How Long Does Law Firm Advertising Take to Work? What the First Six Months Really Look Like

The most common reason a law firm gives up on advertising is that it judged the campaign at the wrong moment. Usually that's week six, when the spend is obvious, the leads are mixed, and nothing has signed yet.

Sometimes stopping is the right call. More often the firm was about four weeks away from its first signed clients. This article sets out what normally happens and when, so you know which situation you're in.

The numbers come from PixelRush HQ, where our clients record each lead through to a signed client, and from nine Australian law firm Meta accounts over the 12 months to September 2026.

How long until the first leads arrive?

Two to four weeks from the day you engage someone, in most cases. Image ads are usually live inside a fortnight. Video takes until week three or four, because it has to be filmed and edited. Google search campaigns can be live in a week, but they need a working landing page and correct tracking first, and skipping that is how firms end up with the problems described in why your Google Ads leads are junk.

That onboarding period has a practical consequence for budget that catches people out. In the first month you probably won't spend your full monthly figure, because half of it is gone before a single ad is live. It's normal to spend a fraction in month one, then spend more aggressively in months two and three to catch up. If you've budgeted $3,000 a month and month one comes in at $1,200, nothing is wrong.

Enquiries typically start the day the ads do. That part is rarely the issue.

How long until someone actually signs?

Longer than most principals expect. We looked at 219 signed clients across nine law firms and measured the gap between the first enquiry and the date the firm recorded them as signed.

Think about what that means at week six. If half your eventual clients take more than 54 days, then a campaign that has been running for 42 days has shown you well under half of what it will produce from the leads it has already generated. The rest are still in your follow-up.

This is why follow-up matters as much as the ads. Two-thirds of the clients in that data signed more than a month after they enquired. A firm that calls once and moves on never sees them.

The consumer research points the same way. Martindale-Avvo's 2024 legal consumer study found most people who hire a lawyer contact two or three firms, and 40% will move on if nobody has come back to them within 24 hours. More than nine in ten research the problem before they contact anybody at all. These are not people making a snap decision, and they are not talking only to you.

That's why I push so hard on multiple contact attempts. Phone, SMS and email, at least three times, before anyone writes a lead off. Whether it's three or seven doesn't matter much. What matters is that once is not enough. These prospects don't know you, they weren't referred, and they know nothing about you.

Why does the bidding algorithm need time to learn?

Because it is being asked to predict something it has almost no examples of yet.

Google's own documentation is unusually honest about this. It says a bid strategy can take "up to around 50 conversion events or 3 conversion cycles" to calibrate to a new objective, where a conversion cycle is the typical time between a click and the conversion it produces. Notice what that means: Google does not give you a number of days. It gives you a number of events. Time only matters because time is how you accumulate events.

For a law firm that distinction is the whole story. If you sign four matters a month and you're optimising towards signed matters, fifty events is a year away. If you optimise towards qualified enquiries instead, you might hit it in six weeks. And if the conversion cycle itself is long, which it is in law, three cycles can be three months before the bidding has any confidence.

Meta works on a similar principle: a campaign stays in a learning state until it has accumulated enough optimisation events in a rolling window, and performance is unstable until it exits. Every meaningful change you make to budget, audience or creative sends it back to the start.

Two practical conclusions follow. The first is that changing things constantly in month one is actively harmful, however much it feels like diligence. The second is that small budgets are genuinely harder to manage than large ones, which is the opposite of what most people assume. With a big account you can spot a pattern in a fortnight. With a small one you are staring at numbers that could just as easily be noise, waiting for enough events to tell the difference.

Why are the first two months the most expensive?

Because the ad platform is learning who to show your ads to, and you are learning which ads and questions work.

In our Meta data, new personal injury accounts paid $80 to $130 per enquiry in their first month or two. By month five the same accounts were paying around $25. Our longest-running account has then held $20 to $24 for more than a year.

Not every account follows that curve, and the next section is about why. Some firms are signing clients before the curve has even started to bend. Others take three or four months of testing before the cost settles. Testing is expensive at times, and it's better to know that going in than to discover it in month two.

The market isn't what's moving, either. Across all nine accounts the underlying cost of advertising on Meta was flat year on year. The early cost is the price of learning. More on the benchmarks in what a law firm lead should cost.

Why do some law firms sign clients in week one and others take months?

Because the same campaign lands in very different firms. Two of our clients show the range.

