400% More Qualified PI Leads — Same Budget, Same Market.

Every PI agency audit we have ever inherited focuses on the same three things — keywords, ad copy, landing pages. Those are usually downstream symptoms. The real damage almost always lives in three places nobody looks at: conversion-event hygiene, geo + day-part waste, and the call qualification scoring inside the firm itself.

In this account, 41% of recorded "conversions" were either spam form submissions, repeat callers from the same matter, or out-of-state callers who would never sign with a firm that does not practice in their state. Google Ads was bidding hard on a signal that was contaminated. We were paying Google to find us garbage.

Before touching a single keyword, we rebuilt the conversion stack: Twilio-routed call tracking with mandatory state qualifier, server-side conversion API piping signed retainer events back into Google Ads, and a deduplication layer that strips repeat callers from the same household number. Day one, the account stopped optimizing toward noise.

Most PI campaigns are structured by keyword theme — "car accident lawyer", "truck accident attorney", "slip and fall." That keyword-shaped thinking forces you to compete in the most expensive, most aggregator-saturated auctions on the open internet.

We restructured around case type and case value. Trucking and commercial vehicle cases have higher settlement averages, smaller auction depth, and far better signed-case economics than generic auto. We carved those into their own campaigns with isolated budgets and bid strategies tuned for case acquisition cost, not click cost. Generic auto stayed in the mix but with a hard ceiling on share-of-voice — we refused to chase aggregators into a bidding war we could not win on cost.

Within four weeks, the share of high-value case types in the lead mix moved from 14% to 47%. Same spend.

The original landing page was a competent, generic PI page — testimonials, badges, hero with a phone number, form below the fold. It converted at roughly 4.1%. Industry benchmark. Perfectly mediocre.

We replaced it with three case-type-specific landers, each with a single conversion path optimized for the urgency of that case type. Trucking accident page leads with "Truck Accident in the Last 72 Hours? Speak With a Trucking Attorney Now." Auto leads with the after-hours messaging that maps to when those incidents actually happen. Slip-and-fall leads with the documentation checklist users actually want.

Combined site-wide conversion rate jumped to 8.7% within three weeks of launch and held there.

In the inherited account, ads ran 24/7 across the entire metro. The data told a different story: 11pm–6am clicks converted to signed cases at less than a third of the daytime rate. Three suburbs in the metro produced almost zero signed cases despite generating clicks at the same rate as the productive ones. And the long-tail "near me" non-branded variants were burning roughly $11,000/month with a signed-case rate below 0.4%.

We day-parted aggressively, geo-carved the dead suburbs out of bidding, and killed the long-tail entirely. That single set of decisions released $14,200/month of budget back into the case-type campaigns that were actually working.

Month one: 47 qualified case intakes (up from 38). Month two: 89. Month three: 152. By the end of week twelve, the firm was producing 4x the signed-case pipeline of the inherited baseline on the same monthly Google Ads budget. Cost per signed case fell from $1,260 to roughly $478.

There was no single hero tactic. There was a series of decisions made in the right order — fix the signal, restructure around case type, rebuild the conversion path, kill the waste — each of which compounds on the others. This is the playbook our PPC experts run every time we take on a personal injury account.