Episode 777: How We Made a Personal Injury Law Firm $55.2M (Case Study)

February 20, 2026

You can scale your business fast with the right digital marketing partners and strategy.

Partner with our Meta ads experts: https://www.tiereleven.com/apply

Are you still betting your entire growth plan on Google? If you’re treating search like the “engine,” you might be building demand everywhere else and giving it zero credit.

In this case study, I break down four years of work inside one of the most brutally competitive niches we serve. Personal injury law. We took a Michigan firm from messy tracking and misaligned leads to a machine that consistently optimized for the only metric that matters: signed cases.

Early on, we drove a 70% drop in cost per signed case to about $1,518 and still achieved roughly a 20x ROI. I’ll walk you through the Meta and Google synergy, the tracking stack that made optimization possible, and the “signed case maximizer” framework we use to scale without drowning in junk leads.

In this episode you’ll learn:

Our strategy for achieving a 20x ROI with a $1,500 cost per signed case
How combining Meta and Google Ads drives high-converting campaigns
Why tracking is the key to optimizing ads and improving performance
How tailored creatives for different customer avatars increase engagement
Google’s offline conversion tracking that improves decision-making for ads
Why a multi-channel approach is crucial for growth and maximizing results
How to reduce CPC and make high-cost keywords profitable

Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Perpetual Traffic?

Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on iTunes and leave us a review!

READ THE TRANSCRIPT:

How We Made a Personal Injury Law Firm $55.2M (Case Study)

00:00:00:00 – 00:00:22:11
Ralph
Oh my God. $1,500 to acquire a new customer. This is insane. Well, that $1,500 represented about a 20 x ROI. The revenue for the firm is $11 million. You’re not a personal injury law firm, you might say. All right, well, this isn’t a great episode for me. Well, in fact, it is. Here’s what we were seeing inside. Good.

00:00:22:11 – 00:00:23:02
Ralph
Also.

00:00:24:23 – 00:00:45:08
Ralph
Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic Podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns, founder and CEO of tower 11. And I’m flying solo today with another case study. This is in the personal injury law space, one of the most competitive, one of the most expensive niches that we serve at tier 11. We happen to do it pretty well.

00:00:45:10 – 00:01:13:04
Ralph
As you’ll see in this case study here. And today is going to be instructive not only for you if you are a personal injury law firm or a lawyer or service based business. But a lot of these concepts will relay over to e-commerce stores, digital products, any type of service. This is a compendium of four years of work here, so it’s a pretty massive case study, and I think we’ll probably have to separate this out into two parts here for you.

00:01:13:04 – 00:01:34:09
Ralph
And we’re also going to get the craftsman behind all of this on to perpetual traffic and give his thoughts on the entire thing. So this might be a three part series here. So if you’re not a personal injury law firm, you might say, all right, well, this isn’t a great episode for me. Well, in fact, it is, because it really does highlight the integration.

00:01:34:14 – 00:01:54:19
Ralph
And the synergy, I guess, is probably the best word to say it between Meta and Google. And this is what we’re seeing so often now. Oh, we’ve got a number of case studies where we talk about multi-channel. This one really is very particular with Meta and Google specifically. I’ve got another case study that we’re working on that we’ll talk about which is more multi-channel.

00:01:54:19 – 00:02:18:13
Ralph
Or we include native advertising, programmatic advertising, as well as email or SMS organic. This is really primarily a paid case study, paid traffic for those two platforms. And it evolved over time. And that’s one of the things that you’ll see in today’s show, like works starting back in 2022. That’s nearly four years ago, or it is just about four years ago when we started engaging with this client.

00:02:18:15 – 00:02:37:09
Ralph
And the strategy has evolved over time. I think, you know, having you know, our head of p law on show here will actually sort of help you understand that a little bit more, especially if you’re in a really, really competitive niche. And one of the things that we did notice while we were doing this, and we’ve really discovered this sort of over time, is

00:02:37:09 – 00:02:44:06
Ralph
Google is no longer a primary driver for a lot of businesses, and a lot of businesses that come to us say, hey, can you manage our Google Ads?

00:02:44:08 – 00:03:06:10
Ralph
Well, in fact, it’s really it’s the synergy between all the different platforms. Google really just captures the demand that you create somewhere else and in most cases, you are creating that demand on other interruption marketing channels. And the one that we used here primarily, and we did use a little bit of YouTube advertising is meta, obviously, and we’ve talked about that with the Andromeda update.

00:03:06:12 – 00:03:26:16
Ralph
So the strategies for this case study change over time. And I think that’s what makes it interesting. And if you’re doing things the old way and thinking that Google is should be the driver of your business, you might want to take some notes here and send this case study to your team, because this is a whole new way of looking at how all the channels really integrate together and work well together in synergy to get.

00:03:26:19 – 00:03:31:09
Ralph
Ultimately, in this particular case, it is signed cases

00:03:31:09 – 00:03:50:03
Ralph
and a signed case is our golden metric. It is the Ncac. It is the cost to acquire new customer. It is the cost per unit. Whatever it is like sign cases in the law. Space is the big metric and this is a service based space. So it does have a human element.

00:03:50:03 – 00:04:07:09
Ralph
There is an intake. There’s a whole process that goes along with it. I think there’s a lot of a lot of takeaways that you can take here, whether you’re an e-commerce brand or you’re a digital products brand. And that’s why we’re doing it here today. So without further ado, let’s get right into the case study. Okay. This is the 11th pilot conversion engine system case study.

00:04:07:09 – 00:04:30:12
Ralph
We’re gonna be talking a lot about the conversion engine here. It’s our methodology our way to approach marketing online. And we use all the elements of the conversion engine in this case study here today. So these were the initial results back in 2022 2023. We’ve got some more screenshots here that’ll actually show inside the Google account. When we first started with this this was largely a Google operation.

