$452 a Call, On Purpose: How a Naples Divorce Firm Buys Expensive Leads for More Expensive Cases
“We’re getting great cases consistently.”
Engagement: Google Ads campaign, launched February 23, 2026
Services: Campaign build, keyword targeting and blocking, landing pages, call tracking, ongoing review
Three numbers
$12,215.57
After BSPE (6 mo)
Ad spend, February to August
27
After BSPE (6 mo)
Phone calls tracked
$452.43
After BSPE (6 mo)
Cost per call
Where the Firm Started
The firm had already built a Chicago practice around people who read about their legal problem for weeks before calling anyone. Florida was a newer market and a harder one, because none of that reading material existed there yet.
The goal was set at the start, and it was better calls rather than more of them. Divorce advertising in a wealthy coastal town draws an enormous number of searches from people who want a form, a free consultation, or a way to do it themselves. Paying Naples prices for those clicks is how firms decide that Google Ads does not work.
So we built the campaign around the four things anyone running ads can actually control: which searches can show your ad, which ones are blocked, what the person sees when they arrive, and how you count what comes back.
Ads that show up for four kinds of searches
The campaign went live February 23, 2026, covering high net worth divorce and complex assets, general Naples divorce searches, alimony questions from the paying spouse's side, and people searching for the attorney and the firm by name. Nothing ran anywhere except Google search results, so every dollar went toward someone actively looking.
A long list of searches we refused to pay for
Free, cheap, and low cost. Legal aid and pro bono. Payment plans and sliding scale fees. Forms, templates, and do-it-yourself divorce. How to file without a lawyer. Anything outside family law. Blocking a search improves the odds of a good call without settling the question.
One page built to do one job
Each ad sends the person to a page written for the search they typed, and the phone number on it is tracked, so we can tell which searches produce calls instead of guessing. When we checked what people had actually typed before calling, the answers were local and ready to hire, along the lines of divorce attorney Naples.
A second campaign instead of a bigger one
In July, the client wanted more Florida matters through the slow summer. Rather than bolt new keywords onto something that was working, we started a separate campaign for two nearby services, child custody and time-sharing, and prenups and postnups. Each got its own page. The two campaigns together were capped at $110 a day.
What it produced inside the practice
On August 24, 2026, the client wrote this about the Florida work:
“We’re getting great cases consistently.”
That is the part Google Ads cannot show you. The platform can tell you a call was tracked. Whether it turned into a case is in your files.
It is also the answer to the trade above. A campaign held to four or five calls a month is worth running when those calls are the right ones, and consistently is the word he used.
The two stay separate in this document. Twenty seven tracked calls are twenty seven tracked calls. They are not twenty seven signed cases.
What the data shows
The main campaign. February 23 through August 24, 2026.
Main divorce campaign | |
|---|---|
Times the ads appeared | 6,991 |
Clicks | 407 |
Spend | $12,215.57 |
Average cost per click | $30.01 |
Phone calls tracked | 27 |
Share of clicks that called | 6.63% |
Cost per call | $452.43 |
Twenty two of the 27 calls came from phones. For a campaign whose whole purpose is to make the phone ring, that makes the way the page works on a small screen a real part of the result rather than a detail.
Thirty dollars a click and $452 a call are high numbers. They are also the numbers we were aiming for.
Every search on the blocked list is a cheaper click we chose not to buy. Free consultation searches are cheap. Form downloads are cheap. How-to-file-without-a-lawyer is very cheap. Let all of it in and the cost per click drops, the cost per call drops, and the phone rings with people who were never going to hire a Naples divorce attorney for a complicated asset case.
These searches cost what they cost because other firms want them, and other firms want them because of what the cases behind them are worth. A cost per lead means nothing by itself. It only means something next to the fee at the other end, and that comparison lives in your files, not in Google Ads.
Twenty seven calls over six months is four or five a month. That is on purpose too.
Run divorce ads in Naples without the blocking and you get many times that, and somebody in your office answers every one. Somebody explains that you do not sell forms. Somebody tells the caller expecting a free consultation what you charge. Somebody redirects the case that belongs in another practice area, and spends fifteen minutes with the person who was never going to hire anybody.
