Solicitors Liverpool: cost per enquiry down 58.48%

Two kinds of trouble, one search box

SLS Solicitors is a Liverpool firm working two of the hardest-fought corners of UK legal search. Tenant eviction for landlords. Housing disrepair claims for tenants. Nobody types those words into a search bar unless something has already gone wrong.

Picture the landlord who has not seen rent in months, or the tenant photographing black mould on a bedroom wall. They search once, ring two or three firms, and instruct whoever picks up and sounds like they have done it before. There is rarely a considered second visit, which means the firm that misses the first call usually never hears from that person again.

Why those clicks cost what they do

A landlord matter is worth having, and every firm in the country knows it. National practices, claims managers and comparison sites all bid on the same short list of phrases, so the auction for somebody typing at eleven at night is not a Liverpool auction at all. It is a national one, and a regional firm stands in it beside marketing budgets many times its own.

Early on, that auction was charging the account A$84.64 for every enquiry. For a fixed-fee caseload business, that sits right on the line between a channel that funds hiring and one that quietly eats the margin on every file. The same period produced only 38 enquiries across 24 days, from 1,336 clicks. That was not an absence of demand. It was a price problem, and at 38 a month there was nowhere near enough volume to absorb it.

The searcher is standing in the room with the problem

Two things make legal work behave differently from an ordinary local service. People in a legal bind ring rather than type, usually from a phone, usually while looking at the thing that has gone wrong. Across the wider account, 30,011 of its 36,507 clicks came from a mobile handset, and those handsets produced 1,181.18 of the 1,660.96 tracked enquiries. Desktop contributed 5,255 clicks and 445.80 enquiries. Phone business first, website business second.

The other difference is that the two practice areas do not cost the same to win. Eviction work produced 1,333.49 enquiries at A$35.65 each. Housing disrepair produced 316.51 enquiries at A$60.55 each. Same firm, same city, same months, and nearly double the price to bring in a disrepair matter. Knowing that, with a deep run of numbers behind it, is what lets a practice decide where the next pound goes instead of guessing.

What we took on

Three campaigns running side by side, and the periods below are windows we picked out of the account and left undated on purpose. Over that stretch the account served 1,345,834 impressions and took 36,507 clicks. Enough solid months to draw firm conclusions from. At that volume, small mistakes compound quickly — and so do small improvements.

We rebuilt the account around the enquiries that turn into instructed work, and wrote the ads to the problem the searcher wanted solved rather than to the practice area printed on the letterhead. Then came the unglamorous half, which ran the entire time: reading what people were really typing, week after week, and making sure the firm only paid when a fee earner would genuinely want that call. It is not a launch task. It never lets up.

Cost per enquiry fell 58.48% in a month

One period was the high-water mark at A$84.64. The next came in at A$35.14, a fall of 58.48%. That did not come from throttling the account back and buying fewer, cheaper leads either. That period produced 156.68 enquiries of its own across 31 days, from 3,816 clicks, and put 136 phone calls through to the firm.

Read the line chart slowly, because the first drop is not the interesting part. What happens afterwards is. The account lands at A$35.14 and then simply stays there — A$41.35 in the period after, A$36.82 in the one following it, A$41.14 next, A$39.69 after that, A$38.18 further along, A$38.26 in the strongest month and A$41.79 in the last one plotted.

Period after period inside a narrow band, never once back near that high-water figure. A single cheap month is luck. Holding a level month after month is an account that has been changed.

The bar chart carries the other half of the story. That 156.68 was already four times the earlier 38, and from there the volume climbed almost every month: 139.30 in the following period, 161.01 in the one after it, 174.62 in the next, 199.41 beyond that, then 212.28. The strongest month the account has recorded returned 277.25 enquiries at A$38.26 each, a 5.86% conversion rate and 234 phone calls in 30 days. The period after held nearly all of it — 269.24 enquiries from 5,750 clicks, the busiest click month the account has had.

Put the two charts beside each other and the shape of the work shows up. Cost came down, then stopped moving. Volume went up seven-fold and kept going. Quality followed the same path: 2.84% of clicks became an enquiry at the start, and 5.86% did at the peak, an improvement of 106.17%. Click-through rate moved as well, from 1.75% in an earlier period to 4.99% in a later one, up 185.27%.

• A$84.64 → A$35.14 cost per enquiry, one measured period to the next — a 58.48% drop
• 156.68 enquiries in the cheaper period, over 31 days, including 136 phone calls
• 277.25 enquiries at A$38.26 each in the strongest month, including 234 phone calls in 30 days
• 269.24 enquiries in the period after it, from 5,750 clicks over 31 days
• 2.84% → 5.86% conversion rate, an earlier period to a later one — up 106.17%
• 1.75% → 4.99% click-through rate, an earlier period to a later one — up 185.27%
• 1,660.96 enquiries and 1,466 phone calls across the account's wider run, at an average of A$41.08 each
• 2.71% click-through rate and a 4.55% conversion rate over that same run

What changed inside the firm

Of everything above, the 1,466 phone calls matter most. In eviction and disrepair work, a call is a person with a live matter and a clock running on it. Those calls reached fee earners at well under half the early price, and the strongest month put more of them through than any month before it.

Predictable cost changes what a practice can plan. You can staff ahead of the work instead of behind it. A firm taking 38 enquiries in one month and 277.25 in another cannot run the same rota for both, but one that can see the cost sitting between A$35.14 and A$41.79 month after month is able to commit to a hire, because the work feeding that person's desk has stopped being a lottery.

It also changes which files are worth chasing. At A$60.55, a disrepair enquiry has to convert well to justify itself. At A$35.65, an eviction enquiry gives a fixed-fee firm far more room to work with. Seeing those two figures separately, month after month, is the difference between marketing that is bought and marketing that is managed. No practice area had to be abandoned here. Somebody just had to know what each one actually costs.

Talk to us

If the cost of winning a new matter has been creeping up for months, that is a fixable problem, and it happens to be the one we are best at. Send us your recent numbers and we will tell you plainly what we see, including which of your practice areas is quietly subsidising the others.