeed. Number four, expand budget only after maximizing priority areas. So this is, what, 8020 rule here? Yeah, to some degree, I would say that, you know, the biggest thing here, it goes back to a lot of times receiving accounts that were working previously of the agency. And then maybe you're the business owner and you're doing everything. So you you created the account, weren't really sure how to set it up. Well, a lot of times, you know what we see in there is basically this hodgepodge of many campaigns with many ranges of different intent put into the account, and then minimal budget in these different pockets. Right? So now you're spending just a little bit on all of these, different groups of campaigns that may not be even the ones you really want to prioritize. So we're really saying with this as an in an ideal state, right. So you've got, you know, your campaigns segmented by service line and by priority intent and things like that. When you get to the point of really maximizing your impression shared, they're the results you're getting, right. So really looking at your, you know, your cost per lead, how much conversions are you driving from that there's different tools you can use to to understand, like what's my potential maximum reach based off of these keywords. And look in the keyword planner tool. Things like that. That should be your indication of like, okay, now I can move into some of that more, you know, middle of the funnel type, search intent or even low intent, depending on where you're at. So the message of number four is, is like in terms of priority, as you're looking to expand your account, expand, you know, where you're getting ads to show within the search results in the ad space or even in other platforms. Make sure you really focus on maximizing those high intent spaces first and then move on. Because if you're putting all of that in there, what's going to happen is that lower intent stuff. There's a lot more search volume there. So Google will actually end up spending a ton of money on a keyword like, you know, just lawyer, right? Instead of a keyword like divorce attorney. Miami, Florida, which is going to be a massively different conversion rate that you can expect from that keyword, and ultimately probably a massively different type of lead who hits your books. Right? So one that actually ends up, more likely being, retainer being sent and signed versus now maybe I'll talk to you guys again in a couple of months. I'd say I'd say two of this is really a combination of the 0.1 and point two from earlier, as well as, like, so within the intention of the keywords, but also across platforms. So like a lot of times we'll, we'll see like only on, Google ads. And we're not doing any lead gen opportunities on socials which are very available. Or everything's clumped together in, in Google ads and not broken out by priority. So like a real practical example is your your top performing keywords from a, intention perspective. We're going to be in the divorce layer and plus a plus a variant brand. Your second best ones are going to be family lawyer. And the reason that's second, and it's probably got a little higher search volume, is the disparity of what's in there. You need a lot more post judgments, a lot more channel because child, child support actions as well as divorce actions in there. So you're going to get a different array that's going to have a different value set. Then after that you're going to have more post judgment and lower value case types, that you can go after. So it's making sure you're, you're segmenting and going down the funnel on all that purchase opportunity before you go up into higher commercial intent or, up into the research bucket. So it's really important. So. 100%. Okay. Bringing this all together, our fifth point is make data driven budget decisions. Right. Like we talked about earlier, this is not a gut feel. This is a science. This is based on the numbers. What is working? What is not working. Right, James? Yeah, absolutely. I think especially on the search front, I think generally speaking, aside from people that really work in this field and are experts at paid search, a lot of people don't realize how how much volatility there is in the auction space. Right? So competitors are ramping up budget at different times constantly. They're pulling out. They're coming in new competitors that were never they're coming in old ones that you that had a previously small budget now are ramping up. Because I got a new agency. Right. This is all going to impact, your performance one way or the other, right. So how much budget does it take to you to ultimately make sure you're showing in the top three results when they're showing ads? Now you have different messaging that's in there that that's different from today, that now you have to compete against. Maybe they have a better offer that they're that they're showing in their messaging. So there's a lot of these variability, these variables that you have to be mindful of as it relates to setting your budget. Because if you just set it and you're not really looking at what's probably happening is all of these things are going on in the background and you're just going to eventually feel some type of performance dip, or maybe hopefully you're lucky and you see some some nice ramp up and you oh, wow, that was weird. And then eventually things, you know, go back to a level set. If you're not paying attention to it, you're not going to really understand what's going on in there. The same thing can be said, right, for, social, social media and other, ad platforms. Right. Auction based. So there's there's just a ton of volatility, right? There's people coming in and out constantly pushing up CPM bids. So getting your ad out there. So if you're not being cognizant of the fact that like the budget you set today would be very, very different two weeks from now, month from now, next quarter, you know, all these different time frames you're probably missing out on opportunities. So just having a good full steer of what your what you're saying can be really effective. Outside of budget specifically, there are obviously tools or like making decisions over, you know, should I maybe go into social media or should I, you know, spend a little bit more on brand? Right. Like the real message here at number five is to is in addition to just keeping a good pulse on how your budget is being utilized for your different platforms, it's like, where am I placing you within my max? Is there some changes to what's going on with my brand campaign, which may indicate that I should be spending more there? Or maybe the opposite. Maybe it's like we can get away with a $10 a day budget here and get good results, or we have no competitors in the auction with us. Let's bump in that other $60 we have per day for that brand campaign and put it towards our buy for campaign with with heavy purchase intent that's now losing out on impressions. So I think that's really the biggest, message with this one is being mindful to that volatility and then making those decisions of power. We can, you know, push through whatever we're seeing based off of data and performance metrics. James, what do you what do you feel like the right. Because I think you're I think you're spot on. Like what's the minimum do you feel like is the right time time frame. Because a budget you set today is based on might be perfect for today, but tomorrow it's maybe it's only 99% correct. Like what is what would you say is like the right time frame to re readjust and re review what you have set up so that you're maximally effective. Yeah. So I would say it's going to obviously be very contingent with your level of spend in the account. So I just want to say that. So if you've got, you know, we spend $500 per month on paid search, it can be different. I would say on average with our clients I would say minimum weekly just to get a pulse check, making sure you're seeing what you expect from that budget spend. Right. Especially in, you know, situations where maybe you've increased in a recent time period. Checking back in is critical right here to really understand what kind of impact you're going to get from it. But as it relates to maybe like, you know, we've kind of had the same budget and we just want to, you know, do kind of a maintenance check. I would say weekly is like a minimum. There, as you scale up your investment in these paid media platforms, biweekly becomes, you know, more in play for sure. Even daily, you know, if you can do a quick check, there's a lot of alerts you can set up and stuff like that to get a to get a good pull sometimes. But I would say probably for the average account, weekly is a good starting point. Just to kind of see, like, hey, we, you know, if we set this budget for this, what are we expecting to get out of it? And what's changing week over week and how may that, you know, impact our decision to either change our budget up or down. Yeah. I know that this we have like budget, budget trending and monitoring sheets that we do for, for all of our clients to keep, keep tabs on all of this stuff. And it kind of helps us see, like, are we are we are we going to spend our budget or are we not. Are we going to go over budget based on what's in the marketplace or not? And there's there's like so there's a lot of variability and paying attention to it's really important. could not agree more. This is not a set it and forget it activity. By spending five bucks a day or a thousand bucks a day, there are opportunities to find efficiencies and and better perform. And, the paid advertising in. That's why we're here to appreciate your time.