Probate calls come on the worst day of someone's life. Most agencies run ads that don't know it.
We run paid media exclusively for legal firms — and probate is the vertical most agencies fail hardest. They treat "probate attorney" as one keyword. They write aggressive copy at grieving families. They miss the intake handoff. We've built a Denver probate practice to 49 connected calls/month from LSA alone — through weekly LSA category testing, real-time intake escalation, and the operational discipline this work demands.
6 months scaling · $5K → $7K/mo
"Probate attorney" isn't a keyword.
It's four different ones.
Estate planning, probate administration, probate litigation, guardianship — four different search intents, four different audiences, four different ad copy registers. Generic legal-marketing agencies bid on all of it from one campaign — and your firm pays the price every time the wrong inquiry gets routed to your intake.
Estate planning ≠ probate.
Estate planning prospects are alive and healthy — they're researching wills and trusts. Probate prospects just lost someone. Same firm, same office, completely different ad copy, completely different intake script. Most agencies use one campaign for both.
Bereaved callers don't leave voicemails.
Someone whose parent died yesterday won't wait on hold or leave a message. They call the next firm in the search results. LSA punishes you for unanswered calls — drop rates, ad rank, ultimately suspension. Your agency's job doesn't end when the ad gets clicked. Intake is the campaign.
LSA is where probate lives.
"Probate attorney near me" is the highest-converting query in this vertical — and it's an LSA query, not a PPC query. Most agencies under-utilize LSA because they don't know how to manage it: category testing, ad rank diagnostics, review acquisition strategy. We do that work weekly.
6 months. $5K → $7K LSA spend.
Probate scaling without losing intake quality.
Evans Case signed in November 2025. Six months later, the same LSA setup is scaling 42% on spend without losing quality.
Aaron Evans runs a multi-service Denver firm — probate, estate planning, guardianship, and probate litigation. When most agencies onboard a firm like his, they spin up a generic "probate attorney" Google Ads campaign and call it a day. We didn't. We built his LSA setup around category targeting — deeds, estate planning, probate administration — and tested them one at a time on a weekly cycle to learn which generated the highest-intent leads.
By March 2026, the account was running 49 connected calls in a month at $127.98 CPL — down 17% month-over-month even as we scaled spend from $5K to $7K. HubSpot lead quality tracking showed 54% of leads classified mid or high quality.
The harder work happened in February when Aaron was in Italy and his receptionist was on maternity leave. LSA calls started going unanswered. We caught it within days, escalated to his entire team, and got call routing fixed before LSA suspended the account. That's the operational discipline this vertical requires. The numbers are downstream of the partnership.
Probate · Guardianship · Estate Planning · Litigation · Denver, CO
Probate is operational, not just acquisition.
Estate planning prospects and probate prospects need different ad copy. LSA dominates the volume but needs weekly category management. Intake matters more here than in any other legal vertical — because bereaved callers don't come back.
Six layers, tuned for the operational reality of this practice. Same architecture across every probate client; the parameters are what change.
LSA-first channel architecture
Probate intent lives on LSA, not Google Search. "Probate attorney near me" is the highest-converting query in this vertical, and LSA owns the impressions. We lead with LSA as the volume backbone — then layer PPC on top for estate planning (where prospects do comparison shopping) and probate litigation (where intent is more researched) once budget supports a separate campaign build.
LSA category management — weekly
LSA for probate has narrow category coverage with finicky qualification rules. We test categories one at a time — deeds, estate planning, probate administration — to find what generates the highest-intent leads. Categories that underperform get shut down. Categories that work get scaled. This is the work most agencies don't do, which is why their LSA budgets bleed.
Ad rank diagnostics + GBP recommendations
LSA ad rank is driven heavily by your Google Business Profile signals — review velocity, response rate, photo freshness, business info accuracy. We monitor these weekly against your ad rank performance, identify what's pulling rank down, and send your team specific recommendations on what to action. You own the GBP. We tell you what to do with it.
Live intake escalation when calls go unanswered
This isn't theoretical. When your firm misses a critical mass of LSA calls, we ping you in real time — not in next week's report. We've kept clients out of LSA suspension by escalating missed-call patterns the same day. Intake quality is part of the deliverable, because LSA's algorithm punishes drop rates with lower ad rank.
HubSpot lifecycle tracking — built for slow-burn sales cycles
Probate retainers don't close in 48 hours. The window from initial call to engagement letter can run two to four weeks — statements, asset review, family meetings, fee agreement. We track lifecycle stage in HubSpot from inquiry → consultation booked → consultation completed → retainer signed, then feed signed-retainer signal back to Google for bid optimization on what actually converts.
