A proper audit of a family law Google Ads account is not a scan of the dashboard. It's a structured review that answers one question: is this account set up to produce qualified consultations, and if not, exactly where is the breakdown? If you want to know how to audit a legal Google Ads account with any real rigor, you need a checklist that covers the mechanics, the money, and the message.
What follows is the ten step process used to evaluate family law accounts before recommending any changes. It works whether you're reviewing your own account, a prospective agency's work, or an inherited campaign from a prior vendor.
Plan on about two hours if the account has been running for six months or more. Less if it's newer. More if the account has multiple campaigns and years of history to sort through.
Steps 1 to 3: Conversion Tracking, Goals, and Attribution
Start with conversion tracking because nothing else in the account means anything if this is wrong. A good setup tracks phone calls from ads, phone calls from the landing page, form submissions, and ideally distinguishes new consultation requests from existing client calls.
Step 1: Verify every conversion action. Open the Conversions section and look at each action. Confirm the tracking is active, the count method matches the goal (one per lead, not every click), and the conversion window is reasonable. Family law buyers often research for days before calling, so a 30 day click window is standard.
Step 2: Confirm which conversions are marked as primary. Only true consultation requests should be primary. Newsletter signups, chat opens, and "contact page views" should be secondary or removed. This directly affects how Smart Bidding optimizes.
Step 3: Check attribution and call tracking quality. If calls are being tracked, listen to a sample. Are they real prospects or spam? Are they being counted after a minimum call length, usually 60 seconds? Firms that skip this step often optimize toward junk.
Steps 4 to 6: Campaign Structure, Keywords, and Match Types
A well built family law account separates campaigns by practice area, geography, or both, depending on budget. Divorce, custody, and post decree modifications behave differently, and mixing them into one campaign hides performance signals.
Step 4: Map the campaign and ad group structure. Look for logical grouping: divorce keywords in divorce ad groups, custody in custody ad groups, and so on. Each ad group should hold a tight cluster of related keywords with ad copy that matches. If you see 40 keywords in one ad group covering three practice areas, that's a structural problem.
Step 5: Review keyword match types and search terms. Pull the Search Terms report for the last 90 days. You're looking for two things: what searches actually triggered ads, and how much was spent on searches that had no intent to hire. Common waste in family law includes:
- Searches for free legal aid or pro bono services
- DIY divorce form searches
- Job seekers looking for paralegal or attorney positions
- Searches naming a specific competing firm
- Informational queries with no hiring intent
- Out of state or out of service area searches
Step 6: Audit the negative keyword list. A serious family law account has hundreds of negatives, organized into shared lists and campaign level lists. If the negative list is under 50 terms, the account is almost certainly paying for irrelevant clicks. This is one of the highest leverage areas in any legal PPC review, and it's where focused paid search management often finds the fastest improvement.
Steps 7 and 8: Ad Copy, Extensions, and Landing Pages
Ad copy in family law has to do two things at once: qualify the searcher and give them a reason to click your ad instead of the four others on the page. Strong ads reference the specific practice area, mention consultation availability, and speak to the moment the person is in without being melodramatic.
Step 7: Evaluate ad copy and assets. Each ad group should have at least two Responsive Search Ads. Check that headlines cover practice area, location, credibility signals (years of experience, board certification, awards where allowed by state bar rules), and a clear call to action. Verify sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets are populated. Missing extensions is a common oversight that lowers ad rank without lowering spend.
Step 8: Follow the click to the landing page. Click a live ad and look at what happens next. The page should match the ad's promise (a custody ad should land on a custody page, not a generic homepage), load fast on mobile, show a phone number above the fold, and have a form that asks only what's needed to book a consultation. If the ad promises "compassionate divorce representation" and lands on a general practice page listing seven areas of law, the click was wasted.
Steps 9 and 10: Bidding, Budget Pacing, and Reporting Hygiene
Bidding strategy should match the account's data volume. New accounts with fewer than 15 conversions per month usually perform better on Manual CPC or Maximize Clicks with a target CPC cap. Established accounts with steady conversion volume can move to Maximize Conversions or Target CPA, but only after conversion tracking is verified as clean.
Step 9: Review bidding and budget allocation. Check that campaign budgets align with priority. Your highest margin practice areas should not be capped while lower value campaigns run wide open. Look at the Auction Insights report to see impression share lost to budget and to rank. Losing 40 percent of impressions to budget on your best performing campaign is a signal to reallocate.
Step 10: Assess reporting and account hygiene. The final step is checking the account's ongoing discipline: change history for the last 90 days, notes on tests being run, geographic targeting set to "presence" rather than "presence or interest," language settings correct, and ad schedule aligned with when your intake team can actually answer. Accounts that haven't been touched in 60 days are not being managed, they're being hosted.
Running Google Ads for your family law firm?
ORSA manages paid search for family law practices exclusively. If your campaigns should be producing more consultations, we’ll take a look and tell you what we see.
How to Audit a Legal Google Ads Account Without Getting Lost in the Data
A ten step audit sounds like a lot, but the discipline is what makes it useful. Work through the steps in order, take notes in a single document, and rate each area as strong, adequate, or needs work. At the end you'll have a specific list of what to fix and in what order, not a vague sense that "something is off."
When learning how to audit a legal Google Ads account, resist the urge to jump straight to keyword lists or ad copy. Those are the visible parts, but structural problems in tracking and campaign architecture will undo any improvement you make at the surface level. Fix the foundation first.
If you're reviewing an account managed by an outside agency, the audit also tells you something about the manager. Clean tracking, a deep negative list, tight ad groups, and current change history are signs of active work. Their absence is the answer to a different question, one covered in our resources on evaluating PPC management.
A complete Google Ads audit for a family law firm takes about two hours and covers six specific areas: conversion tracking, campaign structure, keywords and negatives, ad copy and landing pages, bidding and budget, and reporting hygiene. Most agencies skip three of them, usually the negative keyword depth, the landing page match, and the ongoing account hygiene, because those take time and don't show up in a monthly report. The firms that get consistent results from paid search are the ones whose accounts hold up under all six.
Pick one step from the list above and run it on your account this week. If you'd rather have a second set of eyes on the full ten step review, start a conversation about a paid search audit and we'll tell you what we find.