The fast start. An Adelaide personal injury firm started closing new matters almost straight out of the blocks. In what was effectively half a month of live advertising it had signed four clients and produced around seven matters. I tell that story often and I always add the same caveat straight after it: that is not typical, and I would never sell it as typical. But it's worth understanding why it happened, because none of it was luck.

The slower build. A Victorian injury firm took considerably longer. The first couple of months produced enquiries, some of them good, but not the signings the principal wanted. Around month three two things changed. We narrowed the campaign from several claim types down to TAC claims only, which was her specialty, and she took the phone calls back from her assistant and started calling every enquiry herself, fast. The difference was immediate. In her words: "the quicker we get to them and roll out the process, the quicker they sign." And a few minutes later: "me doing it and you guys narrowing it has really made a big difference." Since narrowing to TAC, she told us, "I'm seeing a lot more clients sign up and I've signed up a couple of big ones." The estimated fees on the matters she has signed are already comfortably into six figures.

The part of her story I find most telling is something she said about her previous agency. She had reached exactly this point once before, a few months in with leads coming through and not enough signing, and had stopped. Looking back, she told us, had they kept going they "would have had a huge increase in revenue and fees". The campaign was not the thing that failed that time. The patience did.

Her own summary is better than anything I could write: "The realisation I've come to is that you've got to be quick with leads. You've got to have a sales process, and I think you need to work that out in one area, really know how to do it, before you can roll out the other areas."

The long build. A Sydney compensation firm took longer still, and it is the most useful of the three because nothing dramatic happened. The first weeks produced plenty of enquiries and the principal's own description of working through them was that it was draining. Leads were hit and miss. Nothing about month one suggested what the account would become.

About nine months in, asked whether it was worth continuing, she said: "I'm happy with the Meta side of things. If anything, I was thinking I'll up that budget a bit and see what it does." That is what a campaign reaching maturity actually sounds like. Not a breakthrough. A principal who has seen enough to want to buy more of it.

She did raise the budget, weighted towards motor accident claims. Some months later: "I have noticed a few more CTPs coming in, which is good. That's what we want."

Three firms, three timelines: signing inside a fortnight, turning the corner at month three, and quietly compounding across a year. Same agency, same channel, same country.

So what separates the fast starters from the slow builders? In our experience it is mostly five things, and only one of them is the ads.

Most agencies get judged at the three-month mark, and plenty of them deserve to be. But three months is also exactly where the slower-building firms are when they give up. In our experience at PixelRush, it is typically somewhere past six months that the business and its marketing are properly aligned: the targeting has been narrowed to the work the firm really wants, intake has a process that fits it, and the campaign has enough outcome data to find more of the same. That is when a firm gets the best result it is going to get, and it is worth knowing before you start rather than discovering in month three.

What does a realistic first six months look like, month by month?

Here is the arc we see most often. Treat the months as rough markers rather than promises.

The part of that arc people underestimate is month two. Everything is paid for, nothing has arrived, and the only visible numbers are the discouraging ones. If you know in advance that month two looks like that, it stops being a crisis and becomes a stage.

Does seasonality distort the six-month picture?

Yes, and nobody tells you which six months you're buying.

In the accounts we run, January is consistently the cheapest advertising of the year, and one family firm recorded its best ever month in January. December is the weak one, with cost per enquiry up 25% or more in three accounts. Most firms do exactly the wrong thing with that information: they switch off over the Christmas break and come back in February, missing the cheapest month and paying to re-learn on the way back in.

So a campaign that launches in October is being judged on November and December, which flatter nothing. A campaign that launches in February gets an easier run. Neither tells you much about the campaign itself.

What should you judge, and when?

When should a law firm stop an advertising campaign?

Persistence isn't always right. These are the signs a campaign is not going to come good on its own.

• By the end of month two, almost none of the enquiries are matters you'd take. That is a targeting or offer problem, and waiting won't fix it.
• Intake is reaching fewer than a third of enquiries. The ads may be fine. The numbers may be fake, or calls are going out too late. Either way, more budget won't help until it's fixed.
• Nobody can tell you what a signed client has cost. Then there is nothing to judge, and the first job is tracking.
• Cost per enquiry is still climbing in month four. Healthy accounts fall or flatten by then.
• The same fix has been promised three months running. Not a data problem. A relationship problem.

One of the accounts we reviewed spent five months on Google at a low cost per click, reached very few searches, and paid about $800 for each real enquiry before it was paused. The warning signs were there in month two. A low bid cap was buying the cheapest, least relevant clicks.

