When Your Marketing Company Buys the Wrong Clicks and Why You’re Paying for It, Literally!

If your marketing company spent their own money, they’d stop doing this.
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Here’s how bad targeting quietly drains your ad budget, and makes every click more expensive for everyone.

The Truth No One in Legal Marketing Wants You to Know

If your marketing company (in-house or outsourced) is pushing ad dollars toward practice areas you don’t even handle, that’s not strategy.
That’s manipulation.
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They do it because it makes your numbers look good on paper.
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But they never tell you what those clicks actually are.
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Or how much you’re really paying for them.

Step 1: They Chase Clicks, Not Clients

Marketing agencies are rewarded for “activity,” not outcomes.
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Clicks look impressive in a report. Clients take time.
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So if you’re an employment lawyer, they’ll happily show your ad under personal injury lawyer or family lawyer near me, because those terms have higher search volume.
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You see a spike in traffic. They claim a win.
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But those clicks will NEVER convert.

Step 2: You’re Paying for Their Ego Metrics

Every irrelevant click still costs you real money.
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When someone searching “divorce lawyer near me” clicks your employment ad, Google still charges you $80–$150.
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Your marketer doesn’t care, because it’s your card on file. If it were their money, you’d see a completely different targeting strategy.

Step 3: You’re Feeding Google’s Auction

Every wasted click tells Google there’s “high demand” for those search terms.
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That pushes up auction competition for your entire area, meaning every lawyer in your market, including you, now pays more per click.
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The longer you let bad targeting run, the more inflated your future ad costs become. You’re not just wasting today’s budget, you’re training the system to overcharge you tomorrow.

Step 4: The Illusion of Performance

By the end of the month, your marketing company delivers a flashy report:
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• 12,000 impressions
• 1,500 clicks
• “Visibility up 40%!”
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But none of that measures quality.
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It’s like bragging that 10,000 people saw your billboard on a highway where nobody drives.
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You’re paying for numbers, not results.

Step 5: The System Rewards Waste

The digital ad model was never built for professionals like lawyers.
It was built for volume, and volume rewards waste.
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More traffic means more billing.
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More billing means more commission.
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And because marketing companies don’t share your risk, they have no reason to optimize for accuracy.

Every wasted dollar is still a billable success story for them.

The Fix: Integrity-Driven Visibility

At Lawggle, we don’t rent visibility, we build it.
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We don’t chase traffic. We match fit.

Our model filters for quality and intent, not impressions.
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Every lead is human-reviewed before it ever reaches you.

That means:

• No wasted clicks.
• No inflated auctions.
• No “we got you visibility” smoke-and-mirrors.

Visibility should grow your reputation, not your ad bill.

Questions to Ask Your Marketing Company

Here are five questions every lawyer should ask their marketing company before signing another invoice:
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1. What percentage of my clicks come from practice areas I don’t handle?
   If they can’t answer this, they’re not tracking relevance, just traffic.
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2. What keywords are you bidding on that don’t directly match my services?
   Look for overlap with unrelated or broad terms. That’s wasted budget.
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3. How do you measure a “successful” campaign, clicks or clients?
   The answer should be conversions, not activity.
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4. What happens when I stop paying for ads?
   If visibility disappears overnight, you’re renting it, not owning it.
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5. How do you ensure I’m not competing against my own data?
   Most firms don’t realize that bad targeting teaches algorithms to overprice their own future clicks.

Final Thought

If your marketing company spent their own money, your campaigns would look very different.

They’d target fewer keywords.
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They’d optimize for accuracy.
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And they’d stop feeding an auction that makes you pay more for every future lead.

At Lawggle, we call that integrity-driven visibility.
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Because real marketing should build authority, not dependency.

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