Picture a firm that takes injury cases, DUI cases and divorces. It builds one campaign, drops all three practice areas into it and sets one bid for everything, say $60 a click.
That $60 is wrong twice. Against the divorce searches, $60 sits far over the family firms' top-of-page estimates, so each divorce click it wins costs more than it needed to. On injury searches, it's far below what the injury firms are paying, so the ad lands low on the page or not at all. One number, two losses, and the account report shows an average that hides both.
The fix isn't a bigger number. It's a different number for each practice area, and for each kind of case inside it, set by a person who knows what each case is worth to the firm. This chapter covers how to set those bids, which four columns tell you whether they're working, and how the bids you set by hand become the target Google bids toward later.
Keyword Planner Puts an Injury Top Spot Near $425 and a Divorce Top Spot Near $35. A Single Bid Fits Neither.
Next to every search, Keyword Planner prints two dollar figures: the low and high end of what firms have recently paid when their ad landed above the results. We took the high end of that range for every lawyer search in our example market, Las Vegas, grouped the searches by practice area and found the middle value for each. Your market's numbers will differ. The spread between practice areas is the point:
- Personal injury: $425.52
- Workers' compensation: $127.72
- Criminal defense and DUI: $47.10
- Bankruptcy: $37.63
- Family and divorce: $34.83
- Immigration: $27.00
- Estate planning and probate: $23.00
- Employment: $14.78
Injury runs about twelve times family. The single biggest injury search in that market, "personal injury lawyer las vegas," shows a range that tops out at $1,000, which is simply the highest figure Keyword Planner will display. Across the whole US, the spread shrinks without closing: "personal injury lawyer" tops out at $291.18 and "divorce lawyer" at $36.73, roughly eight to one.
As Chapter 5 explained, these are estimates of what other firms paid, not quotes. They tell you where the auction sits. They don't tell you where your bid belongs. That comes from Chapter 3: what a signed case in each practice area pays the firm, times the share of clicks that become consultations and the share of consultations that sign. Keyword Planner shows the price of the room. Chapter 3 shows what you can afford to pay to be in it.
A Truck Ad Group and a Dog Bite Ad Group Never Share a Bid. A Person Sets Each One.
The Isolation campaign, our name for the account's exact match campaign, runs on Manual CPC. With Manual CPC, you type in the maximum a click may cost, and Google keeps every bid at or below that number.
Google gives you two places to put that number. An ad group default bid covers every keyword in the group. A keyword bid overrides it for one keyword that's worth more, or less, than its neighbors. Google also advises re-checking manual bids regularly, because the auction keeps moving.
We set the bid at the ad group. Chapter 4 built one ad group per case type, so that's one bid per case type: the truck accident ad group gets its own price, the dog bite ad group gets another and the car accident ad group a third. A truck case and a dog bite case can be worth very different amounts, and a shared bid would overpay for one or underbid the other. Keyword bids are for the exception, such as "18 wheeler accident lawyer" earning more than the rest of its group once the data shows it.
Where to start? In the first weeks, open near the upper end of Keyword Planner's range for each ad group, as long as that stays under the ceiling Chapter 3 worked out. A brand-new keyword has no history with Google, and its Quality Score shows a dash until there's enough data to grade it. Bidding higher at the start buys the impressions that build that history. As the grades fill in, and especially where the ad and page earn above-average marks, trim the bids and watch whether the position holds.
Never above the ceiling. If an ad group can't reach the top of the page without paying more than its case is worth, that's information, not a reason to keep raising the bid.
Four Columns Tell You Whether the Bid Is Working. Aim for the Top of the Page 75% to 90% of the Time.
A bid you set by hand needs a way to tell you whether it's high enough. Google Ads has the columns for it. Add these four to the ad group and keyword views:
- Search top impression share. Of all the times your ad was eligible to show among the top ads, the share of times it did. This is the main one. On the ad groups that bring in cases, we aim for 75% to 90%.
- Search absolute top impression share. The share of those chances where your ad was the very first ad on the page. Useful on the ad groups worth fighting for the first spot.
- Search lost top impression share (rank). The share of those top-of-page chances you missed because Ad Rank fell short. That's the bid, the ad or the page coming up short.
- Quality Score, by keyword. With its three parts, as Chapter 4 laid out. It tells you which of those three is costing you.
Why not 100%? Because in our experience the last stretch of impression share on a competitive search costs far more per case than the stretch before it. Getting from 85% to 95% on "car accident lawyer near me" can mean outbidding the most aggressive firm in town on every search.
Read lost to rank and lost to budget side by side, because they point to different fixes. A spot lost to rank points at the bid, the ad or the page. A spot lost to budget points at the daily spend. Raising the budget does nothing for an ad group that keeps losing on rank, and raising bids makes a budget problem worse.
New keywords and quiet ad groups may show a dash in these columns at first. Google needs enough traffic to estimate them. Give an ad group a few weeks of data before you act on its numbers.
