At the Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing & Management Association (PILMMA) Super Summit in May 2026, Razor Rank co-founder Andrew Orlander presented the following talk. Attendees learned how to feed their firms’ proprietary data into Google’s ad platform in order to “teach” Google’s AI which ad variants earn the most valuable clicks, resulting in more signed cases and fewer underqualified leads. Andrew also introduces Razor Rank’s Full Circle Attribution tool, which automates the connection between an advertiser’s CRM and Google Ads to ensure the proper data is fed into the Google AI on a consistent basis.
Watch the full talk below, and get in touch with us to learn more about how Full Circle Attribution can help you stop wasting spend and get more out of your ads.
Video Transcript
Hey everybody, Andy Orlander here. Nice to see you all. Happy to be back at PILMMA.
What I’m going to be talking about today is going to be how to really and truly improve the performance of your Google advertising results. Google Ads is one of the few levers that you can truly push down and scale your law firm, but it seems to be very difficult. There are a lot of changes going on in the industry, a lot of changes in Google Ads, but if you understand how Google Ads works, you can really make a difference. You can really build up your caseload using Google Ads. So let’s go.
Well before we get into it, I’ll just give you 2 seconds about us. I’m one of the co-founders of Razor Rank and my co-founder is somewhere around here, Jason Manuel. But we started ten years ago. We’re an Inc 5000 company, we’re a Google premier partner, Meta business partner, great reputation, and we do everything from website design to paid media to earned media to multi-location SEO – multi-city, multi-state.
What we’re gonna be talking about today is how to really improve your Google Ads. And what we’re seeing is probably 90 percent of the law firms out there are underperforming in their Google Ads to the point where they almost want to stop. And a lot of the Google advertisers that we speak to, they start Google advertising and it’s not good enough for them, and they fail and then they stop. But what we’re going to talk about today is why that’s happening and what you can do about it.
So how many people here are doing Google advertising, can I see? Okay, a good number. So most people are seeing right now that cost per click is skyrocketing. You are seeing two hundred, three hundred, five hundred dollar costs per click in your advertising campaigns. I’m sure you’re seeing increasing competition from the big players and just from more players being in the space. You’re seeing junk leads coming in where they have very little value, and those leads cost you a lot. At five hundred dollars a click, they cost quite a bit. You’re seeing lower case values in general and you’re seeing cost per signed case that’s out of control. And as a result, you can’t really scale your advertising. But if you could get a reasonable cost per signed case that you knew was reliable and a value of that case that was high, you guys could make a huge difference in your caseload, and that’s what we’re gonna do.
Google actually cares. They want you to keep advertising. They don’t want you to leave. And if you just know how to ask, they will give you what you want. But it’s very difficult to ask. And the problem is your leads from your advertising are coming in as phone calls and forms and chats, and Google cannot see the value of those leads. Google doesn’t know if that phone call that said, “I’m a car accident victim,” they don’t know if that’s a good lead or a bad lead. In fact, you don’t know if it’s a good lead or a bad lead until three or four days later, when you get all the information – you chase down the case, you find out about the liability – and then suddenly that case became a great case. It was a truck accident commercial policy that you really wanted. But you have no way of telling Google that, and so Google has no way of knowing it, and you can’t differentiate between your cases, so Google can’t differentiate between your cases. And as a result, Google’s AI can’t help you. So they’re doing the best they can, and for Google the best they can is to send you everything. And when they send you everything trying to keep you happy, that’s when you get the junk. So how do you fix that?
Google tells you this is in the literature everywhere you look. They want your conversion signals. They give you a conversion table in Google Ads. They say, “Tell us everything about your leads.” And there’s all this literature out there that says if you do that you’ll get 25 to 40 percent more actual, high-value cases than you were getting before. If you don’t do it, you’re on your own. They tell you, as a matter of fact, “Don’t even use PMax if you’re not sending us your conversion data.” So how do you send conversion data? This is called outcome-based attribution, and outcome-based attribution is the only way to advertise now if you really wanna get something out of your Google Ads. So here’s how you do it, and I’m gonna give you the steps so that you could do it yourself, but then I’m gonna show you how we systematize this and how it can be much easier than what I’m showing you manually.
