The Client
McNally Law Offices is a personal injury and accident firm in Pasadena serving greater Los Angeles: car, truck and motorcycle accidents, pedestrian and bicycle injuries, slip and fall, wrongful death and workplace injury, in English and Spanish, on contingency.
Frank McNally has worked with Live PPC Ads since April 2017, our longest client relationship. The Google Ads account has been managed by us for its entire life.
$404 per lead in 2017. $58 in 2024. Same firm, same market, same agency.
The Challenge
Personal injury is the single most expensive category in Google Ads, and Los Angeles is its most expensive market. "Car accident lawyer" clicks run from $100 to well over $500. A firm cannot outspend the national advertisers, so every dollar has to be placed where the accident victim is actually reaching for the phone.
- Extreme click costs with dozens of firms on every query
- Lead quality variance: most calls are not viable cases, and a form is worth less than a call
- 24/7 demand: accidents do not keep office hours
- A large Spanish-speaking market that most competitors advertise to badly or not at all
What We Built, Year by Year
2017 to 2020: Foundation and Call Tracking
Search campaigns built on exact-match, high-intent queries, with call tracking as the primary conversion from the start. Cost per lead fell from $404 in 2017 to $278 in 2020 as negatives accumulated and the ad schedule concentrated budget into the hours that produced calls.
2021 to 2022: Call-Only and Spanish
Call-only campaigns for car accidents and "Pasadena attorney" queries put a phone number, not a website, in front of people searching from the roadside. A dedicated Spanish-language Search program ("abogado de accidentes") opened a second market. Cost per lead: $189, then $176.
2023 to 2024: Performance Max and the Business Profile
A Performance Max campaign became the largest lead source in the account (1,534 leads on $91,203 since 2023), and a Google Business Profile campaign captured map-pack demand at $46 a lead. The call-only car accident campaign delivered 1,041 leads on $47,387. Cost per lead hit $85 in 2023 and $58 in 2024, the firm's best year: 2,117 leads.
2025 to 2026: Rebuilt for a Leaner Budget
When the firm moved to a leaner budget of roughly $4,000 to $6,000 a month, we rebuilt the account around the campaigns that earn their keep. Leads kept coming in at under $100 each, and monthly leads climbed from 16 in March 2025 to 88 in July 2026.
Daily Optimization via Ad Campaign Concierge™
Every campaign is reviewed daily through our proprietary Ad Campaign Concierge™ system: search-term mining against informational and competitor-name queries, hour-of-day bidding, and continuous A/B experiments on landing pages versus call-only formats.
The Results
Nine years of leads, added up.
| Milestone | Leads that year | Cost per Lead |
|---|---|---|
| First year (2017) | 270 | $404 |
| First year under $200 a lead (2021) | 547 | $189 |
| The breakthrough (2023) | 1,287 | $85 |
| Best year (2024) | 2,117 | $58 |
| Nine years in total | 6,674 | on $902,809 of spend |
Cost per lead, year by year, from the first year to the best:
Every lead counted here is a real call or form: 4,922 calls from ads, 567 calls from Business Profile campaigns, 532 form submissions, 431 calls from the website, 171 landing-page contact forms and 51 other tracked calls and forms. Directions requests and taps on a call button are not counted.
Key Takeaways
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In personal injury, the phone is the conversion. Call-only campaigns and call tracking, not landing pages, are what brought cost per lead down from $404 to $58.
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The Spanish-language market is under-served. A dedicated program in the client's second language added hundreds of leads competitors were not bidding for.
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Efficiency compounds over years, not quarters. Nine years of negatives, schedules and experiments is why this account gets leads at a fraction of what the market charges.
About This Campaign
This account is managed daily through Ad Campaign Concierge™, our proprietary optimization system for lead generation accounts.
Industry: Legal: Personal Injury Platforms: Google Ads (Search, Call-Only, Performance Max, Business Profile campaign) Location: Pasadena / Los Angeles, CA Account Duration: April 2017 to present (ongoing)