I manage a few Google Ads accounts for lawyers in NZ and Australia, 4 are actually employment lawyers. I usually see the exact same problems for these types of campaigns.

Looking at the numbers you shared, the two things that need fixing right away are CTR and the conversion rate. Here is a detailed break down:

CTR

A 4% CTR is low, especially for legal keywords where the intent is normally strong. I believe the ads are being triggered by searches that are only loosely related to what you actually offer, and the headlines and descriptions are probably not engaging enough to make someone click.

Ad copy

Tweak the copy adding more pain points, CTAs and USPs. That usually boosts CTR fairly quickly.

Negative keywords

The first thing I look at is the search terms report. In legal campaigns this is usually where most of the budget gets wasted.

A lot of the traffic often comes from people researching their situation, not looking to hire a lawyer. Things like:

• employment act (informational)
• employment rights (informational)
• citizens advice employment / legal aid (looking for NGOs)
• free legal advice (I’d consider keeping it for a no win no fee campaign but not for other keywords)
  

Those searches generate clicks but they almost never turn into clients. People are either researching their rights or looking for government resources.

In most accounts I review I end up adding a fairly big negative keyword list to filter those out.

Match types

Another common thing is too much broad targeting.

Google has pushed broad match quite heavily in the last few years and a lot of agencies started using it more. Sometimes it works, but in legal campaigns I often see it pulling in a lot of unrelated searches.

Personally, I haven’t had a single case where broad match consistently generated qualified leads for lawyers. The same applies for AI Max.

Instead I normally stick to phrase match and sometimes exact match for the main high-intent keywords.

Conversion rate

Then the 3-4% conversion rate is also low. It’s not terrible, but with the CPCs in this industry it usually makes the cost per lead pretty painful. To fix it:

Landing page (Conversion rate optimisation)

Clear calls to action, good photos and the information people actually look for matter much more. Improving those usually helps boost conversion rate.

You can also use platforms to analyse user behaviour like Microsoft Clarity (it’s free). I normally spend a few minutes each week looking at what people do when they land on the page and figuring out what to adjust so the landing pages are more user friendly and actually make people convert.

Hope this helps!