So the first thing you have to do is you have to take all your intakes and leads that are coming to your office, and then you have to put them into a spreadsheet each day. Then you have to take all the marketing data and all the information on the leads – the calls, the forms, the chats – and put where they came from into that spreadsheet. Then you match the intakes to the leads so that the marketing attribution is included. Did they come from Google Maps? Did they come from Google CPC? Did they come from organic? Where did they all come from? And then you need to put values on each thing. Values on all your intakes, all your leads, all your signed cases. And then in that spreadsheet, you need to prepare it for a Google upload. And Google gives you the instructions if you look. What do they need for an upload? You take away all the personally identifiable information, you put the GCLID in, and then you send those values back to Google every day. And if you do this, you will get a significantly better result, and I’m gonna show you what those results look like.
Now there are certain challenges with this, and it’s fraught with peril. And as you get into it, you will find out that there will be missing GCLIDs, and people will be phoning in from other numbers, and people calling in for their friend or their relative or their husband or their wife, and and your data is corrupted. And then you’re going to find out that you have to keep track of that lead from the time they called to the time the retainer came in, and if the value of that lead changed over time, you need to keep up with that. There are duplicate uploads, creating confusion in your data that you’re going to be sending back to Google. The changing values from one time to another – you need to keep up with that. If all of a sudden that case turns out to be nothing, you need to change the value.
But the worst thing that people are doing right now is called assumed conversions. And if you’re doing this, you shouldn’t be doing it. What this means is you have CallRail or call tracking metrics and all the calls come in, you are tracking them and saying, “Okay anything that’s over three minutes is a real lead.” Or anything that’s over four minutes, we want to put a value on that and we want to send that back to Google because that’s a conversion. And if you’re doing that, we have people sending 160 or 200 different phone calls back to Google as over three minutes. But the truth is only ten percent of those leads are probably worthwhile, and the rest is junk. So what you’re doing is you’re actually sending Google 90 percent of the information back, which is what we call erroneous data, and Google is then saying, “Oh, you want more of those? No problem. We’ll send you more of those.” So that is not the way to do it, and if you’re doing that, you need to change to what I’m telling you now.
And so there are a lot of pitfalls, but you can handle it yourself. And the question really is, if this is so important and it’s so great, why aren’t more people doing it? And the answer is – we asked Google, we asked AI why that is – why aren’t more people using the first-party data from their office and incorporating it into their Google Ads? And Google AI overview says, “It’s technically complex, resource-intensive, and fragmented.” Although if you do it, you can see you will get improved conversions. You will get higher return on ad spend and lower cost per lead. So people should be doing it. They want to do it; it’s just difficult. So we understood this through a process that we went through, and I’m going to show you. We created a system that works tremendously well. It’s called Full Circle Attribution. It’s very easy to use, but I’m going to show you how we’ve discovered it.
This is the back end of a Google Ads campaign over a year and a half. And what you can see here is the blue line is the spend. As that spend was going up, up, up, they were spending more money. The red line is the value of the cases going all over the place. Now we had a lawyer, a law firm, who was spending $100,000, $200,000, almost $300,000 a month. They knew they wanted to do this. They understood how the data was working. They understood what Google was asking for, and they were willing to work with us to get all that information back into Google’s AI. And so we were doing it, we were going along, it was getting better. But you can see that one part where the two lines converge right at the end, and then they go straight up. That is where we systematized it and we got every scrap of information back into Google’s platform. And at that point, the cost per case came down, the value of the cases came up, and that law firm said, “Okay, let’s scale.” And they went straight up and started spending almost $900,000 a month, and they had to pull back because they were getting too many cases. They were wasting cases because they couldn’t internally handle it – they had gone from an intake department of five to 26. So they had to back off to handle all the volume, but this was our cue that it was working, and that’s when we went to create a platform that could help everyone do the same thing.