00:04:30:15 – 00:04:50:23
Ralph
It really was. It was car accident attorney near me. Car accident attorney Detroit, our accident attorney Michigan. This is a market that we were serving here. But it has changed with both platforms really working together. So the initial results were largely Google results that you’re looking at here on the screen. And if you’re listening to this, you’re walking the dog.

00:04:50:23 – 00:05:17:10
Ralph
You’re at the gym. I would highly encourage you to check this out over on our YouTube channel at Perpetual traffic.com/youtube. So initial results 2022 and 2023 was about 120% increase in leads, 37% decrease in cost per lead and a 216% increase in contacts and a 56% decrease in CPC or cost per click. So we reduced the cost per assigned auto case.

00:05:17:10 – 00:05:35:02
Ralph
This is automobile accidents. This is motor vehicle accidents or Vas as it’s referred to in the personal injury law space. We reduced that cost per assigned case by 70% to an average of about $1,518 per assigned case. And

00:05:35:02 – 00:05:51:22
Ralph
You might be saying, oh my God, $1,500 to acquire a new customer. A person case like this is insane. I can’t possibly do that in my business. Well, maybe you can, maybe you can’t. But in this case, for this particular client, that $1,500 represented about a

00:05:51:22 – 00:05:54:16
Ralph
20 x return on had spent

00:05:54:16 – 00:05:56:22
Ralph
20 x ROI.

00:05:57:02 – 00:06:16:07
Ralph
And we’re not talking about Roas here. We’re talking about how they actually will get through to some of the the actual financials here in just a second. But $1,500 for a sign case in the personal injury law space is absolutely, insanely great. So we didn’t expect that was going to last forever and ever. You can actually see here this is inside the Google Ads platform.

00:06:16:07 – 00:06:45:03
Ralph
And when we have Olly on the show, he will actually debate some of this. He’ll say like Google is underreporting. I’m just going to show you what I can see. And he’ll give his take on the actual results that were captured through their CRM, which, you know, with every CRM there’s always connectivity challenges. We did face those, but when they changed over their CRM, so some of the data was lost in the interim, but we’ll actually talk to him about that a little bit more when he comes on the show.

00:06:45:03 – 00:07:08:02
Ralph
But here’s what we were seeing inside Google. So last click we were getting about a $1,500, like I said, cost per case and about 628 signed cases. And this is just in our first six or so months working with these guys starting in late September or actually early September 2022 into March of 2023. So we were getting success right out of the gate.

00:07:08:06 – 00:07:31:11
Ralph
So great. Really, really good results here. If you’re in this space, if you can acquire a case for $1,500, especially in this highly competitive, you know, we’re talking about some of the some of these clicks we were paying were 800 plus dollars per click. So if you can get this, you’re doing pretty well. So this is a little bit of a framework here that shows you what a case is worth.

00:07:31:11 – 00:07:51:07
Ralph
And I said if you’re paying $1,500 to acquire a customer, you better have your numbers figured out pretty accurately. So this is this is sort of an industry standard on what a case is worth as an average for settlement. If it’s a minor injury, if it’s a moderate injury, a severe injury, life changing injury, this is sort of the industry standard.

00:07:51:07 – 00:08:22:20
Ralph
If you can acquire a case for $3,000 or even $5,000, the goal for this client was under $5,000. So 3000 is sort of a good industry standard. I think, here. But you can see there’s different grades of personal injury. And each personal injury is somewhat different depending on whether or not they are involved in a motorcycle accident. For example, like a car accident is versus a truck accident, or say, you know, you get hit by an Amazon truck, you could have a million, multiple millions of dollars in an average settlement.

00:08:22:20 – 00:08:47:04
Ralph
So it really does depend. So what we were really focused on here is motor vehicle accidents just in general. So it could be truck accidents. It could be motorcycle accidents could be car accidents. So we use the average of about $60,000 for our settlements. And that is about average for the state. Now every state is slightly different. The average is about 30 to $90,000 for a settlement.

00:08:47:04 – 00:09:06:09
Ralph
Depending on what state you’re in, might be less, might be more. So once again, we were not targeting slipping falls. We were not targeting any of those other types of personal injury. This was really motor vehicle accidents primarily and car accidents primarily. And then we would also gather some of the higher payouts with motorcycle accidents as well as truck accidents.

00:09:06:09 – 00:09:26:13
Ralph
So if you’re saying, oh, this is kind of morbid here, but what we love about this case study is that the people that came to this law firm, they were really, you know, they were in dire straits. And we really felt and, you know, the firm itself is doing such great work because the insurance companies just in general, like when you’re in a car accident, they don’t want to pay any of this sort of stuff out.

00:09:26:13 – 00:09:45:18
Ralph
So this firm is extremely adept at figuring out where the money is and getting money that the victim deserves, especially if it’s through no fault of their own. If we’ve seen these commercials everywhere, I’m sure if you watch TV, you know, if you’re even on the internet, you see these types of ads or if you’re on connected TV, you’ll see, you know, the Morgan and Morgan ads, they’re everywhere now.

00:09:45:21 – 00:10:12:18
Ralph
You know, all personal injury lawyers sort of talk about this in very similar language. However, it is what’s very, very gratifying when you can get somebody who is really down on their luck, a case settlement that is significant. It could be transformative to their life. So in 2022 and 2023, we we actually acquired 628 signed cases. And each case was a settlement amount of we’re using the average of $60,000 in this case.

00:10:12:19 – 00:10:44:01
Ralph
So that was about $37 million plus or minus in settlements. Once again, we’re using an average year between 30 and 90,000. So what this equated to is that in the personal injury law space, how can you pay $1,500 to acquire a customer? Well, if you are getting 30% of that settlement, that really backs out quite nicely. So $1,500 per case, 628 cases, the revenue for the firm is well over $11 million in revenue.