None of that shows up in a Google Ads report. It shows up in payroll, in your own hours, and in attention you needed for the complicated cases you already have.
Four or five calls a month is what it looks like when you trade volume for fit. Whether that was the right trade is a question the ad platform cannot answer and your intake records can.
A page test that went nowhere. We ran a separate test in May.
May page test | |
|---|---|
Times the ads appeared | 466 |
Clicks | 16 |
Spend | $795.49 |
Calls tracked | 0 |
Sixteen clicks is too few to prove anything, so this is an inconclusive result rather than a failed one. It is here because a client should be able to trust that a bad month shows up in the report on its own, instead of getting folded into an account total where nobody sees it.
The second campaign. July 28 through August 24, 2026.
Second campaign | |
|---|---|
Times the ads appeared | 14,492 |
Clicks | 173 |
Spend | $689.95 |
Calls tracked | 3 |
Cost per call | $229.98 |
Both pages got similar money. They did not do similar things.
Page | Clicks | Spend | Calls |
|---|---|---|---|
Child custody and time-sharing | 98 | $336.92 | 3 |
Prenups and postnups | 75 | $353.03 | 0 |
All three calls came through the custody page in this first short window.
Where those three calls actually came from. We built this as a search campaign. That is not entirely where it ran.
Where the ad appeared | Clicks | Spend | Calls |
|---|---|---|---|
On other websites | 142 | $189.89 | 3 |
In Google search results | 28 | $471.00 | 0 |
On Google’s partner sites | 3 | $29.05 | 0 |
All three calls came from ads placed on other websites, where clicks ran about $1.34 each, while ads in Google search results cost about $16.82 a click and produced none.
Those two kinds of clicks are not the same thing. Someone reading an article who taps an ad is in a very different frame of mind from someone who typed divorce attorney Naples into Google, and a higher share of those taps are accidental. Three calls from that source should be checked against your actual call log before anyone counts them as three prospective clients. That check is the next decision on this campaign.
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How to read these numbers
Sourcing and method, stated plainly:
- All figures come from the firm's own Google Ads account, across the dates shown.
- A tracked call means Google Ads recorded a call. It does not mean the caller signed. Signed cases and fees are in the firm's records, and no return on investment is claimed here.
- The 27 calls are not described here as 27 wealthy callers. What the campaign controls is which searches could produce a call, not who ended up dialing. Who they turned out to be is in the firm's intake records.
- The argument that a higher cost per call is worth paying in this kind of case describes what we were aiming for. Showing that it paid off would take fee figures and intake records from the firm.
- The rule for when a phone call gets counted in Google Ads should be written down alongside these figures, because that rule is what the 27 actually means.
- We could see the exact wording behind about half the clicks and spend, so the search examples above describe part of the traffic rather than all of it.
- The May test had 16 clicks, too few to conclude anything, and is reported as inconclusive. The three calls from the second campaign are reported with a note about where they came from.
- The statement reflects the client’s own assessment of the work as of August 24, 2026. Blocking searches improves the odds rather than determining the outcome. Every market and practice area behaves differently, and results vary accordingly.
A lot of attorneys already did
The work continues
Six months in, the main campaign works and costs a known amount per call, the second campaign has one early signal on the custody side, and there is an open question about where those three calls came from that needs answering before the next budget decision.
Four things would make this a stronger story, and all four are in the firm’s files rather than in Google’s: how many tracked calls became cases, what kinds of cases they were, roughly what they were worth if the client approves sharing it, and the written rule for when a call gets counted.
Until then, this is an honest account of how one campaign was built, filtered, tested, expanded, and reported. That is a smaller claim than a return figure, and it is one that holds up.
If you tried Google Ads and quit because the leads cost too much, ask what the cases were worth first. Cheap clicks and cheap cases usually show up together. Let’s talk about where your money actually went.
Prepared by BSPE Legal Marketing. Figures through August 24, 2026. Internal draft. Written permission required before publishing the client quotation.