There's an honest counterweight to all of this, though. Lumpiness is normal and it is not always explicable. One Queensland firm went several months with almost nothing and then signed five matters in a single month. The client asked me why, and the truthful answer was that I didn't know. Sometimes it's the ebbs and flows of marketing. Another account hadn't converted for three or four months, and when it finally did, the matter was worth six figures. If you kill a campaign on a two-month sample in a business where matters are lumpy and large, you will sometimes be killing a good one.

Why is the lead flow fine but nothing is closing?

Because generating leads is usually the easy part.

This is the pattern I see most often in month two and month three. The ads are working, the enquiries are real, and the firm still hasn't signed anybody. At that point the ad account is not the problem and changing it will not help.

One client of ours, an accounting practice we now use as a flagship example, closed nothing at all in its first two months. The leads were good. The problem was a twenty-minute sales call that gave the prospect too little to act on, so nobody ever asked for a proposal. We changed the conversation, not the campaign, and it became one of the best-performing accounts we have.

Three things account for most of it. Leads get contacted once and abandoned. Proposals get promised on a busy day and never go out. Or the first conversation doesn't give the person enough to decide with. None of those are visible in an advertising report, which is precisely why so many firms spend month three optimising keywords.

The check is simple. Look at the share of enquiries your team marked as matters you'd actually take. If that share is healthy and the signings aren't there, the ads have done their job. If that share is poor, the ads haven't.

What about the cash?

For family law, criminal law and most fee-for-service work, fees start arriving within weeks of signing, so the campaign can begin to fund itself by month three or four.

Personal injury is different, and the scale of the difference is worth seeing properly. SIRA's 2025 review of the NSW compulsory third party scheme found that damages claims took an average of 35.3 months from lodgement to resolution in 2024-25, and even threshold-injury claims averaged 43.8 weeks. ReturnToWorkSA reports that 90% of injured workers have returned to work fully or partially at 26 weeks. In other words, a client you sign this month may not produce a fee until the campaign that found them has been running for three years.

That is not a reason to avoid injury work. It is a reason to measure it differently. What you can measure early is estimated fees against ad spend, recorded when each client signs. It also helps to aim for a mix of claim types, including some that tend to resolve in months, so something is coming in while the large matters run. We go through the differences between claim types in personal injury marketing by claim type.

How does this compare with SEO?

Worth asking, because most firms are being sold both at once and told they take a similar time.

They don't. Search engine optimisation for a competitive legal term in a capital city is realistically an 18 to 36 month project. At $5,000 a month, two years of it is $120,000 spent before the thing you bought starts working properly. Paid advertising can produce enquiries in the first fortnight and a defensible view of cost per client by month six.

That is not an argument against SEO, which compounds in a way paid never does and eventually gets cheaper rather than dearer. It is an argument against expecting them on the same schedule, and against judging a six-month paid campaign by an SEO timeline or the reverse. We set out the trade-off in is SEO worth it for personal injury law firms.

What happens after month six?

Most articles on this topic stop at six months. Firms don't.

Months seven to twelve are where the account either compounds or plateaus. Compounding looks like this: cost per signed client is under your ceiling, so you add budget, and the extra budget buys more clients at a similar cost. That is exactly what the Sydney firm above did at month nine, and what it looked like from her side was noticing more of the claim type she wanted arriving. That holds until it doesn't. Every account has a point where more money starts buying worse enquiries, because you have already reached the people most likely to respond and the next dollar goes to somebody further away from the decision.

The signs you've hit it are consistent: cost per enquiry climbs while volume rises, the qualified rate falls, and impression share stops improving no matter what you spend. At that point the growth has to come from somewhere other than budget. A second channel, a second claim type, a second location, or a better offer.

The other thing that changes after month six is that you finally have enough outcome data to bid on it. Six months of recorded qualified and signed leads is the asset the first six months was really building. That's the point where broad match, Performance Max and value-based bidding stop being reckless and start being useful.

Set the clock properly

Advertising for a law firm is not slow. Leads arrive in weeks. But the full result of any month's spend takes two to three months to show, because that's how long people take to sign. If you judge it before then, you will often stop something that was working.

If you want to see what that looks like with real firms, our case studies show the first 90 days as well as the full-year numbers, and our growth system explains how we track it.

This article is general information about marketing, not legal or financial advice, and figures from our own accounts are specific to those firms.