A firm that handles injury, DUI and divorce cases decides it's time for Performance Max. Someone exports the client database, every injury client, every DUI client, every divorce client from the last five years, and uploads it as an audience signal. Find more people like these, the thinking goes.
For the injury side, that's a reasonable hint. For the other two, it's a list Google's own policy says the firm isn't allowed to use. Criminal defense and divorce sit in categories Google treats as sensitive, and in those categories a firm's own client list is off the table.
Performance Max is the most automated campaign Google sells. For a law firm, the first job isn't building it. It's knowing what it's allowed to learn from.
Performance Max Comes Six Months In, After Search Has Proven What a Case Looks Like.
Performance Max is a single campaign that chases the firm's conversion goal wherever a prospective client happens to be: a Google search, a YouTube video, a Gmail inbox, a Maps search for a lawyer nearby. You don't pick keywords or placements. You give it a goal, your ads and pages, and some hints about who you want, and Google's automation decides where to spend.
That only works when the goal is real and the account has history. So in our method, Performance Max waits. The gate is the same kind Chapter 6 used for broad match: about 30 quality conversions a month, meaning qualified consultations, coming in steadily from Search. Half a year of Search is the usual runway before a firm clears it. A busy injury firm gets there sooner. A small estate practice may not get there for a long time, and that's fine.
When it launches:
- The goal is the qualified consultation from Chapter 1, not every call or form.
- No target cost per acquisition at first. Let it spend and learn for several weeks, then set a target from what it actually achieved.
- Location on Presence, for the reasons Chapter 9 gave.
Performance Max doesn't replace the Search campaigns. Isolation keeps first claim on "truck accident lawyer" typed word for word, as long as its budget lasts the day. Google's own page adds the exception: a Search campaign that's out of money for the day can lose those exact searches to Performance Max. Keep Isolation funded, and the two don't fight over your best searches.
How do you know it's earning its keep? Not by its own conversion count. Performance Max reports every qualified consultation it touched, including people who would have called anyway. Judge it the way Chapter 7 judged everything else: cost per qualified consultation, and the signed cases those consultations turn into, compared with what Search delivers for the same practice area. Give it two to three months before deciding. If it's producing consultations at a cost close to Search and the intake team says the callers are real, it stays and grows. If its numbers look great but the intake notes show wrong practice areas and people asking for free advice, it's buying volume, not cases.
Criminal Defense, Divorce, Bankruptcy and Immigration Fall Under Google's Sensitive Rules. Injury Doesn't.
Google's personalized advertising policy lists categories it treats as sensitive, and several of its own examples are law practices:
- Commission of a crime: "Criminal defense lawyers," alongside bail bonds.
- Relationship hardships: "Divorce services."
- Negative financial status: "Bankruptcy services."
- Marginalized groups: "Services for immigrants" and "Legal services for refugees."
For every sensitive category, Google's rule is short: you can use Google's own predefined audiences, but you can't use audiences the advertiser builds. That takes away four things a Performance Max campaign usually leans on:
- Customer Match, your uploaded client list.
- Your data segments, the people who visited your website.
- Lookalike segments.
- Audience expansion.
Custom segments, the audiences you describe yourself with search terms or competitor websites, are allowed in principle, with a catch. Google's footnote says a custom segment paired with sensitive ads or landing pages can only run in Display, and that every other campaign type using one isn't eligible to serve. Our reading: on a criminal defense or divorce asset group, a custom segment signal does more harm than good. Leave it off.
What's left still works. Google's own in-market and affinity audiences, life events, location, your ads, your pages and your search themes are all available. A criminal defense Performance Max campaign runs on Google's understanding of who's searching, not on yours.
Injury, estate planning, employment and business law don't appear in Google's examples, so client lists and custom segments are open to them. One judgment call sits in the middle. An injury page that dwells on a client's medical conditions starts to look like Google's Health category, which has the same restrictions. Keep injury pages about the case, not the diagnosis.
A Multi-Practice Firm Needs One Asset Group per Practice Area, and a Wall Between the Sensitive Ones.
Inside a Performance Max campaign, an asset group is a bundle: headlines, descriptions, images, video, a landing page and the hints that go with them. A firm with more than one practice area needs one asset group per practice area at minimum, so a client list attached to the injury group never sits beside criminal or divorce assets.
