From broken account to retained clients.

Tom Anelli & Associates is an established DWI defense practice serving six upstate New York markets: Syracuse, Albany, Rochester, Binghamton, Watertown and the Hudson Valley. Roughly 49 counties, one intake team, one main phone line.

We took over the Google Ads account in June 2026. It was spending real money and reporting conversions, but the conversions didn't mean much.

The account was losing a large share of auctions on its most important searches, not because bids were too low but because the account's structure and ad relevance were weak. Budget was leaking to people researching DWI law rather than looking to hire a lawyer, and the negative keyword setup blocked some useful traffic while missing obvious waste.

The conversion data was worse. Old tags were counting an internal form that staff used to enter phone leads, so the firm's own data entry looked like marketing results. An outside CRM integration was quietly overwriting the account's tracking template. The only conversion reaching Google was a phone call. Whether that caller hired the firm never made it back at all.

For a DWI practice, that gap matters more than most. A retained case is worth far more than the call that started it. When the ad platform can't tell the two apart, it optimizes for whichever is cheapest to produce.

Clicks and calls still matter. They tell you the ads are reaching people in trouble in the right counties, and we watch them daily.

But a law firm gets paid when someone retains. So we rebuilt the account's measurement around three events, each sent to Google Ads from Scoutflow CRM:

1. Lead Created — any new inquiry, whether a call, a text or a form.
2. Qualified Call — a connected call over 60 seconds from someone who isn't already a client.
3. Retained Client — the case is signed, sent with its value.

Those three are now the only primary conversions on the search campaigns. Everything else was demoted or removed, including a built-in call action that was double-counting ad calls.

Every send carries the click ID when there is one and securely hashed contact details when there isn't. That second path matters: people who text first, or call from a Google Business Profile listing, never carry a click ID. Hashed matching lets Google connect many of them back to the ad anyway. We also backfilled 52 historical retained clients so Google had real outcomes to learn from on day one, and built retractions so a case marked lost is pulled back out of the data.

Cases are sent with values, not just counts, so the bidding learns which searches bring the cases the firm wants most.