So what we developed is called Full Circle Attribution. It’s a platform that basically set up a series of data connections to your practice, to your calls, to your forms, to your leads, to your CRM. We pull all the information in, we match it up with the marketing attribution channel, we tag the data with a value from a valuation table that we create with your office based on what you want to attract. And as soon as the status of a case changes, Google gets that information immediately. And now all of your data is going into Google so that their AI – which is way better than anything we could come up with – their AI can now learn which are your best cases and send you more of them. And it’s pretty amazing, and I’m going to show you some results in a second. But basically, this platform works with any CRM, any form, any call platform, any call tracking, any chat as long as it has an API. It integrates seamlessly with your workflow. You don’t have to change anything. We customize the integration for your office. We create the values for all your cases and then we send that back to Google in real time. And what the result is for you, and I’m going to show you the actual results from our clients, more signed cases – but not just more signed cases, higher-value cases.
You guys are looking for the nuggets. You’re looking for the really high-value truck wreck, the commercial case, the million-dollar case. They’re out there, and you need to attract them, and this is the way to do it. You get a lower cost per signed case. You get more leads, but not only more leads – improved quality of leads. And then the side effect of this is the data transparency. This is why we call it Full Circle Attribution. You’re going to see not only your paid cost per case, you’re going to see all your signed cases – whether it came from Maps, whether it came from organic, whether it came from Bing, whether it’s from Google, whether it’s from a billboard, whether it’s from Google PPC – you’re going to see every signed case and what the cost per signed case is, and then you’re going to understand where you’re spending your marketing dollars so that you can stop spending it where it’s not working and start spending it where it is working.
You know, we have one client where they’re advertising in an entire state, but this one county, they get ten leads in a month and none of them become signed cases. The other county where they’re getting five leads but all of them become signed cases – you have to start looking at where you’re getting your actual signed cases from and stop spending your money in the places that are not working for you. And people have no idea how this works, so you need to have this kind of transparency. As a matter of fact, you’ll have transparency on multiple touchpoints, because people will tell you, “Oh I saw you on TV,” but we know they put a search into the organic search box that said “personal injury lawyer near me.” And so we see, they said TV, but this is what they actually did. So you start to really understand what your marketing dollars are being used for and how they’re actually working.
Now here are some actual results, and this is really interesting. If you look at this graph, the bottom line that you see going across, you can see where the Full Circle Attribution was started. There’s a slight uptick in the conversion value of the cases they’re attracting. The entire next year is higher than the year before, so meaning they’re getting higher-value cases this year. But six or seven months in, you see that huge uptick right around the seventh month? That uptick is a 400 percent increase in conversion value. That is how you know you’re getting higher-value cases. Those are the nuggets that you’re looking for, the high-value cases, and we know they’re coming in. It proves right out in the dashboard. And so the reason that they’re coming in is because we’re sending 500 more data points to Google as to what it is that we’re looking for, and Google is understanding it.
And there is no miracle here. Google works this way and the thing that people do is they try to advertise for two or three months on Google Ads, and they don’t get the result they want. But it takes Google longer than that. You’re not sending them that much information that they can learn in two seconds what you want. You need to have the wherewithal to see what’s going on in your campaign and let Google do its thing.
So here’s their accident cases. We manage them every year. The one year that we used FCA, they had 936 more accident intakes than the year before. The only difference is the FCA. Here’s another client that is a Northeast personal injury law firm, and what we’re looking at is leads, intakes, and signed cases. You can see where the FCA went in around week 46. These are the leads they’re getting from Google Ads – you can see the smooth transition going up. And then the intakes, same thing. A few months later, the intakes start going up. And then you see the signed cases start going up. This is hot-off-the-press data that we’re showing you.
Here’s a Midwest law firm, same thing. FCA goes in, the smooth rise in leads, the smooth rise in intakes, and the nice rise in signed cases. Here’s another law firm. This is just their general PI campaign. Signed cases chugging along around 12, 18, 14, and now doubled, almost tripled, in the next six to seven months. So I mean, the evidence is kind of overwhelming. This is a law firm in Los Angeles where they could not get car accident cases. MVAs were just not coming in for them, and you can see the percentage of MVAs increasing over time. And here’s another personal injury law firm’s year-over-year results. The results for us – you know, we were a little leery about doing this, but now that we’ve been doing it for over a year, we’re starting to see real results in all cases.