00:10:44:01 – 00:11:11:17
Ralph
And we confirm this through their CRM through their back end as well. But this is about the average. So this is pretty significant. So good initial results. Like I said, really really low overall cost per se in case costs have since increased since 2022 2023. And all time results are a little bit different. So as we scaled and the competition increased, the cost per assigned auto case did rise.

00:11:11:21 – 00:11:43:10
Ralph
And as of the end of 2025, the average signed case now is about $2,900 per some case. So once again, that’s about a ten x return on AD spend a ten a10x ROI here. So if you really figure all this math out, it’s first off, it’s well under the KPI the goal of $5,000 per sound case. But if we put this into monetization terms, are all the time results from 2022 to 2025, we got well over 3000 cases.

00:11:43:10 – 00:12:05:17
Ralph
Now we have Olly on the show. He’s going to say, we actually got more than this, but I’m just being conservative here because this is what we can actually show inside the Google dashboard. What is actually done through the CRM is quite different. So we’re using some very conservative estimates here. So 3000 cases, well over 3000 cases between 2022 and 2025.

00:12:05:19 – 00:12:26:18
Ralph
We got about a $60,000 average settlement. That’s about 184 million in settlements. These are for people who are in, like I said, dire straits, like really tough situations. And I’ll obviously tell you more about the client in just a second here. And you can go see some of their videos, some of the website videos that they have, like they really do have a positive impact on the world.

00:12:26:18 – 00:12:53:17
Ralph
This is definitely in alignment with our vision as an organization to help purpose driven businesses achieve their vision. And when they do that, we achieve our vision as an organization. Tier 11. So what this means to them is that 30% on an average, this is about $55 million in revenue that we generated between 2022 and 2025. So we’re using the tail end of 22, all of 23, all of 24, and then all of 25.

00:12:53:17 – 00:13:10:16
Ralph
So we’ve got this data all the way through 2025. Like I said we have Oli on. We’ll even talk about some of the cases that we probably are even missing in this case study. But this is a conservative estimate. So bringing in $55 million, this is about a ten x return on spend okay. So this is the law firm.

00:13:10:16 – 00:13:35:05
Ralph
It’s Mike Moore’s law. They’re located in Michigan. And like you see here on their website, they have won over $1 billion for our clients and no fee until they win. Obviously they take their percentage. That’s just the way that it works inside the personal injury law space. Extremely reputable 2500 plus Google reviews. And this is the type of accident that unfortunately, a lot of people get into.

00:13:35:05 – 00:13:58:15
Ralph
And then somebody is at fault as a result of this type of accident. So their goal was car accidents. Their goal was not slip and fall or medical malpractice that we were not going towards that type of personal injury law. We’re really focused on motor vehicle accidents. Yes. Motorcycles? Yes. Trucks. We we all know if you’re in the personal injury space, those are highly lucrative.

00:13:58:15 – 00:14:23:18
Ralph
We were going after those as well. But the really have the heart and soul of this whole thing was really was car accidents. And those were the types of terms that we were bidding on. Now, the diagnosis that we made here in 2022 was multifold. So they really didn’t have an idea of what their avatar was. So their ads, as a result of that, their meta and their Google ads, they’re really struggling with both of those.

00:14:23:18 – 00:14:46:13
Ralph
First off, they’re struggling with just getting those two platforms to work together, but they really didn’t have effective messaging on who their avatar was. It’s very there’s two distinct avatars which we uncovered. So they were spending an excess of $1 million on Google ads in the past, but they had no idea what was working because they had no conversion tracking on any of their Google ads.

00:14:46:13 – 00:15:10:18
Ralph
They had nothing in place. So the most powerful algorithm in the world was not able to optimize their ads for what they wanted most. And like I said, that is signed cases. This isn’t just phone calls and leads. Those are easy to get and you can get a lot of those. But what really matters is those phone calls, those lead form fills turn into actual signed cases.

00:15:10:18 – 00:15:34:13
Ralph
So without tracking, you really can’t feed the algorithm any kind of data in order to tell Google. In this particular case, like I said in 2022 2023, this is a largely a Google venture. So we just started to introduce meta ads in 2023, and you’ll see some of the results there. So unfortunately this was resulting in a lot of really crappy leads that were just sort of missing the mark.

00:15:34:17 – 00:15:56:04
Ralph
Like workman’s comp. Okay, slip and falls. Like I said, that don’t really lead to great outcomes. And they didn’t really back out from a financial standpoint. They were really focused, like I said, on motor vehicle accidents, car accidents in particular. And a lot of those slip and falls and the workman’s comp cases, they pay a lot less. So the economics don’t really work quite as well.

00:15:56:04 – 00:16:20:01
Ralph
So they’re missing the mark there. One of the other things is that they were not running any paid social Facebook and or Instagram ads. They had tried paid social in the past, but they just didn’t work. And that was fine because we realized that that was just a hidden gem. That was just tremendous amount of blue ocean there that they weren’t utilizing.

00:16:20:04 – 00:16:41:19
Ralph
And like I said, this is a case study between Facebook at that particular point in time back in 2022. And I think it was very meta at that point. But between Meta and Google. So they weren’t leveraging the Mike Morse brand and their ad copy and their creative. And like I said, they had no tracking in place to differentiate incoming leads on Facebook from form fills that were just junk leads.

00:16:41:19 – 00:17:02:14
Ralph
So the tracking was just really a mess throughout the entire site. So that was the number one thing that we really needed to do was fix the tracking and also start initiating the Facebook ad spend, which worked out quite well. The other parts of this is like their landing pages were completely outdated, and we’ll show that in just a second here.

00:17:02:14 – 00:17:23:21
Ralph
And we’re losing a lot of clients as a result of that. Just people bouncing their bounce rate on their site was extremely high. So like as you just mentioned here, this is and we’ll get more in depth into this in the after the quick portion of the case study here. Yeah. Confusing sort of above the falls areas. They really didn’t have the ability to be able to click and call on the header.

