Case Study · Legal Services
Six years. $30K per month scaled to $150K per month. 150 to 180 signed retainers per month at peak. 4.2x ROAS sustained for over four years.
A national immigration law firm came to LGG Media in 2018 after the previous campaign manager lost $30K in a single weekend with no attributed client activity to show for it. LGG Media took over with a two-week transition window. Our approach for this vertical is on the immigration law service page.
The account had no conversion tracking beyond basic form submissions, no revenue data flowing back to campaigns, and no record of which inquiries became paid consultations or signed retainers.
The firm had no way to answer which campaigns produced clients who signed retainers. Without that answer, there was no basis for budget decisions and no way to identify which spend generated revenue.
The first stage was a paid consultation at $150. The second was a signed retainer averaging $5K.
The prior campaigns had optimized on free inquiry form submissions, the step before the consultation. The result was high form volume from prospects researching immigration options broadly, with nothing connecting those inquiries to the clients who actually paid. See how that approach compares with other immigration lead generation options.
LGG Media built a Salesforce integration that tracked the complete revenue journey from ad click through signed retainer.
The architecture used UTM parameters embedded in all ad URLs, with Zapier automations connecting Salesforce events to a conversion tracking layer and uploading those events to Google Ads. Every time a prospect booked a paid consultation, that event was pushed from Salesforce with the original UTM attribution attached. Every time a retainer was signed, the same process fired with the $5K retainer value.
With signed retainer conversions uploading to Google Ads at the actual retainer value, the algorithm began differentiating between query patterns that produced clients who paid $5K retainers and those that produced inquiries that did not convert. Budget shifted toward the keywords, audiences, and ad formats that produced retainer clients rather than free inquiry volume.
The two-week transition window meant no gap in campaign activity. The Salesforce integration was live and passing retainer conversion data to Google Ads within the first month. For the tracking mechanics behind this, see how attribution infrastructure works →
LGG Media restructured the campaign strategy around the paid consultation rather than the free inquiry. Landing pages and ad copy directed prospects to book a $150 consultation with an immigration attorney rather than submit a free contact form.
The $150 fee functioned as a self-qualification layer. Prospects willing to pay for the initial consultation had a demonstrated intent level that free inquiry submissions did not.
Retainer conversion from paid consultation prospects ran at 30 percent. Retainer conversion from free inquiry prospects had run at approximately 5 percent. The shift reduced raw inquiry volume while increasing the proportion that became $5K retainer clients.
Cost per signed retainer fell even as cost per inquiry increased, because the inquiries that remained converted at six times the prior rate. Fewer inquiries at 30 percent conversion produced more signed clients than higher volume at 5 percent.
The outcome: the cost per signed retainer held at approximately $1,200 on a $5K average retainer value throughout the engagement.
The account scaled from $30K per month to $150K per month within approximately 12 months of the engagement start. From 2019 through 2023, it held 4.2x ROAS consistently, four years at the same return across spend levels that ranged from $80K to $150K per month depending on case volume and staffing capacity.
At peak, the account produced 500 to 600 paid consultations per month and 150 to 180 signed retainers per month. Cost per retainer held at approximately $1,200 on a $5K average retainer value. Monthly revenue attributed to advertising-driven retainers reached approximately $750K at peak monthly spend.
The six-year partnership duration is itself a measurable outcome. A 4.2x ROAS sustained across four years of spend scaling does not happen by accident or a one-time setup. It reflects an attribution infrastructure that kept improving its signal quality as it accumulated data, and a strategy correctly aligned to the revenue event from the start.
The Salesforce integration produced geographic performance data that went beyond campaign optimization. The firm used that data to inform decisions about where to open physical offices.
Markets where advertising consistently produced high retainer conversion rates, where the ratio of paid consultations to signed retainers was strongest, were identified through the attribution data as priority markets for operational investment.
That gave the firm a demand signal traditional market research does not provide. The advertising infrastructure was producing a map of where demand for immigration legal services was strong enough to support a physical office, validated by actual client conversion data rather than population estimates or competitor density.
The same data that optimized campaign budgets also identified which markets warranted physical office investment. Two distinct business decisions, media spend allocation and office expansion, were running off the same attribution infrastructure.
Explore the approach: Immigration lawyer leads → · Pay-per-click management → · Attribution infrastructure → · All client results → See how the underlying tracking and bidding work in our guides to Google Ads offline conversion tracking and target ROAS.
Next Step
If campaigns are producing form submissions but retainer conversion is inconsistent, the optimization signal is the problem.
Request a Discovery Call →