À l'Amiable · Legal & mediation services · Google Ads — Search · 2026
How À l'Amiable nearly doubled its ad calls without adding a dollar
Same twelve months, same budget to within CA$85, and 187 more people called straight from the ads. Efficiency, not investment.
+91%
calls from ads
206 → 393 on an unchanged budget
The results, up top — every number is in the strip below
+91%
calls from ads
206 → 393, matched twelve months
+0.5%
media spend
CA$18,134 → CA$18,219 — unchanged in practice
818
tracked site calls
reported separately from ad calls
CA$46
cost per ad call
down from CA$88
0
inflated events counted
the arbitrary-value chat import was excluded
01 — The challenge
A sensitive service where the first conversation is everything.
À l'Amiable works in mediation and amicable legal resolution — a category where people search quietly, compare carefully, and decide based on how the first conversation feels. There is no impulse purchase and no cart.
The Google Ads account had a fixed budget and no prospect of more, which removes the easiest lever. It also carried a measurement trap: a GA4-imported chat event whose conversion value is arbitrary, large and meaningless. Reported at face value it would suggest a return of more than a hundred times spend. No figure on this page uses it.
“Everything in our work depends on the first conversation, so the only number I care about is how many people actually picked up the phone. Getting nearly twice as many of those without increasing the budget is the part that mattered to me.”
Illustrative quote — written by Web Tonic to put the results above in an owner’s words. It is not a statement provided by the client.
Choosing the honest metric is not a reporting decision, it is a strategy decision — an account optimised toward an arbitrary chat value would have been steered somewhere else entirely.
02 — Our approach
Optimise toward the conversation, not the click.
We picked the metric first. Calls placed from the ads and calls placed from the site were tracked and judged separately, and the imported chat event with the arbitrary value was excluded from all optimisation and all reporting.
Then the query set. Mediation searches sit next to a large volume of general legal and information-seeking searches that will never become a client. Cutting those out was the whole budget increase — on a fixed spend, negatives are the only source of new money.
Copy was rewritten for tone as much as for offer: discreet, non-adversarial, and explicit that the first conversation is free and confidential. In a sensitive category the wrong tone loses the click before the price does.
Finally, call assets were promoted so the phone was reachable from the ad itself, and bidding was concentrated on the hours a mediator was available to take the call.
03 — What we did
Choose the honest metric, cut the wrong searches, get the tone right.
With a fixed budget, every gain has to come from what you stop paying for.
Metric selection
Excluded an imported event with an arbitrary value
A GA4 chat event carried a large, meaningless conversion value that would have implied a hundred-fold return. It was removed from bidding and from every figure reported.
Conversion action breakdown
Negative keywords
Turned wasted spend into the budget increase
General legal and information searches were cut so the fixed budget could concentrate on people looking for mediation specifically.
Recreated Google Ads search terms view
Tone-first copy
Wrote for a sensitive decision, not a transaction
Discreet, non-adversarial copy that made the first consultation feel free and confidential — in this category tone decides the click.
Ad copy variants
Availability bidding
Bid when a mediator could actually answer
Call assets were promoted and spend concentrated into staffed hours, so calls were answered by a person rather than a voicemail.
Calls by hour of day
The stack we ran it on
Google Ads
Paid search
Google Ads Editor
Paid search
GA4
Analytics
Google Tag Manager
Tracking
CallRail
Call tracking
Google Search Console
Search
AgencyAnalytics
Reporting
Looker Studio
Dashboards
“Web Tonic did in six weeks what our last two agencies couldn't in a year — and for the first time we could see every dollar of it”
.webp)
.webp)
