Your intake team says the leads are rubbish. Your agency says the account has never performed better. Both of them are looking at real information, and both are probably right.
That gap is the most common thing we find when we audit a law firm's Google Ads. The campaign is doing exactly what it was set up to do. It was just set up to find the wrong thing.
This article goes through the six causes we see most often in Australian law firm accounts, how to check each one in about ten minutes, and the order to fix them in. It draws on nine law firm Google Ads accounts we manage or have audited over the 12 months to September 2026.
Key Takeaways
- Most junk leads are real people, not spam. They searched something close to what you do, and the campaign counted them as a success.
- Four of the nine accounts we reviewed were counting actions that are not enquiries. Once those were removed, the true cost per enquiry was 17% to 63% higher than reported.
- If the account says you're busy and the phones say you're not, believe the phones. That gap almost always means the tracking is wrong.
- Free legal advice and legal aid searches are the usual source of cheap, unusable enquiries. They look great in a report.
- Loose keyword matching is cheap per click and expensive per client. In one account the loose version of a keyword cost about 7 times less per click and 4 times more per enquiry.
- Fix the tracking first. Every other fix depends on the campaign being told what a good lead is.
What is a junk lead, and why isn't it the same as spam?
A junk lead is a real person with a real problem that your firm doesn't handle or can't take on. Spam is a bot or a sales pitch. They need different fixes, so it's worth separating them before you change anything.
| What it looks like | Where it comes from | What fixes it | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spam | Gibberish names, SEO pitches, fake numbers | Bots and form crawlers | Form protection, SMS verification |
| Junk | Wrong practice area, wants free advice, outside your state, legal aid matter | Keywords, matching and what the campaign is optimised towards | Everything in this article |
| Not ready | Right matter, not ready to act | Normal for any channel | Follow-up, not ads |
In our experience, spam is a small share of the complaints. Most of what intake calls junk falls in the middle row, which is good news, because the middle row is fixable.
Key Point
Ask intake to tag every bad lead with one of three words for a fortnight: spam, junk, or not ready. The split tells you whether you have an ads problem or a follow-up problem.
Cause one: is the campaign counting things that aren't leads?
This is the most common cause and the most damaging, because Google's bidding chases whatever you count as a conversion.
Four of the nine accounts were counting soft actions alongside calls and forms: a click on an email address, a tap on a phone number, a click through to LinkedIn, or several stages of the same enquiry counted separately. Remove them and the picture changes.
The cost isn't the real problem. The real problem is that the campaign learns from those soft actions. If a tap on a phone number counts as a win, Google finds more people who tap phone numbers, whether or not they ever call.
Here's the quick test. If your report shows a low cost per lead and a high conversion rate, ask whether it feels that busy. If the phones are quiet and nobody is overwhelmed, the tracking is wrong. We cover the benchmark side of this in what a law firm lead should cost.
How to check: in Google Ads, go to Goals, then Conversions, and look at which actions are marked Primary. For most firms the only primary actions should be a completed form, a phone call over a minimum length and a booked consultation. Also check that a call isn't being recorded twice by two different tracking tools. Two of the nine accounts looked like they were doing that.
Cause two: are you paying for free legal advice and legal aid searches?
Searches for free legal advice, legal aid, community legal centres and pro bono lawyers are high in volume and cheap per click. Add them to a campaign and the cost per click and cost per lead both fall sharply. The account looks healthier. Intake gets a stream of people you can't act for.
Most firms we speak with do not want these enquiries. A few do, for example firms with a legal aid practice, and for them this is a legitimate strategy. It should be a decision, though, not an accident of loose matching.
How to check: open the search terms report and filter for "free", "legal aid", "pro bono", "community" and "how to". If those terms have spend against them and you don't want the work, add them as negative keywords across the whole account.
Cause three: how loose is your keyword matching?
Google has steadily loosened what a keyword can match to. A broad match keyword for "litigation lawyer" can show for almost anything Google considers related.
Inside one Melbourne commercial litigation account, the same idea run two ways gave very different results.
The cheap click was the expensive lead. We see the same pattern across practice areas: the family law firm paying $5 a click paid twice as much per enquiry as the one paying $17.
Loose matching isn't always wrong. It works when the campaign is being fed signed-client data, because the bidding then learns which of those loose searches are worth paying for. Without that feedback it mostly finds volume.
How to check: sort your keywords by cost and look at the match type column. If most of your spend is on broad match and you are not sending signed clients back to Google, that's where a lot of your junk is coming from.
Cause four: what's hiding in your search terms?
Google no longer shows every search that triggered your ads. A meaningful share of clicks now sit in a row labelled "Other search terms", with no detail behind it. You are paying for some searches you can't see.
You can still manage the ones you can see. Negative keywords are the most neglected part of most accounts we audit. The standard list for a law firm covers jobs and careers, courses and degrees, free and legal aid terms, templates and DIY, other practice areas, and other states if you only act locally.
How to check: look at when negative keywords were last added. If it was months ago, nobody is reading the search terms.
Cause five: is Performance Max running without client data?
Performance Max places your ads across Search, YouTube, Display, Gmail and Maps, and decides for itself where to spend. It reports very cheap leads. In one compensation account it showed $73 per conversion against $407 on ordinary search.
The catch is that you can't see most of where it ran, and the cheap conversions tend to be the lowest-intent ones. In that same account more than half of the Performance Max conversions came through a single call-tracking action, which made us cautious about the number.
Our position: Performance Max can work for a law firm once the account is sending qualified leads and signed clients back to Google. Before that, it optimises towards whoever fills in a form most easily.
How to check: if Performance Max is a large share of your spend, ask for its leads to be reported separately from search, with the share that intake marked as qualified.
Cause six: does your page qualify anyone?
An ad that says "free consultation, all matters" and a page with a name, phone and message box will convert well, and it will convert everyone. The ad and the page are the cheapest place to do screening, because the person screens themselves.
Say what you act on, where, and what you don't take. Ask two or three of the questions your intake team would ask anyway. Cost per lead will go up. Cost per signed client usually comes down. We've written more on this in should law firms qualify leads or take everyone who calls.
What order should you fix this in?
The order matters, because each step makes the next one work.
Expect the numbers to look worse before they look better. Lead volume drops and cost per lead rises in the first few weeks, because you've stopped counting and buying the easy ones. Judge the change on qualified enquiries and signed clients, over at least six to eight weeks.
Expert Tip
Step four is the one most firms skip, because it feels like homework. Three columns per lead is enough: did you speak to them, would you take the matter, did they sign. That is what PixelRush HQ records for our clients, and it is the difference between a campaign that finds enquiries and one that finds clients.
When are junk leads actually fine?
Sometimes a high junk rate is the price of a good campaign. On Meta, where people haven't searched for a lawyer, we expect only 10% to 40% of personal injury enquiries to be matters the firm would take, and those campaigns can still return many times their spend because the leads are cheap.
The test isn't the share of junk. It's the cost per signed client, and whether intake can handle the volume without good enquiries waiting. If both are fine, leave it alone.
The report and the phones should agree
If your Google Ads report and your intake team disagree, the report is usually the one that's wrong. Start with what the account counts as a lead, then work down the list. Most of the fixes above cost nothing but time.
If you'd like a second pair of eyes, this is what we look at first in any Google Ads for lawyers audit.
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