CASE STUDY · FACEBOOK ADS
11 Months. 434 Leads. Two Campaigns Cut on Purpose.
How a Virtual Immigration Firm Found Its Best Market by Testing and Cutting Fast
A virtual immigration law practice serving Spanish-speaking clients, a small daily budget, and eleven months of campaigns where the data decided what stayed on.
THE CLIENT
A Firm That Could Take Clients Anywhere and Needed to Know Where to Look
This immigration firm ran its practice almost entirely online, meeting clients by phone and video and working with Spanish-speaking families on asylum, parole, and other immigration matters. Without a local office tying it to one city, the firm could reach clients in any state, which sounds like an advantage until you have to decide where a small ad budget should go.
The plan for 2024 was to find out where that demand really was. The main campaigns targeted Spanish-speaking families in the San Francisco Bay Area, San Jose, and Salinas, and a separate test went to Colorado to see whether a market outside California could perform just as well.
The budget was modest from the start, about $14 a day for the main campaign, which meant every test had to prove itself quickly or give its money back to the campaigns that were already working. I managed this account until October 2025, and this report covers every campaign that ran from January through early December 2024, including the ones that didn't work.
THE APPROACH
Start Small, Measure Everything, and Move the Money Where It Works
For a firm with no local office to walk into, the lead form was the front door. Someone scrolling Facebook on a phone at night, worried about their case, is far more likely to fill out three fields inside the app than to open a website and hunt for a contact page, so the core of the account was a set of lead form campaigns, one for the San Francisco area and separate ones for San Jose and Salinas.
Around those core campaigns I ran smaller tests with clear expiration dates. The Colorado campaign tested whether the firm could pull clients from outside California, and a parole campaign tested whether a specific case type would convert better than a general immigration message; both ran at roughly double the daily budget of the main campaign, so they had to show results fast.
With a small budget, the worst thing you can do is keep a weak campaign alive because you already put money into it. Colorado and parole got their chance, the numbers said no, and that money went back to the Bay Area, where each lead was costing less than half as much.
THE RESULTS
Eleven Months of Data and What the Numbers Showed
434 leads. About $9,000 in ad spend. 426,257 impressions. The average cost per lead across every lead campaign came in at $20.76, and the most important number sits inside that average, because the San Francisco campaign produced 292 of those leads at $16.49 each on roughly $14 a day.
For context, immigration attorneys bidding on Google search terms can pay $50 or more for a single click. A completed lead form on Facebook for under $17 gives the firm a real conversation with a real person for a fraction of that cost.
Here's how every campaign performed and what I did with it
| Campaign | Ad Spend | Leads | Cost per Lead | Decision |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| San Francisco Bay Area | $4,814 | 292 | $16.49 | Kept running |
| San Jose and Salinas (2 campaigns) | $2,075 | 91 | $22.81 | Kept running |
| Parole | $1,001 | 27 | $37.08 | Cut after the test |
| Colorado | $1,122 | 24 | $46.73 | Cut on July 1, 2024 |
What Worked, What Didn't, and Why
San Francisco carried the account. The campaign ran on the smallest daily budget of any lead campaign and still produced two out of every three leads, which made it clear where the demand for this firm was strongest. By December the average person in that audience had seen the ads more than five times, a sign the audience was getting saturated and the creative needed to rotate, which is the normal price of running one market for a full year.
San Jose and Salinas landed in the middle, with 91 leads at an average of $22.81 across two campaigns. That cost was close enough to the Bay Area number to justify keeping both markets live, and together the three Northern California areas produced 383 of the 434 leads, or 88% of everything the account generated.
Colorado was the expensive lesson. At $46.73 per lead, each inquiry there cost almost three times what the Bay Area was producing, and a click rate of 0.32% showed that people were seeing the ads and scrolling past them. I stopped it on July 1, 2024, once the spend was large enough to be sure the result wasn't bad luck.
The parole campaign told a similar story in a shorter window, with 27 leads at $37.08 each. A narrow case type can work well when the audience is large and the need is urgent, although for this firm the general immigration message on a lead form beat it by a wide margin.
THE TAKEAWAY
A Small Budget Only Works When You're Willing to Turn Things Off
Most firms that try Facebook Ads with a small budget make the same mistake, spreading the money across every idea at once and then deciding Facebook doesn't work when none of the campaigns gets enough budget to learn. This account went the other way; every test had a budget and a deadline, and the money that survived went to the one market that kept proving itself.
The outcome was 434 people who raised their hand and asked a virtual immigration firm for help, with no office nearby and no referral in between, at an average cost that few legal advertising channels can match. If you want to see what the same discipline looks like over four years instead of one, the San Jose immigration firm case study shows how a steady $161 a week kept producing leads for 182 consecutive weeks.
Is Your Ad Budget Going to the Markets That Actually Respond?
Brimar has been helping businesses grow online since 2011, and today most of my Facebook Ads work for law firms is for immigration attorneys who serve Spanish-speaking communities. Book a free audit and I'll show you which of your campaigns deserve more money and which ones should be turned off.
BOOK A FREE AUDIT