And so here’s another law firm. There’s just their number of leads way over year-over-year once they started using FCA. So – oh, and this is the last one I’m going to show you. This is a school furniture website. They don’t sell online; they get phone calls just like you. Their phone calls, their sales, are worth $100,000 per sale, $200,000 per sale. They sell to schools. And they had, using FCA, almost$2,000,000 more in revenue, but the spend was almost $500,000 less because they’re getting a lower cost per acquisition. So anybody who gets phone calls, forms, and chats where Google is blind, this is a huge plus for you. And the beauty is almost nobody is using it, and the reason is still because it’s such a pain in the neck to do it manually. It’s really difficult.
So this is what it looks like on the back end. This is an example of what we send to Google. This is a car accident lead. It’s not signed up yet, but they like it, so it has a value. It says they’re still chasing this for a retainer. So there’s a value that goes to Google, and then what happens is three days later, four days later, they get the retainer. They confirm that this is a real lead. The minute they change the status, that value changes to whatever we say it’s supposed to be, and that goes straight to Google in real time. And so Google is now learning: This was a good lead, but now this is a great lead, and that is what happens. And this is the back end. What you’ll see is all the leads going back to Google, all the successful data that’s going back to Google, and that is exactly what you want to see. You want to see every scrap of data going back to Google, teaching them what it is you want to get out of your Google Ads campaign.
Now this is an example of what not to do. This is a regular conversion table in Google Ads. This is someone who does what we called assumed conversions. You can see they send about 165 phone calls back to Google, and I can guarantee you that 150 of those are erroneous. And that’s what most people do because that’s the easiest way to do it, and the best you can do when you’re not using some kind of a manual or an FCA-automated system. And then they have other leads going in, they have forms going in that have certain keywords in them. It’s automated, but it’s not good. This is what it should look like in the back end of Google. This is where you’re sending only the values that you want Google to see. You’ll send them everything that’s qualified, everything that’s signed, with the right values for each case, and Google can now accumulate all that data and start sending you better information, better leads, and better quality cases.
And then this is another thing that we see in the back end. You see failed data because Google changes things every week. Every time they make a change, it breaks something in the in the system and we have to immediately figure that out and change it, and resend the data. And that happens all the time, but we get flags and warnings and we’re in communication with Google, and we can fix it immediately. And as a matter of fact, if you change something in your CRM and you’re doing it manually, you’ll see the same thing. All of a sudden everything breaks, and then you fix it, all that data goes right back in.
So here’s what we say. Most of your agencies and most of your PPC people who are working in your office, they are playing defense. They are using negative keywords to help you stop paying for clicks you don’t want. Yes, they should be doing that. You should be doing negative keywords all the time. They limit the geography. They say, “Maybe we’re advertising in too big an area,” and so they make the geography smaller. Let’s not waste money. Let’s restrict the times. You know what? People in the middle of the night, we don’t want to advertise to them anymore. We have no idea if we’re getting signed cases then, but we’re not going to advertise there anymore. So now we’re restricting the people who can come in. We’re restricting the geography where they can come from. And then we try to lower the cost per click. Everybody’s disgusted when it gets to $500. We say, “We’re not going to spend $500 on a click anymore.” And maybe all your good clicks are $500. You have no way of knowing this. But when we put in Full Circle Attribution, we know exactly which campaigns, exactly which clicks, turned into signed cases.
So what we say is, “You’re trying to stop the waste? What we’re trying to do is help you actually play offense.” Help start asking Google for the leads that you want, and the quality cases that you want, and use the technology to your advantage. They’re giving you an out. Start using this in your practice and you will be able to actually pull the lever on Google Ads and scale your caseload. So come visit us – I know there’s going to be a ton of questions about this. We’re at Booth 31. If you want, we’ll audit your campaign and tell if you’re wasting money, and see what we could do to help you. But this is a great way for you all to scale your practice, increase your caseload, and generate more revenue. So that’s it! Thanks.
