How to lower your cost per lead when bigger competitors outspend you
If bigger competitors outspend you on Google Ads, matching their bids gets expensive. The steps I'd take instead, from fixing your tracking to a weekly check.
If bigger competitors spend far more on Google Ads than you can, you know what it does to your numbers. Your ads show up less often, and each lead costs more than it used to. You can bring that cost down without matching their budget. Most of it comes down to where your money goes and what happens after someone clicks.
Cost per lead is what you spend on ads divided by the leads they bring in. You can lower it two ways: pay less for the same leads, or get more leads for the same money. Each step here works on one side or the other, and I’d take them in this order.
Why the bigger budget wins the popular searches
Google runs an ad auction each time someone searches. Your bid is only one part of what decides whether and where your ad shows. Google also weighs the quality of your ad and the page it sends people to, how competitive the auction is, and the context of the search. On the most popular searches, a competitor with more money can keep paying for the top spots, and you end up paying more per click or dropping out of sight.
The quality part is your opening. Google says better ads often pay less per click. That’s where a smaller advertiser can compete: the right ad for a specific search, sending people to a page built for that search.
Fix your tracking first
Every later step depends on knowing which clicks turned into leads, so tracking comes first. We tested 309 Georgia law firm websites this fall, and 32% had no Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager code on the page we loaded (the full results). If your site is one of them, your ad account can’t see the form leads your ads bring in.
For Google Ads to count a form lead, your site needs the Google tag, plus a setup for each action you want counted. Calls from your ads have their own setup. Count calls and sent forms, and leave out things that aren’t leads, like page views. If the tracking counts the wrong things, every decision you make after that rests on bad numbers.
In any ads account we take on, if the tracking is broken, we fix it before we touch the campaigns.
Split your ads by search, area and time of day
An ad group is a set of closely related keywords (the searches you bid on) and the ads that show for them. If one group covers every kind of case or job, one ad has to fit all of them, and everyone lands on the same page. Split it up so each specific search gets its own group. A law firm might have one group for truck accidents and another for motorcycle accidents. An HVAC company might split furnace repair from AC installs.
You don’t need dozens of groups on day one. Start with the searches closest to a paying job or a signed case, and add groups as you see what brings in leads.
Then use Google’s controls for the rest. You can target people in, or interested in, a location, so a group can cover one area. An ad schedule lets you pick the days and hours your ads run, and raise or lower your bids for certain times. That way more of your budget goes to the hours when clicks cost less.
This is how Accident Advantage, an accident law firm we work with, competed with firms spending $50,000 to $200,000 a month on Google Ads. We split its 23 ad groups into 47, built around specific accident types, areas and times of day, and gave each group its own landing page. We also cut its forms from 8 fields to 4 and rebuilt its tracking. Within four months its cost per lead was down 62%, which means each ad dollar brought in about 2.6 times as many leads (one divided by 0.38).
Match types inside each group are a separate question, with a post of their own: Should a small business use broad match in Google Ads?
Send each group to its own page
A tight ad group only pays off if the click lands somewhere that matches it. Google counts the quality of your landing page when it decides where your ad shows, and someone who searched for one thing wants to see that thing when the page opens. In one of our reviews this fall, a law firm’s Facebook ads for a nearby town sent people to its homepage, and the site had no page for that town at all. It’s the same mistake on any ad platform.
If you’re bidding on a search you have no page for, build the page or stop bidding on that search until you do.
Build each page around its search. Put the service and the area in the headline, keep the page about that one thing, and put a phone number people can tap at the top. In those same phone tests of 309 Georgia law firm websites, 40% had no tap-to-call link on the first screen.
Then shorten the form. On a phone, every field is one more thing to type with your thumb, and each required field is another reason to give up. Ask for what you need to call someone back: a name, a phone number and a line about what they need. A shorter form made a measurable difference for Salandria, a Toronto demolition company: cutting its quote form from 12 fields to 5 tripled its mobile submissions within 30 days of launch (case study).
Build your regular rankings alongside the ads
Big ad spenders tend to neglect their regular Google rankings, because ads are quicker to measure. That leaves the unpaid results less crowded than the ad auction. Look for specific searches like “ride share accident attorney near me”, where the person searching wants a lawyer and fewer firms compete.
Visitors who find you in the regular results don’t cost you a click. A page that ranks for one of those searches keeps sending you visitors without adding to your ad bill. It takes time, though. As our SEO page says, growth from content usually takes three to six months to kick in. That’s why I’d start on it alongside the ads instead of waiting until the ads are sorted.
Check the numbers every week
Once a week, look at cost per lead for each ad group and see which ones earn their money. Then open the search terms report, which shows the actual searches that triggered your ads, and add the ones you’d never want as negative keywords. Check which hours and areas your leads came from, and move budget toward them. Pause what doesn’t bring in leads.
It helps to set a target cost per lead before you start, so you know what too expensive looks like. A simple rule I like: once an ad has spent about three times your target with nothing to show for it, cut it. Once a week is often enough to see a pattern without reacting to every day’s swings.
If you’re a law firm, check your state bar’s advertising rules before any ad or landing page goes live. The rules differ from state to state.
If you’d rather have us run this for you, or you want a second look at your landing pages first, start with a free website review. It covers the three to five things on your site that are costing you calls.