Why a law firm’s Google Ads should run one account per city
One of the biggest accounts in my portfolio is a US probate law firm: $1.44M through Google Ads and 17.2K conversions over its history, which works out to about $84 a conversion. It is not one account. It is seven, one per Texas city, under a single manager account.
The reason shows up the moment you put each city on its own row. Same firm, same all time view, cost per conversion by city:
- Corpus Christi: $65
- Dallas: $78
- San Antonio: $80
- Austin: $84
- Houston: $88
- El Paso: $90
- Fort Worth: $146
Blended, the firm pays about $84 a conversion and every city looks fine. Split, Fort Worth costs more than twice what Corpus Christi does for the same result. With one shared budget, the bidding keeps feeding whichever city it finds easiest to spend in, and the expensive city hides inside a healthy average.
One account per city does three things:
- Each city gets its own budget, so a cheap market is never starved by an expensive one.
- Each city’s calls are logged with their own keyword and location, so intake can tell you which city’s leads actually sign.
- When a city stops paying back, you see it on its own row and act on that city alone.
The check for your firm: if you advertise in more than one city, pull cost per conversion by location for the last 90 days. If one location costs more than twice another and they share a budget, the cheap one is paying for the expensive one.
How the numbers were worked: cost divided by conversions for each city, from the manager account’s all time table. That is a cost per lead, not a cost per signed case. Getting signed cases back into the account is the next step of the tracking, and it is the number the budget should follow.