00:17:24:00 – 00:17:47:02
Ralph
We’ll see that on the mobile site when we do our analysis there. And the form design was a bit amateurish. It wasn’t really optimized for conversion. The copy was a bit confusing. It was all about us. It wasn’t really about them. So there was no description field in the form which would allow the intake personnel to understand what kind of problem the person had.

00:17:47:02 – 00:18:09:09
Ralph
So the site itself really did need a makeover. And this is the interesting thing with your 11 is, yes, we have an incredible CRO division, but all of our growth strategists, especially Olly, who leads our personal injury law team, they don’t stop at the click. He actually helped them redesign their entire site as part of the service, even though it wasn’t, you know, stipulated within the agreement itself.

00:18:09:09 – 00:18:29:09
Ralph
And this is what we do because we realized everything after the click. That’s 50% of the effectiveness of the. Yeah. So I did a great job here in the personal injury team at tier 11 to tremendous job of fixing a lot of these things. We’ll get into that in just a second. So like I said, the average case that we acquired in that period of time was about $1,500 thereabouts.

00:18:29:09 – 00:18:45:20
Ralph
Their target was actually less than 5000. So we were well, well within our target range in this first this first engagement, sort of the first year or so working together. So this is what we started to do. So the prescription now. So we’ve made the diagnosis. We know what the problems are. So what are we going to do about it.

00:18:45:20 – 00:19:06:11
Ralph
And so here is the prescription. So we diagnose prescribe and then iterate. And that’s usually how we operate here. So the first thing that we needed to do is needed to install the tier 11 data suite. It doesn’t really even matter what level of attribution or what tracking system you put in place. Something is better than nothing. And they basically had nothing.

00:19:06:16 – 00:19:26:13
Ralph
So this is in the early stages of the tier 11 data suite. Back in 22 and 23, Facebook wasn’t getting any data for booked calls. They were losing track of their leads in order to get the number of booked calls and the cost per to acquire those leads, we had to go into their CRM. We had to pull manually upload spreadsheets.

00:19:26:13 – 00:19:55:23
Ralph
So prior to launching a single ad, we made sure that everything on the back end with the tracking was really perfected. And our data team at tier 11, God bless them, they’re absolutely amazing. The team that we have here and obviously we work alongside the folks that blot out and wicked reports. So the tech stack here really made a major difference, because if you’re going to be spending millions of dollars in advertising, you better have good tracking set up.

00:19:55:23 – 00:20:14:23
Ralph
And the the elites, the best of the best is really is the tier 11 data suite. And we’ve tested every single one that’s out there. So this is the conversion engine here. So data is a big part of it. So this is sort of step number one I said this is the conversion engine. The and make up is creative traffic.

00:20:15:04 – 00:20:34:03
Ralph
And there’s after the click. And it’s all tied together by data by this little guy over here. So let’s get into why the tier 11 data suite is so vitally important. So this is just an overview. We talked about this multiple times here on the show. User clicks on an ad or clicks on an email or does an organic search.

00:20:34:07 – 00:21:01:09
Ralph
That user ID is then captured on what’s referred to as an edge server here, before it actually goes to the origin server, aka if it if that click goes to the origin server, it will get blocked by privacy. IOS 14 it will get blocked by pop up blockers. It will get blocked by slow site speed loading. So what we do is we capture that data on the edge and then we pump it into our data warehouse.

00:21:01:09 – 00:21:21:21
Ralph
And then that then goes into our interface, which is wicked reports. And all that data is actually fed back into the ad platform itself as well as back into the CRM. So this is how the tier 11 data suite works. If you need more information on that, just check us out over at your 11.com/data suite. So anyway, so we needed tracking set up here.

00:21:21:22 – 00:21:47:05
Ralph
We needed tracking that was reliable. And that was not getting blocked by all of the privacy updates that are probably giving you headaches in your business. So so that is the tier 11 data suite which we installed immediately through our tech team. So you could see they had spent about $1.3 million in Google ads from April a 21 to mid 2022, right before we started to take charge here.

00:21:47:08 – 00:22:07:09
Ralph
And the keywords that they were using were actually sort of attracting the slip and fall of these workman’s comp. So we had to they had to refer all of those out and they were just really wasting money here. So you can actually see sort of a snapshot of their, their ad spend. So it was significant. I mean they’re spending over $1 million in spend, no tracking set up, no avatar, none of this sort of stuff.

00:22:07:09 – 00:22:27:13
Ralph
So we realized that we had an uphill climb here and they were pretty frustrated. And their previous agency obviously wasn’t getting the results that they wanted for them. Like I said, you know, they were spending a lot on these very, very expensive keywords, especially a car accident attorney Michigan, car accident lawyer, Detroit, those types of keywords, very, very expensive.

00:22:27:16 – 00:22:43:12
Ralph
Like I said, some are hundreds and hundreds of dollars cost per click. So they were spending a lot and they weren’t even getting a very high search impression share. So they were doing a lot of things wrong. So we realized that that needed to get fixed. And getting good tracking was the first thing that we needed to do.

00:22:43:12 – 00:23:01:10
Ralph
So they were actually paying about an average of $24 a click, according to all in his team here, for their own brand name. And it was only showing up. And you can see it here. This is for their brand homepage sort of search like for the name Mike Morse Law. They were paying $24 a click, which is crazy.

00:23:01:12 – 00:23:23:02
Ralph
Shouldn’t be paying that much. And they weren’t even getting all the impressions. So we realized that there was a lot that we needed to do. The problem was, is that the tracking wasn’t set up properly. We weren’t feeding the algorithm enough data to attract the type of car accident sign cases that they really wanted, and that we knew would back out for them, and they could help clients with those payouts.

