Professional Services · Google Ads

A family lawyer in the US had stopped believing Google Ads worked. Then she stopped trying to be clever.

Her free consultations had collapsed from around fifteen a month to one. She'd done everything the marketing people had told her to do. The fix, when it came, was the one thing she hadn't tried — and the one thing she said felt like an insult.

By Claire Jarrett, Contributor  ·  30 May 2026  ·  4-minute read

Claire Jarrett at her studio. She has managed Google Ads for licensed professionals since 2007.

The first time I met Janine, she'd already given up on Google Ads twice.

She runs her own family-law firm in the United States. A real one — the kind where a single retainer is worth fifteen thousand dollars and a clean caseload is the difference between a practice that pays for itself and one that doesn't. A year before we spoke, her free consultations had been around fifteen a month. By the time she found us they were down to one.

What she'd tried, in the meantime, was everything the marketing people had told her to try. She'd applied the recommendations Google had flagged in her account. She'd worked on pushing her optimisation score up because Google had said that was the answer. She'd hired a marketing person who added hundreds of "great" keywords. She'd narrowed everything to exact match, then broadened it again. She'd swapped headlines, swapped offers, swapped bid strategies. Every one of those moves, in isolation, sounded reasonable.

"When I told her the answer was to copy what was already working in her city, she looked at me like I was mad."

What I told her, in our first call, was that I wasn't going to help her reinvent anything. Two to ten of her local competitors were already winning Google Ads in her market. Their ads were running. Their phones were ringing. Their entire system — their ads, their keywords, their landing pages — was sitting in a free, public archive almost no one in her industry opens. The fix was to stop trying to be clever and start reading the market.

She looked at me like I was mad. She'd been through agencies, Google reps, hundreds of keywords, months of reinventing — and the answer was to copy what was already working? It felt, in her own words, like an insult.

She said yes anyway. She'd run out of clever.

Within thirty days her bookings began to climb back. The first thing she said when she noticed was that the ones coming through were different. They weren't tyre-kickers. They were people looking for the specific kind of work she actually wanted to take on.

What changed for her, in her own telling, wasn't the spreadsheet. It was that for the first time in two years she could log into her own Google Ads account and tell you why a campaign was working — or wasn't. She stopped being a passenger.

That was three years ago. She's still our client. She started looking at hiring her next associate roughly six months in.

The reason I'm writing this isn't really her story. It's that I've watched the same thing happen — in slightly different shapes — across three continents and nineteen years of doing this. Owners who'd been told Google Ads didn't work for their industry. Owners who'd spent thirty, fifty, a hundred thousand dollars proving it didn't. None of them needed a better agency. They needed permission to stop reinventing.

That's the only thing I'm offering on this training. Thirty minutes. A clear look at what's already winning in your market, what your account is probably missing, and what to do about it.