Should You Run Ads?

Ads are the most reversible decision in the whole discovery system. On today, off tomorrow. Which is exactly why they're where practices burn the most money. Nothing stops you from starting. Nothing forces you to check whether it's actually working. And an entire industry is optimised to keep the meter running.

So before the how, let's do the whether.

So when are you actually in an ads situation? When you need demand right now. A new practice. A new location. A new service line. And you can't wait for organic assets to compound. Or your market's organic real estate is genuinely locked up. Or you already have proven capacity to convert more enquiries than you're currently getting.

You're not in an ads situation if the honest problem sits downstream. Enquiries that die in an inbox. A site no stranger would trust. Ads just pour water into whichever bucket you already have.

The arithmetic nobody runs

Search ads rent you position inside active demand. Someone searches "family lawyer near me." You pay to appear. The rent is honest. But it's permanent. Stop paying. You disappear. Compare that with what the same money buys elsewhere. Your profile, your reviews, and pages that compound all keep producing long after you stop feeding them.

That doesn't make ads wrong. It makes them a bridge, not a foundation. The right use is buying demand while your owned assets grow — or surging for one specific push. Practices get hurt when the bridge quietly becomes the whole road. The marketing budget turns into a permanent rent bill.

One genuine bright spot for professional practices. Google's Local Services Ads — the pay-per-lead format with the verification badge — tends to beat classic search ads for local services. You pay for conversations, not clicks, and you can dispute the junk.

The burn patterns

Watch for the four ways small ad budgets die.

Broad match on a small budget. Your "estate lawyer" ad shows up for "free legal aid," and the budget's gone by lunch. Small budgets need tight match types. And a ruthless negative-keyword list.

Clicks sent to the homepage. An ad about wills that lands on a generic homepage wastes the exact intent you just paid for. Every ad deserves a page that finishes its sentence.

No conversion tracking. If you can't trace which ads produced booked work — not clicks, actual work — you're not advertising. You're donating. This is measurement's home turf, and ads are the spend it audits first.

Meta ads treated like search ads. Facebook and Instagram manufacture demand — they interrupt people who weren't looking. That's a longer, colder game of getting remembered later. Sometimes right for consumer-facing practices. Usually wrong as a first move for professional services.

Questions practices actually ask

What budget makes it worth even testing? Enough to buy statistical honesty. Usually a few hundred clicks' worth, over one to three months, in your market's cost range. A trickle too small to produce a readable result is the most expensive kind of cheap.

Agency or DIY? For one location and a handful of services, a carefully set-up self-managed LSA or a tight search campaign is manageable on your own. If you do hire help: pay flat fees. Own the ad account yourself — the ownership rule applies to ad accounts too. Judge everything on cost per booked client.

How do I know the ads — not luck — brought the work? Ask every new client how they found you. When the spend is meaningful, use a holdout: pause a region or a month, and watch what happens. Would it have happened anyway is the only question the invoice answers to.

My ads get clicks but no calls. Then the ads are working, and something after them isn't. The landing page. The proof. The response speed. That leak lives in Get Chosen, and no bid strategy will fix it.