Choosing between two family law PPC agency proposals usually comes down to one factor: whether you can tell what you're actually buying. Learning how to compare two family law PPC agency proposals starts with separating the ad spend from the management fee, then checking who owns the account and the data when the engagement ends. Everything else is secondary.
For the complete picture, see our The Complete Guide to Vetting a Family Law PPC Agency.
Most proposals bundle these pieces on purpose. One agency quotes a flat monthly number that includes media. Another quotes a management fee plus pass-through spend. A third charges a percentage of spend with a floor. On the surface, all three look like a monthly invoice. The economics are different.
The framework below pulls the fine print to the front so you can line up two decks and make a defensible call.
Start by separating spend from fee
Before anything else, rewrite both proposals on a single page with two line items: media budget paid to Google, and management fee paid to the agency. If a proposal won't let you split those cleanly, that's your first data point. You need to know what percentage of your monthly outlay is working media versus agency compensation, because that ratio determines how aggressively your account can compete in auctions.
A family law firm spending a modest monthly total on a bundled fee may be putting far less into Google than they think. In a market where family law keywords are among the most expensive in paid search, that gap matters.
The side by side that actually matters
Below is the comparison most firms should run. The two columns represent a common choice: a national full-service legal marketing agency that handles multiple channels, and a specialist focused only on paid search for family law. Fill in your own numbers from each proposal, but these are the dimensions that usually decide the outcome.
| Factor | National full-service agency | Family law PPC specialist |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Bundled retainer covering strategy, media, SEO, and sometimes content. Media spend often not itemized. | Management fee stated separately from ad spend, which is paid directly to Google or passed through at cost.Better fit |
| Spend minimum | Often lower entry point because PPC is one of several bundled services.Better fit | Typically a stated minimum media budget to make the engagement viable. |
| Channel depth vs breadth | Breadth across SEO, social, display, and search under one roof. | Depth in Google Ads for family law, including sub-practice keyword behavior and seasonal patterns.Better fit |
| Keyword and negative keyword control | Shared playbook across many legal verticals, often templated. | Negative lists built from family law search behavior, with ongoing search term review.Better fit |
| Reporting transparency | Dashboards aggregating multiple channels. Consultation attribution can be blended. | Reporting focused on consultations booked, cost per lead, and search term quality.Better fit |
| Account ownership on exit | Agency-owned accounts in some models. Review termination clauses carefully. | Client-owned Google Ads account and conversion data stays with the firm.Better fit |
Where proposals hide the real cost
The fee structure is usually visible. The terms that affect your long-term economics are usually not. Pull these items to the front before you sign anything.
- Account ownership. Is the Google Ads account under your MCC or theirs? If you leave, do you keep the historical data, conversion actions, and audience lists, or do you start over?
- Minimum commitment. Month to month, 90-day, or annual? What's the exit notice period?
- Setup fee treatment. One-time cost, waived with commitment, or amortized into the first few months?
- Call tracking ownership. Who pays for the tracking platform, who holds the recordings, and can you export call data on exit?
- Landing pages. Built by the agency, hosted where, and transferable when the contract ends?
- Reporting cadence. Monthly PDF, live dashboard, or scheduled calls with the person actually managing the account?
- Who runs the account day to day. Senior strategist, account coordinator, or shared pod? Ask by name.
Any proposal that gets vague on these points is telling you something. The answer may still be acceptable, but you want it in writing before the first invoice.
How to normalize two different pricing models
When one agency quotes a bundled fee and the other quotes fee plus spend, convert both to the same shape. Pick a target media budget, say the number you'd realistically spend on Google each month, then calculate total monthly outlay for each proposal at that media level.
Three questions to answer in that exercise:
- At your target media level, what percentage of total spend goes to Google versus the agency?
- If you increase the media budget by 50 percent, does the agency fee scale, stay flat, or step up at a threshold?
- If paid search is paused for a month, do you still owe the full fee?
These answers tell you how the agency makes money as your account grows or contracts, and whether their incentives line up with yours. A family law firm with seasonal variation in demand should pay particular attention to the pause question.
Reporting that lets you verify the work
Good reporting for a family law PPC engagement centers on consultation volume, qualified lead rate, cost per consultation, and search term quality. You should be able to see which keywords and ads are producing the calls and form fills that actually turn into retained cases, and which are producing people searching for free legal aid or do-it-yourself divorce forms.
When you compare proposals, ask each agency to show you a sample report from a current family law client with the firm name redacted. The structure of that report tells you what they prioritize. If consultations booked and cost per consultation aren't the headline numbers, you're looking at a different definition of success than the one that pays your rent.
This is where a specialist tends to show up differently. At ORSA, reporting is built around consultations and search term quality because those are the two things that determine whether paid search is working for a family law firm. More on how that shapes campaign management is on the services page.
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.
Which one fits you
Both options can be the right call. The decision depends on where your firm actually sits.
The full-service agency fits you if: you want one vendor managing SEO, content, social, and paid search together, you don't have internal marketing leadership to coordinate multiple specialists, and you're comfortable with blended reporting across channels. This model trades depth in any single channel for coordination across all of them.
The family law PPC specialist fits you if: paid search is your primary growth channel or you want it to be, you already have other marketing partners or in-house capacity for SEO and content, and you want the person building your negative keyword list to understand the difference between a search for a custody modification and a search for free legal aid. This model trades channel breadth for execution depth in Google Ads.
A useful tiebreaker: if the two proposals landed on your desk with the agency names removed, which one answers more of the fine-print questions above without you having to ask? That proposal was written by people who expect to be held accountable to the terms.
Two proposals rarely price the same thing, which is how firms pick wrong. The framework above gives you a like-for-like view that separates ad spend from management fee, surfaces the reporting and account-ownership terms buried in the fine print, and turns two glossy decks into a decision you can actually defend. Spend an hour rebuilding both proposals on a single page before you take the next sales call, and the right choice usually becomes obvious.
If you want a second read on two proposals you're weighing, you can bring them to a conversation on the Work With Us page, or review more decision frameworks in the resource library. The question to walk in with: at my target monthly media budget, what percentage of each proposal is actually reaching Google?
