Is Your Agency Questioning Google´s Suggestions, or Just Accepting Rising Costs?
What happens when you stop scrutinising Google’s ad suggestions
Every law firm we take on has a version of the same story. Costs have crept up, someone points to a number — usually cost per lead, sometimes cost per click — and the explanation on offer is that this is simply what digital advertising costs now. More competition. More firms bidding on the same searches. Google getting more expensive, the way rent does.
Some of that is true. But it isn’t the whole story, and treating it as the whole story is expensive.
We took over a law firm’s Google Ads account in 2024 — a multi-practice UK law firm. Their previous PPC manager had left the agency running the account, it was reassigned, and it got less attention than it had before. Cost per lead worsened within months. Nothing in the legal market had shifted in that window; what changed was who was watching the account, and how closely — the kind of quiet neglect we’ve written about before as one of the clearer signs an agency is letting a client down.
Karl Smales, Somuna’s PPC director, puts the underlying question plainly: “If PPC budgets keep increasing and results aren’t getting better — which is actually the norm now — are PPC managers doing enough to fight back against Google’s drive to relinquish complete control to algorithms?”
Many conversations about PPC costs miss that distinction: market conditions versus account management. Four years of industry benchmark data suggest the second matters more than firms are usually told.
Why rising PPC costs aren't just because of the market conditions
There’s a comfortable explanation for rising PPC costs, and it’s the one most firms hear from whoever is running their account: the market got more competitive, so prices went up. It’s comfortable because it’s partly true, and because it puts the cause somewhere neither the firm nor the agency has to own.
But Google Ads isn’t a passive market where prices simply track demand. It’s a platform with a business model built around advertisers spending more, and every account has a dashboard nudging it in that direction — Google calls it the Optimisation Score, a percentage that rises the more of the platform’s own suggestions an account accepts.
A 100% Optimisation Score doesn’t mean your Google Ads account is efficient (or indeed optimised) — it just means you said yes to everything Google suggested
This isn’t speculation about Google’s motives. During the US Department of Justice’s antitrust trial against Google, testimony cited in Wordstream’s reporting showed Google had deliberately raised search ad prices to meet internal revenue targets — and that ad-click revenue reached $250 billion in 2023, roughly five times what it was a decade earlier. A platform with that incentive structure isn’t a neutral advisor on how to spend your budget.
Karl has managed enough accounts that used to belong to someone else to know what the Optimisation Score actually measures. “Google’s recommendations are always to ‘get more market share’ — which translates to spending more to get the expensive part of the market, and broadening targets so much that you absorb a lot more irrelevant traffic,” he says. “A 100% Optimisation Score doesn’t mean your Google Ads account is efficient (or indeed optimised) — it just means you said yes to everything Google suggested.“
That inverts what most firms assume. A high Optimisation Score isn’t evidence of a well-run account. It’s evidence of an account that has stopped questioning the platform running it. “The reality is the opposite of what Google implies,” Karl says. “How efficient your CPCs and CPAs are is affected by how much you weigh up each recommendation’s potential to drive irrelevant traffic, and how much you reject or control the setup far more than Google recommends.”
What the Google Ads benchmark data actually shows for law firms
Wordstream’s Google Ads Benchmarks report has tracked search advertising costs across 23 industries for ten years running, and Attorneys & Legal Services has sat near the top of nearly every cost metric it measures for all of them. That’s not news to anyone in legal marketing. What’s more useful is how unevenly those costs have actually moved year to year — because a genuinely uniform market squeeze should show up as a steady climb, not the pattern below.
|
Year |
Legal CPC |
Legal conv. rate |
Legal CPL |
All-industry CPL |
|
2023 |
$9.21 |
7.00% |
$111.05 |
$53.52 |
|
2024 |
$8.94 (-2.9%) |
5.64% (-19.5%) |
$144.03 (+29.7%) |
$66.69 (+24.6%) |
|
2025 |
$8.58 (-4.0%) |
5.09% |
$131.63 (-8.6%) |
$70.11 (+5.1%) |
|
2026 |
$9.87 (+15.0%) |
5.55% |
$131.63 (flat) |
$66.69 (-4.9%, first drop in 5 yrs) |
Source: Wordstream Google Ads Benchmarks, 2023–2026 reports (Google + Microsoft Ads, search campaigns). Figures are the reports’ own year-over-year percentage changes.