00:23:23:02 – 00:23:41:17
Ralph
Then they were basically getting screwed by their insurance company. So worse yet, they had no way of tracking how many cases they were getting because they had no tracking in place. So prior to launching a single ad, we fixed the tracking. That was the first thing. There’s no way I can show that here visually. It’s just trust me when you have a good dev team, they do all this work for you.

00:23:41:17 – 00:24:03:18
Ralph
I don’t even know sometimes what they do, but all I know is that the tracking works and it works almost perfectly. But 99.4% accurate. So step two was deploy. What we refer to was the same case maximizer framework. So this is a framework that we use for our PII law clients. Like I said this is the traffic component of the conversion engine system.

00:24:03:18 – 00:24:22:10
Ralph
So like I said before the conversion engine system is created of traffic after the click all tied together with data. No strategy is the overarching thing that we sort of think of that as the oil that’s sort of greases the engine here, but this is the conversion engine. This is how we sort of view everything in digital marketing.

00:24:22:10 – 00:24:22:20
Ralph
So

00:24:22:22 – 00:24:47:19
Ralph
On the traffic side. Like I said, when we first started this, this was really more of a Google centric, very 8020 Google versus meta. We started to introduce meta in early part of 2023, mid part of 2023, and we’ll show those results in just a second. But it’s important for us to know, like when you are using Google you need to know like what does Google actually know about you.

00:24:47:19 – 00:25:06:09
Ralph
And it knows a ton about you. And there’s actually a great graphic here that we’re going to show. How does Google track you? Well, it tracks you through a number of different things that you do online. If you use the Chrome browser, they know what websites that you visit. If you are on YouTube, they know what kind of videos you like to watch.

00:25:06:10 – 00:25:31:12
Ralph
They follow you. If you have Google Maps and or Waze, they know exactly where you’re going, how fast you’re driving. If you’re driving fast after you visited a bar, for example, whether you are texting and driving or using an app while you’re driving. Very helpful for personal injury lawyers so it knows what books you read and knows your photos and those pictures of your kids, your calendar knows where you are.

00:25:31:15 – 00:25:51:02
Ralph
All of this I understand. I use Google all the time. Google knows exactly where I am, what I’m doing right now, and if that freaks you out, then you’re probably not a digital marketer. But if you’re a digital marketer in the personal injury space, you’re really going to know a lot about your potential clients. And if you don’t have that tracking set up first, none of these Google ads are going to really work for you.

00:25:51:03 – 00:26:08:20
Ralph
So like I said, you know what news you read. Your Gmail reads your Gmail. If you have the Google Fit app, which I don’t have. It knows how fit you are, like what your heart rate is and all these sorts of thing. Shopping. If you’re doing any sort of Google searches and you’re clicking on any Google Shopping ads, it knows what you’re buying.

00:26:08:23 – 00:26:37:20
Ralph
So obviously it knows what ads that you click on. So there is a ton that Google knows about you, so knows who you are. It knows what you look like, know what you sound like, your religious, your political beliefs. If you have any dietary restrictions, if you have children, how healthy you are, all of these things and it finds it through all of these ways, through not just all the apps that are on Google, but they know exactly where you’ve been, how you travel, where you go, where you work, where you visit.

00:26:37:21 – 00:26:57:13
Ralph
And like I said, this is a lot of data points. That and this is all collected through all the things that we use every single day I use Waze, I’m going to be going on a trip a little bit later on today. It’s going to be knowing that I’m driving from Sagamore Beach to somewhere in Maine. I believe it’s, you know, northern Maine for a ski trip this weekend.

00:26:57:13 – 00:27:22:22
Ralph
It knows all of this stuff. So I’m not saying this to freak you out. And but if you are in digital marketing, you probably know a lot of this. The point is, is that Google has we intercepted this. My friend Cosmo Haslam intercepted this memo from three years ago. Google has over 72 million data points on every human on the planet, psychographic and demographic factors on every human on the planet.

00:27:23:02 – 00:27:43:14
Ralph
And this is three years old. This data now with AI, I would imagine this is probably ten times this number. So the question then becomes what do you do with it? Well, this information, like I said, is very helpful for p law firms because especially this one here, which means Google knows how fast we drive where we’re headed thanks to Waze maps.

00:27:43:14 – 00:28:10:16
Ralph
It can even track through any other navigation system that you use. It can also track you what apps you’re using even when you’re driving. Like I said before, it knows if you go to a bar and then you drive. I went to a bar last night. I didn’t drink, but I drove home. Google knew that. So if Google knows that about me, if they know all of that for a car accident, they might even be able to predict whether or not you might be in a car accident.

00:28:10:16 – 00:28:32:05
Ralph
And if you don’t have your tracking and you’re not using Google correctly, this is how personal injury law firms can really win, because there is so much data that Google will then use in order to optimize their ads. And this is precisely what we did, especially early 2022 and to 2023, before we really even optimized and really scaled up the Facebook ads, which we’ll show in just a second here.

00:28:32:08 – 00:28:52:17
Ralph
So this really does mean and this is kind of a scary photo here. This is not AI generated by the way. It means that Google knows when accidents are most likely to happen. Imagine that. That’s why law firms should be using Google Days 90 day conversion window. That is the key to this whole thing. And we did this using the 90 day window tracking.

00:28:52:17 – 00:29:16:18
Ralph
And we did this through what’s referred to as offline tracking. So you’ve got a platform that knows all of your tendencies. It knows where you are. It knows what you’re doing. All you need to do is be able to feed it the correct data and then give it the goal. Tell Google this is my goal. My goal is sign cases, not phone calls, not leads, not form files, but actual signed cases.

