PPC for criminal defense lawyers
PPC for criminal defense lawyers.
Paid search for DUI firms is the only channel that can produce a retained case in the first week, and the only one that stops producing the day you stop paying. Used properly it covers the caseload while the organic work matures. Used carelessly it is the fastest way to spend several thousand dollars on clicks from people who were never going to hire anyone.
How does Traffic Lawyer Marketing run Google Ads for DUI firms?
UpdatedWe run tightly scoped search campaigns with a large negative keyword list, and we bid up the overnight and weekend hours when arrests happen.Most competing firms pause ads then, which makes those hours the cheapest high-intent inventory in the account.
Ad management is billed separately from the $1,000 a month program, as a flat fee on top of your spend.The spend goes to Google. A percentage-of-spend fee would pay us more when your budget rises whether or not it produces cases.
We judge the account on cost per retained case, not cost per click.Defense clicks run from the mid tens of dollars into the low hundreds. Who answers the phone at 2am changes the economics more than the bid does.
$120–270
typical CPC range on competitive defense terms
Semrush, US database
Nights
when DUI arrest searches actually peak
And when most firms pause ads
Week 1
how fast paid search can produce calls
Versus 3–6 months organic
$0
what paid traffic produces the month you stop
Which is why the earned layer matters
DUI paid search, three layers
What we run, and in what order
Local Services Ads, where available
Google Screened ads sit above everything else on the page when they run for your practice area and market.Availability varies by legal specialty and geography and changes over time, so we verify for your market rather than assume. Where they run, they are usually the first thing to test.
Call-only and call-extended search
Most DUI clients convert by phone, not by form, so the ad should be a phone number.Call-only campaigns during peak arrest hours, call extensions on everything else, and call tracking so you know which keyword produced which conversation.
Tightly scoped search campaigns
Exact and phrase match on situation terms, with an aggressive and constantly growing negative list.Refusal, second offense, CDL, and county-level terms get their own ad groups so the ad copy matches the search rather than averaging across all of them.
DUI Google Ads: what to check first
Five settings worth checking in a criminal defense ads account
These are the five things we look at first when we pick up a DUI account. None of them are exotic, and each one is worth real money every month it runs correctly.
No negative keyword list worth the name
Free, pro bono, public defender, salary, jobs, law school, how-to-fight-it-yourself. Without these you are paying premium prices for people who will never retain anyone.
Ads paused exactly when arrests happen
Business-hours scheduling on a practice area whose entire demand curve peaks overnight and at weekends. This is the most common and most expensive mistake.
Every keyword pointed at the homepage
Someone searching about a breathalyzer refusal lands on a general practice page, does not see their situation named, and leaves. The click is spent either way.
Conversions counted as clicks
If the account optimizes toward clicks or landing-page views rather than tracked calls, Google will happily deliver cheap traffic that never phones.
Broad match plus automated bidding, unsupervised
The combination that quietly spends a month's budget on adjacent, unqualified searches. Automation is fine once there is conversion data to train on; it is not where you start.
Paid and organic are not alternatives
The right question is not whether to run ads or do SEO, it is what each one is for. Paid search buys attention today at a price that never falls. Organic and Map Pack visibility take months to build and then keep producing at a cost per case that drops every year the asset exists.
The sequence we run for most firms: ads on from month one to keep the calendar full, the earned layer built underneath it, and ad spend rebalanced downward as rankings hold. Firms that skip the earned layer are renting their caseload forever. Firms that skip ads have two quiet quarters they did not need to have.
PPC for criminal defense lawyers: common questions
Pair this with
SEO for Criminal Defense Lawyers
Rank for the charge-and-city searches that bring retained cases, not price shoppers.
Read moreSEO for DUI Lawyers
Own the DUI searches in your county before the license-suspension clock runs out.
Read moreAI SEO for Criminal Defense Lawyers
Get cited when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI who to call.
Read moreSources & data
- Semrush : cost-per-click benchmarks for DUI and criminal defense terms in the US database. Metro-level figures are pulled per market during the audit.
- Google Ads policies : govern what legal advertisers may claim and how legal services must be represented.
- Google Local Services Ads : availability by legal practice area and geography, including Google Screened eligibility.
- State bar advertising rules : apply to paid advertising as much as to organic content, including required disclosures and prohibitions on outcome claims.
Get an honest read on your paid search
Send us access and we will tell you what the account is actually spending per retained case, where the waste is, and whether the market is worth it at current click prices, before you commit to anything.
Family-owned since 1999 · 27 years marketing law firms · Washougal, WA