The Logic
Someone who types a specific attorney’s name into Google has already made a decision. They know who they want. They’ve been referred, they’ve seen a review, they’ve heard the name from someone they trust.
When your ad appears for that search, one of two things happens.
Best case: the user is confused about which firm they want and clicks yours by mistake. They will not hire you. Worst case: they click your ad specifically to find contact information for your competitor. You pay for the click. They call someone else.
Neither outcome produces a client. Both cost the same $8-15 per click as a genuine prospect search.
The user searching a competitor’s name has already decided. You’re paying to lose.
The Scale of the Problem
A Monmouth County NJ criminal defense and family law audit found 58 named attorneys and law firms appearing in the search term report. That’s 58 categories of searches producing zero conversions while consuming clicks at legal CPC rates.
Legal is the most expensive local advertising vertical — $8-15 average CPC for standard terms, $20-50 for DUI and high-value terms. At even $8 per click, 58 competitor name categories running for a quarter represents meaningful wasted budget.
The fix is one afternoon of exclusion work: pull the search term report, identify every named competitor, add them as exact match negatives at the campaign level. Then set a quarterly review to catch new competitor names as they appear.
The Own-Name Problem
The flip side of the competitor name issue is the own-name issue. An attorney whose name is not actively bid on — or worse, accidentally excluded — is invisible when potential clients search for them specifically.
In the Monmouth County audit, the attorney’s own name had been set to excluded in a prior account configuration.
Someone searching specifically for this attorney by name saw competitors’ ads instead of theirs. That’s a warm referral converted into a competitor’s lead.
Brand terms for law firms should always receive: the highest bid priority in the account, exact match protection, and separate tracking so brand conversion rates are measured independently.
How to Structure the Exclusions
Competitor names as exact match negatives
Add each named competitor attorney and firm as an exact match negative keyword.
Exact match is important here — you want to block searches for that specific name while still appearing for searches that happen to contain common words those names share with legitimate searches.
Apply at campaign level, not ad group level
Competitor name exclusions should apply across every campaign — criminal defense and family law separately, plus any LSA campaigns running. A user searching a competitor’s name should not see any of your ads, regardless of which campaign would have triggered.
Review quarterly
New attorneys enter markets. Existing attorneys change firm names or add partners. The competitor name list needs a quarterly update to stay current. A 30-minute review every quarter is enough.
The Budget Recovery
The exact recovery depends on how many competitor name clicks have been accumulating and at what CPC.
In legal accounts with 20+ named competitors running for more than a quarter, the recovery is typically $200-600 per month redirected from zero-conversion competitor searches to genuine prospect searches.
At legal CPCs, that recovered budget represents 15-75 additional prospect clicks per month. At a 5-10% conversion rate on prospect clicks, that’s 1-7 additional lead opportunities per month from the same budget.
