Google Ads for criminal lawyers, run around your phone

Ads for people with a deadline

Most advertising can wait for the customer to be ready. Criminal law cannot. The person searching has a court date, a charge sheet or a notice, and they are working through a short list of firms in a single sitting. If your ad is there and your phone is answered, you are on the list. If either is missing, you are not.

That makes the account different from one for most other fields. Fewer searches matter, each one matters more, and the cost of a missed call is high.

One campaign for each matter

We build ad groups around the offence the person types. Drink driving gets its own, as do AVOs, bail applications and traffic matters. The ad repeats the words they searched, names the town and shows a phone number. The landing page is the matching offence page on your site, with the number at the top.

On the Karnib and Co site, that is the structure of the pages: nine for criminal matters and eleven for traffic offences, plus a page for each of its two offices. We run the site, not the ads, so we cannot quote Ads figures for that firm. The pages show what an ad can send people to.

Targeting the court town

Criminal law work follows the court. A person charged in one town may live in another and still need a lawyer who appears at the court where the matter is listed. We set location targeting around the courts you attend, then check the report on which towns the clicks came from.

If you have two offices, each gets its own location setting and its own landing page, with the right address and phone number. Spend in a town you do not appear in is trimmed.

The schedule follows the phone

A charge does not respect office hours, and neither does the person who has just been told about one. The ad schedule is set around when someone answers.

With an after hours line, the ads run all night, and the number at the top of the page connects to a person. Without one, we pause the campaign when the phone is unattended. For quieter hours we offer a short form asking for a name, a phone number or email, and a note. The page says when you will call back.

If the reports show missed calls clustering in one stretch of the day, the schedule changes to match.

Before the first ad runs

We go through the offence pages with you first. If a page is thin, the ad is not worth paying for, so we fix the page before the campaign starts. We also ask who answers the phone, at what hours, and what they say. That answer sets the schedule, the landing page wording and the budget we suggest starting with.

Ad copy under the conduct rules

Solicitors' advertising is regulated. Rule 36 of the Australian Solicitors' Conduct Rules, as the Law Society of NSW publishes it, covers advertising that is false, misleading, deceptive or offensive, and false impressions of specialist expertise. State rules differ in some details, and your firm should take its own professional guidance.

So an ad says what you handle and where you are. It does not say you will win, that charges will be dropped or that you are the best. We write each ad, show it to you, and only run it once you approve. You can ask us to change or pull any ad at any time.

Counting the right things

A click is not an enquiry. We record a call from the ad, a tap on the number on your site and a sent form as three separate conversions. Extra actions that Google tallies on its own, such as a tap on a call button inside the ad, stay out of the count that guides bidding.

After a few weeks, you can see how many calls each offence brought in and what each cost. Whether a caller became a client is something your intake team knows, and we can use it if you record it.

Control stays with you

You open the Google Ads account and add your own card. Google bills you directly for the clicks. We are added as a manager and our fee covers running the account. If you leave, you remove our access and keep the account and its history.

Each month you get a short report on spend, calls, forms, cost per enquiry and the changes we made.