Twenty-Nine of 46 Injury Firms Ran Search Ads This Summer. Auction Insights Shows Which Ones You Meet.
The top of the page doesn't have a fixed price. It costs whatever the other firms in your auction are willing to pay, and in injury law there are a lot of them.
In our example market, we checked 46 local injury firms in Google's Ads Transparency Center. Twenty-nine had Search ads running at some point between July 1 and the end of September. So did all eight national injury brands that showed ads, and seven of the nine legal directories and marketplaces we checked. Family law looked very different: 4 of the 17 family firms we checked. The Transparency Center doesn't show which cities or searches an ad targeted, so treat these as a picture of who's advertising, not a map of every auction. The pattern still fits the prices above. The crowded practice area is the expensive one.
Auction Insights shows who you actually meet. Pull it for the truck accident ad group, say, and each rival firm gets a row. Three of its columns do most of the work for a law firm:
- Overlap rate: how often that firm's ad appeared on the same searches as yours.
- Outranking share: how often yours beat theirs, counting the times theirs didn't show at all.
- Position above rate: the rival's share of your shared searches where it landed higher.
The remaining three columns repeat your own top-of-page measures, one row per rival firm.
Under 10% impression share, Google leaves the report empty. If that's your number, you're barely a participant in that auction.
Read it for patterns. If a national brand keeps showing above you on your truck accident keywords, and holding the top spot would take a bid above your ceiling, step out of that fight. Lower the bid to what the case supports, accept a lower position on that search, and move the money to a case type, or a language, where the auction is less crowded and your bid can win. Chapter 16 covers Spanish-language searches. Leaving an auction that costs more than it returns is a decision. Staying in it out of pride costs money.
Exploration's Target Comes From What Isolation Actually Paid, Not What You Hope to Pay.
Chapter 6 covered when Exploration launches: the broad match copy of the account, once Isolation produces about 30 quality conversions a month. Its bidding is Target CPA, which Google called "Maximize conversions with a Target CPA" until June 2026. You give Google a target cost per qualified consultation, and it sets a bid for each search on its own.
The target comes from Isolation's actual numbers. Take what Isolation paid per qualified consultation over the last 30 days, practice area by practice area. That's the same window Google uses when it recommends a target for a campaign with history, and a new Exploration campaign has no history of its own yet.
Practice areas matter here too. Google lets you set a separate target for each ad group but says it doesn't recommend it, because it can restrict Smart Bidding. So when a firm's practice areas cost wildly different amounts per consultation, as injury and divorce do, give each one its own Exploration campaign and its own target. One blended target can pull the algorithm toward whichever practice area is cheaper and starve the other, the same way one blended bid did in Isolation.
Two settings mistakes cost firms money:
- A target set too low. Google warns that a target that's too low can cause you to lose clicks that would have converted, so you get fewer conversions in total. A wished-for number trains the algorithm on fantasy.
- A target set too loose. Starting August 17, 2026, Google changed how target-based bidding behaves when a campaign is limited by budget. These campaigns now deliver closer to the target you set. Google's illustration uses a $10 target on a campaign that was actually landing conversions at $5: after the change, results move toward $10, and Google's advice is to lower the target to $5 to keep them. Google won't change your targets for you. We covered the change in full in On August 17, Google Starts Taking Your Bid Target Literally. A cushion that used to sit unused now gets spent.
One column changes meaning at this point. Google doesn't recommend the "Lost IS (budget)" column for campaigns that maximize conversions, because those campaigns are built to spend their full budget and look budget-limited by design. In Exploration, judge by cost per qualified consultation and by signed cases, not by that column.
A Cheap Consultation From the Wrong Practice Area Is an Expensive One. Review the Calls by Ad Group.
Every bid in this chapter rests on one number: the cost per qualified consultation. If the consultations aren't really qualified, every bid built on them is wrong.
So once a week, someone matches the intake team's call notes to the ad group that produced each call. Three questions per call: was it the right practice area, was it a matter the firm would take, and did it end in a booked consultation? Chapter 1 set up the qualified consultation as the conversion Google bids on. This review is how you keep it honest.
The review finds problems the cost numbers hide. A dog bite ad group with a cheap cost per consultation can turn out to be pulling landlord disputes and animal control complaints. A DUI ad group can fill up with people asking about license reinstatement forms. On paper both look like bargains. In the intake notes, they're wasted hours. Lower the bid on that ad group, fix its keywords and negatives, or pause it, even though the dashboard says it's your cheapest.
And if the calls are right but nobody answered them, the bid isn't the problem. Chapter 15 covers missed calls.
Bids Buy the Position. The Ad Decides Who Clicks.
Once the bids are set, the ad does the rest of the work. Chapter 8 turns to the ad itself, written from what clients say about firms in their reviews: the callback they praise, and the "free consultation" line one rival ad in four already uses.
See every chapter on the guide home. Want the bids set and watched for you? See our Google Ads management.