Where the economics differ, go further and give practice areas their own campaigns. Chapter 7 showed injury clicks running about twelve times divorce clicks in our example market. One Performance Max budget across both lets the automation drift toward whichever converts cheaper, the same problem a blended bid caused.
Here's what that looks like for a firm with injury, DUI and family practices:
- Campaign one, injury, with an asset group each for car crashes, truck crashes and motorcycle crashes. Client list and custom segments allowed as signals.
- Campaign two, criminal and DUI, with Google's own audiences only, no client list, no visitor list, no custom segments.
- Campaign three, family, under the same restrictions as criminal.
Each campaign gets a budget sized from what that practice area's Search campaigns already proved it can spend at a good cost per consultation. A practice area that hasn't reached the 30-a-month gate on its own doesn't get a Performance Max campaign yet, even if the firm as a whole has.
Three more walls matter:
- Remarketing tags stay off the sensitive pages. If the site tags every visitor for remarketing, the DUI page and the divorce page should be excluded from those lists, or the list itself carries sensitive information.
- Landing pages are fenced. Google lets Performance Max pick its own landing page from your site by default, and says it can send people to pages you didn't intend. Exclude the blog, the careers page, the attorney-login page and any results page that lacks the disclaimer your state requires. Exclude the sensitive practice pages from the non-sensitive campaigns too.
- Final URLs point to the case page. Each asset group lands on the page Chapter 4 built for that kind of case, not the home page.
Your Firm's Name Already Has a Campaign. Brand Exclusions Keep Performance Max Off It.
Nothing stops Performance Max from bidding on the firm's own name. They convert beautifully, because those people were already looking for you, and the campaign's results look better than they are.
Google's fix is brand exclusions. Google recommends them when brand traffic runs in its own campaign and you don't want to pay Performance Max for those clicks. Chapter 2 set up that brand campaign. So exclude the firm's name, its common misspellings, and every lawyer's name. Performance Max then has to earn its consultations from people who didn't already know you.
Lawyer names matter more here than in most industries. People search for the lawyer who handled a friend's case, the name on a billboard, the partner quoted in the local news. Those searches belong to the brand campaign, where a cheap exact match bid protects them. If a lawyer leaves the firm, take that name off the brand campaign and the exclusion list in the same afternoon, so neither campaign keeps paying for someone who no longer works there.
Real Lawyers, Real Offices, Real Video. Switch Off the Video Google Would Generate for You.
Performance Max shows ads in places a Search ad never goes, which means it needs pictures and video. What goes in decides whether the ad looks like your firm or like anyone's.
- Headlines and descriptions: the ones that won in Search. Chapter 8's client-review headlines, with the same rules about claims your state allows.
- Photos: the actual lawyers and the actual office. No stock gavels, no scales of justice, no handshake in front of a skyline. A prospective client is choosing a person.
- Video: a short real one, even shot on a phone: a lawyer explaining what happens after an arrest, or what a first meeting looks like. Google offers auto-generated videos as a campaign setting. Leave it off. A video assembled from your images is still a video your firm never approved, and Chapter 9 explained why that matters for a law firm.
- AI-generated images: skip them for the same reason.
- Search themes: the searches Isolation proved, entered as themes so Performance Max knows where to start. If Google flags a theme, drop it.
For the non-sensitive practice areas, build the custom segments before the campaign. In Audience Manager, describe the people you want with the searches they make and the websites they visit, such as competitor firms' sites and legal directories, and attach the segment to the injury or estate asset group as a signal. A signal is a suggestion, not a boundary. Google's page says Performance Max may reach people beyond it when it expects them to convert. That's the point. The signal tells it where to start looking.
Nobody Searches for a Will Until Something Tells Them To. Demand Gen Gets There First.
Performance Max finds people across Google's channels on its own terms, and mostly among people already looking for a lawyer. Some practice areas have clients who don't know it yet. Chapter 11 covers Demand Gen, the campaign that puts real video and images on YouTube, Discover and Gmail on purpose, starting with estate planning and the new parents who haven't searched for a will.
See every chapter on the guide home. Rather have Performance Max set up within the rules for you? See our Google Ads management.