Between April 2023 and March 2024, legal cost per lead jumped 29.7% — sharper than the 24.6% average rise across all 23 industries that year. The detail worth noticing is what drove it. Legal cost per click actually fell slightly, down 2.9%. The spike came almost entirely from conversion rate, which collapsed 19.5%. Clicks got marginally cheaper and dramatically less likely to turn into an enquiry — the exact pattern you’d expect from an account absorbing broader, lower-intent traffic.
The following year ran the other way. Between April 2024 and March 2025, legal cost per click fell again and legal cost per lead dropped 8.6%, while the all-industry average moved in the opposite direction — cost per click up 12.9%, cost per lead up 5.1%. For that twelve-month window, law firm accounts as a category got more efficient while the rest of the market got more expensive. That’s not consistent with costs simply being set by the market. It’s consistent with accounts being managed against the direction Google was pushing.
The most recent year complicates the picture. Wordstream’s 2026 report — its tenth — found cost per lead fell across all industries for the first time in five years, and its own analysts credited part of that to advertisers “settling into a rhythm” with Performance Max and AI-driven bidding tools.
Legal didn’t share in that improvement. Legal cost per click rose 15.0% in the same period — the sharpest single-year move in four years of data — while legal cost per lead stayed exactly flat rather than falling, meaning firms had to push conversion rates up just to hold their ground.
If broader automation adoption really is behind the wider market’s improvement, legal — a high-value, high-competition category where one misrouted click is expensive — looks like exactly the kind of account where accepting that automation without scrutiny carries the most risk.
That’s close to what we found taking over the account mentioned earlier. Since then, we’ve tested a number of Google’s Optimisation Score recommendations — and found a consistent pattern: broader match types and expanded audience suggestions that Google flags as opportunities routinely bring in lower-value traffic and enquiries a lot of which sis not convert. We´ve found this to be a repeating pattern and that accepting them without careful scrutiny does not lower the cost per lead or improve enquiries.
What you can do about it
None of this means rejecting Google’s tools outright. The fix isn’t refusing automation — it’s using it without switching off judgement. You need to use the latest features and campaign types to stay competitive, but the biggest difference clients notice between us and previous managers is the questioning of all of Google’s new campaign types and bid strategies, and the ability to maintain control over spend that would otherwise keep becoming more inefficient if Google’s recommendations were all just accepted.
In practice, that’s less dramatic than it sounds:
- It means testing a suggested audience expansion on a small budget before applying it account-wide.
- It means checking what a broadened match type actually brings in before deciding whether the extra reach is worth the extra noise.
- It means treating the Optimisation Score as one input rather than a target, because chasing the score and lowering cost per lead aren’t always the same task — and in a market as expensive as legal, they can pull in opposite directions.
It’s a slower way to run an account than clicking “apply all recommendations”. It’s also the difference, in the data above, between a year where legal costs moved with the market and a year where they moved against it.
If your firm’s PPC costs have been climbing and the explanation on offer is “the market,” it’s worth asking a more specific question: is anyone actually reviewing what Google is recommending, or is the account running mostly on autopilot? The Optimisation Score won’t tell you the difference. Neither will a single month’s cost per lead.
That’s the kind of thing we look at in a First Look — a free 30-minute call where we open your account live, with you, and give you an honest read on what’s actually driving your costs. No pitch attached.
This piece expands on an argument first raised in Somuna’s guest post for Legal Futures, “Is your PPC budget funding your competitors’ AI visibility?” For the fuller picture on how UK law firms are showing up — or not — in AI-generated answers, see our UK Legal Services AI Impact Report 2026.
