What Google Ads Actually Cost an Irish Law Firm: Ten Months of Account Data

Most articles about Google Ads costs in Ireland give you a range. Eight to twenty five euro per click for legal. Eight hundred to two thousand a month in budget. The ranges are not wrong, but they are useless, because the number you actually need is what a campaign costs to run to the point where it produces something.

So here is one account in full. Anthony Joyce & Co. is a Dublin 8 practice with four quite separate areas of work: personal injury, medical negligence, immigration and notary services. I have run their Google Ads since late November 2025. Every figure below is read straight out of the account.

Two definitions first, because most write-ups blur them and the blur is where the exaggeration hides.

A conversion here means a tracked phone call or form submission that the call tracking system attributed to a paid click. It is an enquiry, not a client. Some of those enquiries become files, some do not, and the ones that do are a matter for the firm's own system rather than the ad account.

Cost per enquiry is spend divided by those conversions. It is not cost per client. Anyone quoting you a cost per client from a Google Ads dashboard is quoting you something the dashboard does not know.

The whole account, month by month

November 2025 covers six days, because that is when the account was rebuilt.

Half conversions appear because Google splits a conversion across several clicks when more than one click preceded it.

Three things in that table are worth more than the totals.

April was the worst month and it cost more than March did. Spend went up, enquiries went down, cost per enquiry nearly doubled to €85.57. That is what a scaling attempt looks like when it does not work. It happens, it is visible in the data, and the honest version of a case study includes it.

July was the biggest month in both directions. Nearly seven thousand euro of spend and a hundred and thirty enquiries. That was a deliberate test with daily budgets pushed to two hundred euro on the strongest campaign. It worked, in the sense that volume scaled roughly in line with spend rather than collapsing.

The best efficiency came after throttling back, not while scaling. September is running at €21.66 per enquiry on less than a quarter of July's budget. Cutting spend on the weaker terms improved the average more than any bid change did. That is the least intuitive line in the whole dataset and it is the one I would act on first in somebody else's account.

Cost by practice area

Same account, same period, split by campaign. This is where the interesting part is.

Immigration and personal injury consumed almost exactly the same budget. Immigration produced twice as many enquiries.

Medical negligence costs three times what immigration costs per enquiry, and it converts at a higher rate than either of the others. Both things are true at once. The clicks are simply expensive: an average of €6.89 each against €1.91 for immigration. When somebody searches for a medical negligence solicitor, every firm in the country wants that click, and the auction prices accordingly.

This is the practical point for any firm with more than one area of work. You do not have one advertising problem, you have one per practice area, and they do not behave alike. Running them in a single campaign with a single budget means the expensive area quietly eats the budget of the cheap one, and the account average tells you nothing about either.

What the clicks cost before and after

The account existed before November 2025 and had been running for roughly three years.

Thirty one thousand euro produced more clicks than forty two thousand had, in the same account, in the same market, for the same firm. The click price came down by roughly half.

Most of that is not clever bidding. It is structure. The previous setup had campaigns being switched on and off constantly, which is consistent with automated scheduling of some kind. A campaign that restarts that often never accumulates continuous learning data, and Google charges more for clicks it is less confident about. Rebuilding as one campaign per practice area, left to run, did most of the work on its own.

What this means if you are a firm looking at a budget

A few things transfer, and a few do not.

Transfers: the shape of the cost curve. Expect the first month to be your worst. Expect efficiency to improve for several months as the data accumulates. Expect at least one scaling attempt to fail visibly.

Transfers: the practice area spread. If you do high-competition work and lower-competition work, the ratio between them will be somewhere in this range, and you should budget them separately.

Does not transfer: the absolute numbers. Cost per enquiry is a function of your click price, your landing page and your phone handling. A firm with a slow website and a receptionist taking messages will pay more per enquiry on identical clicks.

Does not transfer at all: the conversion of enquiries into files. That is your intake process, not the ad account, and it varies more between firms than anything Google charges for.

If you want the general picture rather than one account, I have written separately about what Google Ads cost in Ireland across professional services, with the usual ranges and what drives them. The full write-up of this account, including why immigration and notary went first, is on the case studies page.

The honest caveat

Five hundred and ninety six enquiries over ten months is one account in one city in one sector. It is not a benchmark and I would not present it as one. What it is, is a real set of numbers with the measurement basis attached, which is more than most agency case studies give you.

If you run a firm and want to know whether your own numbers look normal, send them over. I will tell you what I see, including when the answer is that paid search is not worth it for what you do.