The challenge
Hassakis Law wanted car and truck accident cases from Southern Illinois, not from Chicago, St. Louis, or Kentucky, and not for practice areas the firm handles but doesn't advertise. The account had the classic problems of a small law firm competing with billboard budgets:
- A single phrase-match keyword, "injury law," was pulling in medical malpractice, workers' comp, and competitor-name searches, at one point accounting for 77% of a campaign's monthly spend with almost no qualified calls.
- Out-of-area clicks were paying for searchers the firm could never represent.
- Lead counting was inconsistent: raw call totals looked healthy, but the firm's intake team knows a real case takes at least five minutes to qualify on the phone, so shorter calls were noise.
- Website form tracking had silently broken, so a share of real leads never reached the ad platform's bidding at all.
In the summer of 2025 the account converted 0.76% of clicks into qualified leads at a cost per conversion of about $172, with a search impression share of 17.5%.
What we did
We rebuilt the account around the firm's actual economics: a couple of signed cases a year can pay for the practice, so lead quality outranks cost per lead, but volume has to hold.
- Defined a qualified lead the way intake does. Google Ads counts a conversion only for a tracked call of five minutes or more from an ad, or a completed case-evaluation form. Raw call volume is reported separately, never as the lead number.
- Locked the geography. Search campaigns target Southern Illinois around Mt. Vernon, Effingham, and Marion, with Chicago, the St. Louis metro, and Kentucky excluded rather than targeted.
- Built a 177-term shared negative keyword list covering out-of-scope practice areas (workers' comp, medical malpractice, food poisoning, slip and fall) and competitor attorney names, applied to the non-brand search campaigns and mirrored as campaign-level negatives on Performance Max. Search terms are re-swept every two weeks.
- Separated brand, non-brand search, and Performance Max so each is judged on its own cost per qualified lead. Performance Max for car and truck accidents became the workhorse; a dedicated brand campaign keeps the firm's own name cheap and protected.
- Wrote ads in the firm's approved voice. Headline position one rotates the firm name and geography; claims are limited to what the firm has verified ("$100M+ recovered since 1950," "two generations of trial experience"), with no outcome promises.
- Fixed the plumbing. Enhanced conversions verified on both the ads and call-tracking side, and the broken website form triggers replaced so form fills count again.
- Reported monthly in plain English, with spend, qualified leads, cost per lead, and a standing offer of a live review.
The results
Same three months, one year apart, essentially the same budget:
| June–August | 2025 | 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ad spend | $12,062 | $11,986 | flat |
| Qualified conversions (5-minute calls + forms) | 69.9 | 83.2 | +19% |
| Cost per qualified conversion | $172 | $144 | −16% |
| Click-to-lead conversion rate | 0.76% | 2.57% | 3.4× |
| Search impression share | 17.5% | 23.6% | +6.1 pts |
| Click-through rate | 2.71% | 3.35% | +24% |
The 2026 figures are conservative: website form conversions were under-recorded for part of that window because of the tracking break fixed in September 2026, so real qualified lead volume was higher than the platform shows.
Paid search is now a measured, predictable source of accident inquiries for the firm, with budget decisions made from a monthly report instead of a gut feeling. The account is managed month to month, in the firm's own Google Ads account, with the same partner on every review.
Figures are from the firm's Google Ads account for the periods shown. Past results are not a guarantee of future performance, and every market and firm is different.