Facebook ads for lawyers: what US law firms run, write and link to, from five of our studies

Facebook ads for lawyers are easy to find and hard to judge from the outside. Over the past two weeks we studied live Facebook and Instagram ads from US local businesses five different ways: the ads themselves, the words in them, the page after the click, a four-point scorecard and a check of who also runs Google ads. This page pulls out what we found about law firms.

The short version: most firms in our Facebook ads for lawyers data run one long-lived ad, write long text, lean on the phone and rarely lead with an offer. The full figures, with the study each comes from, are free to download at the end.

What Facebook ads for lawyers look like

We found 265 live US law firm ads from 146 firms. 69.9% of the firms had only one ad in our sample, and only 6.2% had five or more. Ads ran a long time, though law firms had the shortest median of the four trades in that study: 181 days, 79.2% for 90 days or more and 30.9% for over a year.

The formats were spread out. 37% of the ads were videos, 32.5% used dynamic creative (several images, headlines and texts that Meta mixes) and 24.9% were single images. 38.9% used a Learn more button and 16.6% Contact us. 7.5% used Call now, and 9.1% had no button.

Law firms leaned on the phone. 18.9% of their ads had no link at all and asked people to call or message, and 20% of the ads wrote a phone number in the text. 10.6% of the ads were in Spanish, 28 ads in all, 22 of them about immigration. Our view is that a firm whose clients speak Spanish should test ads in Spanish, as these immigration firms did.

What the ads say

We measured 224 distinct law firm ad texts. The median text was 42 words, or 247 characters, and 72.8% ran past 150 characters, the top of the 50 to 150 characters Meta's ads guide suggests for single-image ads.

Few firms led with an offer. 30.6% of the English texts mentioned one, usually a free consultation or no fee unless the firm wins, and only 12.8% put it in the first line. Of the texts that made an offer, only 40% put it within the first 150 characters. 19.6% wrote a phone number in the text itself. 48% told the reader what to do, such as call or claim, and 26.3% opened with a question. 35.7% named a place or called themselves local.

The tone was mostly plain. 30.8% of the texts used an emoji and 30.8% an exclamation mark, and the median text read at about grade 8 (Flesch-Kincaid, English texts of 20 words or more).

In the Ad Library data, 28.7% of law firm ads mentioned something free, 14.3% used social proof such as reviews or results, and 5.3% gave a price.

Where law firm ads appear

Almost every law firm ad ran on both Facebook (96.2%) and Instagram (95.1%), and 58.5% also ran on Meta's Audience Network, which places ads inside other apps. Our view is that law firms should check that placement on purpose, compare its leads with Facebook and Instagram, and turn it off if it does not bring signed cases.

Dynamic creative was more common among law firms than in the other trades in that study, at 32.5% of ads.

The page after the click

We opened the most-used link of 76 law firms on an iPhone-sized screen. 43.4% sent clicks to their home page, 39.5% to an inner page and 15.8% to a separate landing page. 56.6% of the sites ran on WordPress, and the median page weighed 2 MB. Only 3.9% were over 5 MB, so page weight was rarely the problem for law firms.

The phone carried the page. 89.5% had a tap-to-call link, 78.9% showed it on the first screen and 53.9% kept it fixed as you scrolled. Forms were common, though rarely on the first screen: 64.5% of the pages had one, but only 7.9% showed it on the first screen. 43.4% ran a chat widget, and 21.1% of the links passed through at least one redirect before the page loaded.

On tracking, 75% of the pages loaded the Meta pixel and 96.1% had a Google tag. Our view is that the pixel figure is the one to fix first. In our view, a law firm without it is paying for clicks it cannot learn from.

How law firms score on four basics

In our local business scorecard we checked 74 law firms on four basics: an offer in the ad, a clear ask in the ad, a way to call or enquire on the first screen of the page, and the Meta pixel. Only 20.3% passed all four, 15 firms in all. Law firms had the highest share of the five trades with a way to act on the first screen (85.1%), and the offer was their weakest check: only 52.7% had an offer anywhere in the ad text, headline or link description. Of the 31 firms that passed three checks, 12 were missing the offer. The average law firm passed 2.78 of the four checks.

Facebook alone or Facebook plus Google

We looked up 29 law firms from the same set in Google's Ads Transparency Center. 82.8% of them had shown Google ads in the US in the last 30 days, with a median of 13 ads in that time. The median firm with Google ads had 21 of them on record, more than the 10 for dentists in the same check. For a law firm in this sample, Facebook was usually one of two channels. Only 6.4% of the Facebook ads used Meta's instant form.

What we would change in a law firm's Facebook ads

• Put the offer in the first line. Only 12.8% of law firm texts did. In our view, a free case review or no fee unless you win belongs in the first line.
• Cut the text. 72.8% ran past 150 characters. In our view, two or three short lines that name the problem, the offer and the ask do more work.
• Keep the phone, add a short form. Most pages already show a call link on the first screen. In our view, a three-field form on the same screen helps people who will not call from work.
• Check the pixel. A quarter of the pages did not load it during our visit.
• Refresh old ads. The median ad had run for half a year. Our view is that a firm should test at least one new ad a month.

For the keyword side of law firm marketing, see our law firm marketing data. If you run Facebook or Google ads for a law firm in the US, UK, Canada or Australia, give us read access to the account. A senior buyer will write a free audit of where the spend goes, whether your tracking counts real results, how your creative is holding up, and the three things we would fix first. It takes about two working days and the document is yours. More studies are on our research page.

How we did this

Questions about Facebook ads for lawyers