00:29:17:00 – 00:29:36:05
Ralph
And then Google will then go out and find those people for your. And this particular case law firm or whatever your business happens to be. So we deployed this 90 day window tracking within Google. And like I said, this is probably a little bit conservative. And Ali will comment on this as well. So this is how a typical lead flows.

00:29:36:05 – 00:29:54:12
Ralph
And this takes less than four weeks. I am conservative here in the estimates, but usually this is how a lead actually flows on Google for personal injury law. So first of all somebody searches for car accident lawyer. Maybe they have heard about we’ll talk about this in a little bit. You know they heard about this specific law firm.

00:29:54:12 – 00:30:16:10
Ralph
Maybe they Google the name of your law firm. Maybe they Google the name of your business. Let’s say you are an e-commerce brand and you are selling a specific type of face cream, or you’re a beauty brand and you have ads that are showing and creating awareness over on meta, over on Instagram, over on Facebook, on reels, on stories, all of that.

00:30:16:10 – 00:30:38:14
Ralph
And then the Google search then is typically is your brand name or the product description that you’ve shown them, or you expose that audience to same thing here in the car accident lawyer space. So the Google ads clicked. They click on the ad, then that typically leads to a phone call or sort of an intake. And then after that intake there is a case review.

00:30:38:14 – 00:31:03:18
Ralph
And usually after the case review, which I say conservatively here, 1 to 4 weeks. This is usually less than a week if the law firm is really on the ball. In this case for this personal injury law client, they’re very, very, very quick and they can assess very quickly if the case is a good case or not. So that case review is critical because that determines whether or not a signed case is present.

00:31:03:18 – 00:31:24:02
Ralph
And that is the key with this whole thing is you don’t want just any old person coming in. You want to be able to tell Google, I want signed cases. And after this phone call and then the case review, it’s determine what is a signed case. And then this is flagged inside the the CRM or the customer relations management software.

00:31:24:07 – 00:31:53:03
Ralph
And then that data is then piped back through and offline conversion back into Google so that we can find more of those signed cases, not just leads, not just phone calls, because those don’t necessarily equate to sign cases, which turns into settlement dollars. So so most law firms don’t understand this real advantage. So like Mike Morris, they were bidding on clicks for terms like car accident, attorney, lawyer for a car accident, all that sort of stuff.

00:31:53:03 – 00:32:13:10
Ralph
And they’re doing it in the most competitive niche in Google Ads. I mean, this is like I said, these are hundreds of dollars per click. In many cases, they were even paying $24 a click back in 2022 for their own brand name for Mike Morris law or Mike Morris law firm or accident and attorney Mike Morse. That kind of thing.

00:32:13:16 – 00:32:37:23
Ralph
So they were competing against themselves and not getting a very good share. So law firms are spending a fortune trying to get to the first position for people that are urgently searching for a lawyer to solve their problem or help them out to get the money that they deserve, especially if they’ve just been in a car accident. So I guess that Google does not create that demand, but it does capture intent.

00:32:37:23 – 00:32:57:02
Ralph
So in law, firms are all competing against each other for these keyword phrases. And it’s highly, highly competitive. So a great way to diversify and to scale is to not just rely on Google, but also Google on other platforms to create awareness of what you do as a business. And that is one of the big things that we’re seeing right now with Andromeda.

00:32:57:06 – 00:33:19:14
Ralph
We really geared this into our entire strategy in 2025, and we’ll show you that in just a second here. So with Google’s offline tracking, we can still send the success signal back to Google, even if an accident had happened within 90 days. So in other words, so we train Google to bid on searches that have the highest chance of becoming signed cases.

00:33:19:17 – 00:33:38:14
Ralph
And this is the key element to this whole thing. You have to have your tracking set up. You have to have your offline conversion tracking, and you have to have this 90 day conversion window also set up. And these are sort of big keys here. So sometimes it’s several weeks or even months of past before cases improved. I mean in most cases that is not how it works.

00:33:38:14 – 00:33:55:11
Ralph
It’s usually within a week or so as to after the intake. There is a very specific procedure that the law firm typically will do in order to figure out, okay, this is a good case. So this is a bad case or it’s a case that we can help or it’s a case that we can’t help. So having that tracking set up is highly highly important.

00:33:55:16 – 00:34:28:01
Ralph
So so looking at this at a little bit of a higher level think about Google is is really has transformed or will see this in some of the other data in 2023, 24 and 25 is that it really has become an intent machine, not a traffic machine. You need to create the the awareness over on the meta side and create more traffic to your site and then have both of the both of the engines, so to speak, both of the ad platforms work together and meta creates the awareness.

00:34:28:06 – 00:34:52:16
Ralph
And Google. That’s the last click for the sale. And this is how we were able to scale and leverage both platforms. Like I said, we started off mostly with Google and then created a blend, almost a 5050 blend between Meta and Google into 24 and into 25, which is when the Andromeda change happened within the meta platform. So it’s very, very helpful for scale.

00:34:52:19 – 00:35:19:18
Ralph
So step number three was we installed the digital strategy Velocity Engine. So this is a fancy way of saying it’s an AI powered production system for creative. That is laser focused to be able to create creative at volume and at scale. When you’re spending millions of dollars, you need to have lots and lots of creative, and you need to really understand who your avatar is.

00:35:19:18 – 00:35:41:21
Ralph
So all of that ties into here. So this is sort of yet another part of the conversion engine. This is the creative side. We said creative is the largest wheel here. As you can see. It’s there’s a reason for that is because creative now especially is the most vital is the most important part of the entire engine. They all work together but creative traffic after the click and all tied together with data.

00:35:42:00 – 00:36:10:16
Ralph
None of these would work without great data. That’s why data is so vitally important. So here’s what we did. So with all clients, whether it’s a personal injury law firm or a digital products company, or an e-commerce brand or a beauty brand, we do a what we refer to as a deep dive avatar research or a creative strategy framework or CSF, where we go deep into the business, we listen to, you know, phone calls from the client services people we read comments on.

