Notary Services: €4.40 Cost Per Lead Across the EU

Client Overview

A network of notary offices needed to reach Ukrainian diaspora communities seeking legal documentation services across Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the UK, and Spain. Their existing campaigns generated leads at €40-45 each — economics that simply didn’t work for a legal services business with this margin profile.

After restructuring, the account deployed €28,072 in total budget to generate 6,271 leads at a cost per acquisition of €4.40 — a roughly 90% reduction — with a website conversion rate of 4.8% (about 1 in 20 visitors converting).

Strategy

A four-pronged approach addressed cost, quality, and fraud simultaneously:

1. Geotargeted search optimization — Google Maps advertising for local searches, with separate campaigns emphasizing remote services (power of attorney, certified translations) for diaspora audiences in Poland and Germany.
2. Query filtering — aggressive negative keyword work eliminated low-intent searches, focusing spend exclusively on high-value inquiry types: inheritance, real estate, and business matters.
3. Fraud prevention — scripts blocking competitor click fraud and bot traffic protected an estimated 20% of the budget that would otherwise have been wasted.
4. Algorithm optimization — shifted from manual bidding to automated bid strategies trained to identify users most likely to convert into phone inquiries.

Implementation

The campaign structure split local, in-person services (handled via Google Maps and local search ads) from remote services aimed at diaspora communities abroad — these audiences search differently and convert through different paths (phone calls vs. web forms), so they needed separate campaigns, ad copy, and landing experiences.

Query-level filtering was the single highest-leverage change: by excluding low-value query categories and concentrating spend on inheritance, real estate, and business-related searches, average lead quality rose sharply even before bid automation was introduced. Anti-fraud scripts ran continuously, identifying and blocking the click-fraud and bot patterns that had been silently consuming roughly a fifth of the previous budget.

Results

Metric	Result
Total budget deployed	€28,072
Leads generated	6,271
Cost per lead	€4.40 (down from €40-45)
Website conversion rate	4.8%

The roughly 90% reduction in cost per lead enabled the client to expand — opening additional offices and growing staff — while maintaining profitability across all five target markets.