Google Ads for law firms: in-house or agency?

Start with the practice areas you want to advertise, the locations you can serve and the matters your intake team can accept. Identify who can approve the service description, fee information and advertising claims. An agency still needs those decisions from the firm.

List the recurring work: account review, search-term assessment, budgets, ad copy, landing-page changes, measurement checks and enquiry-quality review. A general marketing role may already have website, events and communications duties. Compare the time available with this specific workload.

If you are still choosing the channel, begin with Google Ads versus SEO for solicitors. This guide addresses who runs paid search once it belongs in your plan.

Consider a small employment practice with a marketer who owns the website but has no capacity for regular campaign work. A shared arrangement might put campaign management with a specialist, page publishing with the marketer and enquiry classification with intake. This is an illustrative division of work, not a client result.

Media spend is required whichever delivery model you choose. Compare the cost of managing the work separately, then add the necessary pages, tools, measurement and internal review time. Avoid comparing an agency’s management fee with the total cost of an employee whose role includes unrelated work.

Request a scoped agency quote and use the firm’s own employment and supplier costs. There is no useful universal budget or return figure for every practice area. A sensible comparison records the assumptions so you can replace them with actual costs.

Google Ads has different account access levels, with permissions that affect what a user can view or change. Review the current permissions with your account administrator when giving a supplier access.

As a procurement requirement, ask for the firm to retain suitable administrative access and a record of who has access to advertising, measurement and landing-page systems. Put spending authority, approvals and handover into the agreement. Access to a dashboard alone is not a substitute for an operational handover.

When changing providers, agree the transition date, outstanding work, reporting exports and the person responsible for live campaigns. Check any contractual ownership terms rather than assuming every asset or licence transfers automatically.

Google supports different ways to track conversions, including website actions, phone calls and imported offline outcomes. Choose a measurement design that fits the firm’s systems, permissions and consent arrangements, then verify which events are actually recorded.

A call-button click is contact intent. It does not establish that a call connected, that the enquiry was suitable or that a matter was instructed. Require the report to identify the event definition instead of labelling every interaction a client.

For each review, ask intake to distinguish relevant enquiries, unsuitable work, duplicates and accepted matters using an agreed process. Use aggregated outcomes in routine reporting. Record what cannot yet be attributed so the team does not treat incomplete data as a precise return calculation.

• Which services and locations used the budget?
• Which recorded actions count as conversions, and how were they checked?
• How many enquiries could intake review and classify?
• Which page or campaign changes followed from that review?
• What decision does the provider recommend next, and why?

Ask a prospective hire or agency to explain a relevant account decision, the evidence behind it and the work they personally handled. Request an example reporting format that protects client confidentiality. A claim of legal-sector experience should be supported by work the provider is able to discuss.

Use the worksheet to compare scope, ownership and costs in one place. Resolve unanswered items before the campaign depends on them. Our Google Ads service explains the work RankMyFirm can scope; media spend is separate from management fees.

If the resourcing question also includes organic search, use the separate in-house SEO versus agency guide. The skills and deliverables overlap in places, but the operating costs and account responsibilities deserve their own comparison.

• Download the Google Ads provider worksheet (CSV)