00:36:10:16 – 00:36:37:04
Ralph
And so we use AI to do a lot of this research, but we realized very quickly, through this sort of two week deep dive, is that they had two very distinct avatars, and we had to approach each one in a slightly different way, especially early on in our relationship with this client. So one was really ideal for Google, and the other was really ideal for meta, but each needed sort of its own optimization, its own messaging.

00:36:37:07 – 00:36:59:03
Ralph
And you’ll see that in just a second here. So so what we found in this two week deep dive and we created this creative strategy framework is that avatar number one was very well suited for Google Ads. This is referred to as accident Andy. Yes, we do give goofy names to some of our avatars, but it helps us sort of distinctively talk about them serving in our communication, our internal communications.

00:36:59:03 – 00:37:16:01
Ralph
So key motivations for action. And Andy has just been in a car accident, probably one of the worst moments of his life, and wants to talk to somebody now. And he begins his search on Google. Maybe he’s seen a meta ad, but he really does begin mostly on Google. So fears and frustrations we go through that he’s he’s angry, fearful.

00:37:16:01 – 00:37:32:07
Ralph
He’s concerned. And the stuff that he wants he wants justice now. He wants assurance that his financial needs are going to be met. And he wants to put behind all this stuff ASAP and just sort of get on with his life. So this is somebody who’s just experienced a car accident and is in a tough spot at this point in time.

00:37:32:07 – 00:37:54:08
Ralph
So Google ads are very well suited for this avatar. The second avatar we found was a little bit more towards the meta side. This is post action and Amy. So this might be somebody who maybe it’s been 30 to 62, maybe even 90 days since the accident. She has not contacted a personal injury lawyer at this point, but she’s been focused on recovering and healing.

00:37:54:11 – 00:38:13:11
Ralph
But the bills are starting to pile up. Okay. And then she maybe sees an ad for a lawyer about getting the money that she deserves. Her insurance company really isn’t helping her out. So this is a slightly different avatar. The two can be used together, but we found these two very distinct avatars. Avatar number one is the one where we really focus on Google Ads.

00:38:13:11 – 00:38:31:10
Ralph
Avatar number two. However, this is where we created the demand and got more traffic to the website using meta. So her frustrations and fears are slightly different than our Google avatar. This is, you know, a lot of pain. She’s wondering how long this is going to take before she can, you know, take up sort of a normal life.

00:38:31:12 – 00:38:49:20
Ralph
Her financial needs are not being met. She’s running short on cash. Maybe she can’t work if she really does want her old life back. So this avatar research is maybe as corny as it sounds. Post accident. Amy, I don’t know. An accident. Andy I don’t know why we didn’t name it post accident poorly or something like that, but anyway, it doesn’t matter.

00:38:49:23 – 00:39:19:05
Ralph
Point is, this is like each one of these avatars. It’s going to crew. We’re going to have to create different types of advertising, different types of creative to attract each one. So this is the initial results back in 2022. You can see this is inside the Google ad account. Our costs where Daryl having to take over was was in around the mid part of 2022 thereabouts about July I think I said September before we took over.

00:39:19:05 – 00:39:40:09
Ralph
Actually I think it’s July of that year and their costs immediately started to decrease due to this messaging. We started having the tracking being put in place. Like I said, things are really starting to move in the right direction and our search impressions share was increasing over time. So a really pivotal moment here where we started to realize, all right, this stuff is really starting to work now.

00:39:40:14 – 00:40:00:03
Ralph
The other thing we realized is that the top personal injury lawyers are the ones who spend most on awareness ads. You’ll see these on the side of the road as you’re driving on the interstate. These guys are all over the place. There’s a reason why they want you to think of them first, whether it’s on radio, whether it’s on TV, whether it’s, like I said, whether it’s on a billboards.

00:40:00:03 – 00:40:25:07
Ralph
So but we wanted to do is we wanted to create a digital strategy that encompassed awareness. And we used meta in which to do that. So in and around the late part of 23, we started to use what we refer to as a more full funnel or a multi-channel strategy. So this is a study from Les Binet and Peter Field.

00:40:25:11 – 00:40:53:16
Ralph
And you can actually see if you are trying to just get conversions, you’ll have high efficiency, you’ll have immediate ROI. But the short term uplift stops when you spend less. And we were seeing this with Google. We got initially good results. We optimize the ads, things were moving in the right direction, but we needed another way to create more awareness and get two platforms to work together in order to produce the results.

00:40:53:16 – 00:41:23:08
Ralph
So this study by Binet and Field is sort of a landmark study where when you start to increase your awareness in your consideration, part of your advertising, the rising tide will be that your will, your sales, will increase over time as opposed to it’s sort of being stop, start, stop, start. If you’re always bidding on car accident attorney Detroit or car city attorney Michigan or whatever the town is in the state of Michigan, you’re never really creating a brand.

00:41:23:08 – 00:41:43:11
Ralph
All you’re just doing is grabbing that sort of intent at the bottom of the funnel. But to really scale and grow, you need to combine awareness and consideration with conversion. And that’s really what we started to do here. And this study was one that I actually saw a presentation on it in and around this time, and we started to deploy this within this space.

00:41:43:11 – 00:42:06:14
Ralph
And that’s one of the reasons why we’re doing today’s case study, is we were able to combine both platforms on the awareness build brand, and then the two of them together outperform just sales conversion campaigns alone. So you can think of this as the jagged line on the bottom is your Google Ads. But the stair step or like lower left hand to the upper right hand corner is your meta ads.

00:42:06:15 – 00:42:29:05
Ralph
Your meta ads really do power that awareness and consideration. So the two really start working together. So what happened? Well, in early 23 they were not spending a whole lot of money on meta. This is inside the meta platform. They spend about $7,000 a month. And by late 23, like I said, we took this over in about mid like Q3 of 2022.