Weekly written briefs, monthly strategy
Every week, a real person writes you a paragraph explaining what moved and why. Every month, we look at per-niche performance — is estate planning carrying its weight, is probate scaling, is litigation worth running — and decide what to scale, pause, or test next. You'll always know what we'd do with another $2,000.
Numbers from an actual probate account.
Not stock screenshots.
From a live, multi-service Denver probate firm running across estate planning, probate administration, guardianship, and litigation. All tracked back to connected calls and signed retainers in HubSpot.
A different posture on your account.
Simple. Transparent.
No "plus a percent" games.
You're on one plan or the other. Never both. No per-channel surcharges. No mystery line items in month three.
- One channel: LSA, PPC, or Meta
- Up to $10K/month ad budget
- Per-niche campaign build (probate / estate planning / etc.)
- GTM, CallRail & HubSpot integration
- Weekly LSA category management
- Weekly & monthly written reports
- Real-time AgencyAnalytics dashboard
- All channels: LSA + PPC + Meta, orchestrated
- $10K/month per channel ($15K min for 2)
- Everything in Starter, plus —
- PPC campaign builds layered on LSA backbone
- Real-time missed-call escalation
- Quarterly per-niche strategy review
- Slack access for priority response
- Founder-led account stewardship
If you run a probate practice — these will sound familiar.
Pulled directly from intake calls with probate and estate planning firms. If yours isn't here, the founder will answer it live.
Should I lead with LSA or PPC for probate?
LSA, almost always. "Probate attorney near me" is the highest-intent query in this vertical and it lives on LSA, not Google Search. Evans Case is LSA-led — 49 connected calls/month at $127 CPL. PPC has a role for estate planning (where prospects do more comparison shopping) and probate litigation (where intent is more researched), but the volume backbone is LSA. We'll typically recommend starting LSA-only and adding PPC for specific sub-niches at month 3 or 4.
What budget do we need to see real movement?
$5K/month LSA is the operational minimum — below that, you can't afford the bid levels that get you in front of high-intent searches. For multi-service practices (probate + estate planning + litigation), $7K–$15K/month gives you separate testable budgets per niche. Evans Case started at $5K and scaled to $7K over six months as quality data validated the spend.
What about the unanswered-call problem?
It's the biggest single risk in probate marketing — LSA punishes drop rates with lower ad rank, and bereaved callers don't leave voicemails. We monitor your call connection rate weekly via CallRail and escalate the same day when patterns develop. We've kept clients out of LSA suspension by flagging missed-call clusters to the firm's leadership before they became compliance issues. If your reception is structurally understaffed, we'll tell you on the intake call.
How do estate planning and probate campaigns differ?
Completely. Estate planning prospects are alive, healthy, and researching — they want educational content, comparison shopping, and a long consultation window. Probate prospects just experienced a death — they want immediate help, sensitive tone, and a fast path to a human being. In LSA, we manage them as separate categories tested weekly. When budget supports adding PPC, we'd build them as separate campaigns then. Either way, the principle is the same: estate planning bid dollars shouldn't get consumed by probate intent or vice versa.
Can you handle probate litigation specifically?
Yes. Probate litigation is its own intent — contested wills, breach of fiduciary duty, undue influence claims. Search volume is lower but case values are higher. For LSA-led firms, litigation surfaces through category testing alongside probate administration. Once budget supports adding PPC, litigation gets its own campaign build — the math justifies it at the right spend level because of the case-value asymmetry.
How do you handle low-fit out-of-state callers?
Geographic targeting at the LSA level filters most of them. For the ones that slip through (someone calling from Florida about a Colorado decedent's estate, etc.), we recommend building a referral list of trusted out-of-state probate firms — and training your intake team to route low-fit callers to it. Keeps your team focused on jurisdictionally-fit callers without burning the relationship with the caller.
I'm already running with another agency. How does the transition work?
30 days' notice to your current vendor. During that window we take ownership of accounts (LSA, Google Ads, GA4, GTM, HubSpot, CallRail — always in your name), audit existing campaign structure, and stage what we'd run differently. Day 31, we go live. No double-spend month. We've migrated multiple firms off ineffective agencies.
Who exactly will I be working with?
You'll meet Davor (founder) on the intro call, and he stays on every account. Day-to-day you'll work with him plus a senior media buyer on your campaigns. Total team you'll interact with: 2–3 people, same every week. No account manager rotation.
Let's see what your probate funnel looks like today.
30 minutes with the founder. No deck. We'll look at your last 90 days of intake, your case mix (estate planning vs probate vs litigation), your average retainer, and your current ad spend — and tell you, honestly, what we'd run differently and whether we'd take you on.
Book a 30-min strategy call →