00:42:29:08 – 00:42:52:02
Ralph
This is where we really started to ramp things up. So we had optimized Google. Google is doing well, but we hit sort of a demand ceiling. So we realized that we had to combine the two platforms together. And obviously we did so. And you can see here we ten axed their ad spend in a very short period of time, up to about 70 plus thousand dollars a month, which was still, you know, much less than we were spending on Google.

00:42:52:02 – 00:43:12:03
Ralph
But it was very significant because, remember, we’re talking about a small regional area. This is the state of Michigan. We’re not talking about nationwide. So $70,000 even in like the Detroit market is a lot of spend. So these are the three most popular ads. Astonishingly, the ads that we used at this sort of awareness and consideration level were, were pretty straightforward.

00:43:12:03 – 00:43:30:21
Ralph
I mean, they were just really sort of awareness, like obviously sort of a shot of the owner, the principal of the organization here. And then we would probably do this differently now with creative diversification. But these were the most popular ads that we used in 2023. They’re all kind of looked the same, but surprisingly they worked to create that awareness.

00:43:30:23 – 00:43:51:04
Ralph
We would not use those today. We would use real, diverse creative in which we’re going to be showing a second here. But these are the types of ads that started to work almost immediately for us. So we’re creating that brand awareness, that consideration. And then Google is then getting the conversion with the brand name search. And we obviously are optimizing your Google ads, optimizing our meta ads at the same time here.

00:43:51:07 – 00:44:11:18
Ralph
So think about this as meta is almost like a feeder strategy. And John and I have talked about this many times on many of the ad labs. Meta creates the awareness and then feeds that awareness to Google, which gets the last click of the scale. So if you’re still looking at things in silos, you’re going to say, well, why am I spending any money on meta?

00:44:11:18 – 00:44:31:23
Ralph
Because Google is the one that’s powering all my conversions. Well, the two actually work together, and that’s why the two year 11 data suite is so important, because it shows you exactly how each individual channel, email and SMS and organic and TikTok and programmatic, all of those individually, how they’re all working together to produce the results. And remember the result.

00:44:31:23 – 00:44:52:01
Ralph
Here is sign cases less than $5,000. And in this first year, we’re getting them at $1,500. So these are just some examples of some of the ads. They’re not incredibly remarkable. What we did start to do is we started to incorporate more video, more sort of, you know, casual kind of Mike types of ads, very good in front of the camera, utilized a lot of that.

00:44:52:01 – 00:45:13:22
Ralph
We realized that was a real true asset, showed a little bit more of the personality of the law firm, which is not really common in this space. So even some sort of grainy, lo fi sort of UGC shot with an iPhone camera behind the scenes, this really created sort of a likability factor. And this really had a lot to do with how we were able to use both platforms and ultimately scale up.

00:45:14:01 – 00:45:33:12
Ralph
So, as you can see here, our reach on our ads in meta was very significant. So we’re reaching about a million for a people, and we are hitting them with a lot of the same messaging. So our our frequency was very high. Here is we got a lot of impressions. But once again we were targeting the right types of individuals.

00:45:33:12 – 00:45:54:13
Ralph
We’re letting the algorithm do its work. So these are the people that have a propensity to either get a car accident or had been in a car accident. So through targeting, through what that point in time was largely targeting. Related. Andromeda does a lot of the targeting for you. Now. We were really getting the messaging in front of them with a lot of creative, lot of rotation and creative, which I just showed you here.

00:45:54:13 – 00:46:14:23
Ralph
So keep in mind this is a regional market. This is not a national market. So even with this second avatar between the two avatars that we discussed on an earlier slide, you are still focused on driving that top of funnel awareness and getting the Google Ads to create that bottom of the funnel conversion. So very, very significant ad spend here.

00:46:14:23 – 00:46:42:14
Ralph
And this was really what was happening is that meta was creating the awareness and then the Google branded search campaigns chipped in for a six inch pipe. So step four, as we optimized for after the clicker, we’re going to get into that in our next episode here on perpetual Traffic. So really appreciate you listening to this. Obviously we’ll leave links in the show notes for everything that’s here as well as we have this all on video for the first six months that we worked with this client, we can show you all that.

00:46:42:14 – 00:47:03:04
Ralph
That’s over at tier 11.com/p I will leave links in the show notes there a tremendous sort of seven part series. If you really want to get even more granular. We show you how we did everything almost with excruciating detail. Or of course, you know, if you want us to help you out, we can always help you out over at your 11.com/apply.

00:47:03:04 – 00:47:27:02
Ralph
So to continue this our next episode. Really looking forward to that. And of course wherever you listen to podcasts make sure you leave us a rating and review gets this out to a wider audience. We can teach them how to do this stuff the right way, through metrics that matter and growth at scales, and get your personal injury law firm more signed cases if that’s the case, or just more new customers, which is the whole goal of growing a business.

00:47:27:02 – 00:47:42:08
Ralph
And that’s what we try and teach you how to do here. On perpetual traffic. So on behalf of my amazing co-host Lauren E Petrillo, till next show, see you.

Episode 777: How We Made a Personal Injury Law Firm $55.2M (Case Study)

Mentioned in the Episode:

Listen to this episode on your favorite podcast channel:

We appreciate your support!

Connect with Ralph Burns:

Connect with Lauren Petrullo:

READ THE TRANSCRIPT:

How We Made a Personal Injury Law Firm $55.2M (Case Study)

More Episodes

Episode 781: Is Your Agency Performing Or Just Reporting Well?

Episode 780: Meta Andromeda ‘Ice Cream Strategy’ – Stop Killing Your Best Flavors!

Episode 779: How We Made a Personal Injury Law Firm $55.2M with Oli Liboy

Sign Up For News & Exclusive Opportunities