Why Do My Marketing Campaigns Work for a Few Months Then Stop?

The Uncomfortable Truth About Marketing Campaign Decay

Every law firm owner has lived this nightmare. You launch a campaign, leads start flowing, you finally exhale. Then three months later, the phone slows down. Six months in, you're wondering what happened. By month nine, you're questioning everything and probably blaming your agency.

Here's what we've learned working with over 1,400 law firms since 2016: campaign decay isn't a bug. It's a feature of every marketing channel. The firms that understand this build systems that anticipate it. The firms that don't spend years chasing the same dragon, convinced something is broken when really, they're just watching physics do its thing.

Why Every Channel Eventually Burns Out

Three forces work against every marketing campaign from the moment you launch it.

Audience fatigue is real and measurable. Your target audience is finite. In most legal markets, there are only so many people searching for a car accident lawyer or divorce attorney in any given month. Once your ads have reached that pool multiple times, response rates drop. People who were going to click already clicked. The rest have mentally categorized you as background noise.

Competition never sleeps. The moment you find a profitable angle, your competitors notice. We've watched firms discover a winning Google Ads strategy only to see three competitors copy their exact approach within 60 days. When everyone bids on the same keywords with similar ads, costs rise and conversion rates fall.

Algorithms are constantly shifting. Google changes its search algorithm thousands of times per year. Facebook adjusts its ad delivery system quarterly. What worked beautifully in January may be actively penalized by March. Not because you did anything wrong, but because the platform decided to favor different content.

Understanding these forces changes how you approach marketing entirely. You stop looking for the permanent solution and start building the permanent system.

How Fast Each Channel Actually Decays

After generating over 25,000 signed cases for member firms, we've identified clear decay patterns for each major channel. These aren't arbitrary estimates. They're based on watching the same cycle play out hundreds of times.

Google Ads typically requires a major refresh every 6 to 12 months. Your ads accumulate click history that affects quality scores. Your competitors learn your keywords and start bidding against them. Search behavior shifts as Google autocomplete and AI overviews change what people actually type. Most firms see a 15-25% performance decline somewhere between month 6 and month 10, even with ongoing optimization.

Facebook and Instagram ads decay fastest, usually within 2 to 4 months. Creative fatigue hits hard on social platforms because you're interrupting people rather than answering their search. The same ad shown to the same audience becomes invisible remarkably quickly. We've seen campaigns that produced 40 leads in month one drop to 8 leads by month three with identical spend. The creative just stopped working.

SEO has the longest runway at 12 to 18 months, but the crash is harder. When you rank well organically, it feels permanent. It's not. Competitors study your content and create better versions. Google updates its core algorithm and suddenly favors different page structures. Your content gets stale as laws change and user expectations evolve. The advantage of SEO decay is that it happens slowly enough to see coming. The disadvantage is that recovery takes 4-6 months once you've lost ground.

Local Service Ads hit saturation in 3 to 6 months depending on market size. LSAs pull from Google's pool of verified users in your area. In smaller markets, you run through that pool quickly. In larger markets, you have more runway but face more competition. Once you've been shown to most relevant searchers, your cost per lead starts climbing and quality often drops as you reach people who are comparison shopping rather than ready to hire.

How to Diagnose What's Actually Declining

When performance drops, most firms assume something broke. Usually, nothing broke. But you need to know the difference.

Start by separating your leading indicators from your lagging indicators. Impressions and clicks are leading indicators. They tell you whether people are seeing and engaging with your ads. Leads and signed cases are lagging indicators. They tell you whether that engagement converted.

If your impressions and clicks are steady but leads dropped, look at your landing page or intake process. Something changed in how you're converting traffic.

If your impressions dropped but click-through rate stayed the same, you're losing auction visibility. Check your bids, your quality scores, and whether new competitors entered the market.

If your click-through rate dropped while impressions stayed high, your ads lost appeal. This is classic creative fatigue or increased competition with better messaging.

If your cost per click spiked suddenly, either a competitor started bidding aggressively or the platform changed how it values your ads. Check the auction insights report in Google Ads or the delivery insights in Facebook to see who's eating into your traffic.

Decay Versus Destruction: Knowing the Difference

Sometimes campaigns don't decay. Sometimes someone breaks them. Here's how to tell.

Gradual decline over weeks equals decay. This is the natural pattern we've described. Performance slides slowly as the forces of fatigue, competition, and algorithm changes take their toll. It's predictable and manageable.

Sudden collapse overnight equals something broke. If your leads dropped 70% between Tuesday and Wednesday, something changed. Check for tracking code issues first because those are the most common culprit. Then look for disapproved ads, paused campaigns, budget caps that got hit, or landing pages that went down.

Seasonal patterns repeating annually equals normal fluctuation. Legal marketing has predictable rhythms. Personal injury drops during December holidays. Family law spikes in January. If your decline matches what you saw the same time last year, you're not decaying. You're experiencing seasonality.

We had a member firm convinced their SEO was broken because organic traffic dropped 40% in two weeks. Turns out, their website migration had created 200 redirect loops that Google couldn't crawl. That's not decay. That's destruction, and it required completely different intervention.

Building a Portfolio That Survives Decay

The firms that maintain consistent lead flow don't find immune channels. They build portfolios that account for decay cycles.

Your portfolio should include channels at different stages of their lifecycle. Run one established channel that's performing well, one newer channel you're building, and one experimental channel you're testing. When your established channel starts declining, your building channel should be maturing into its prime.

Budget allocation matters here. We recommend a 60-30-10 split: 60% to your proven performers, 30% to channels you're actively building, and 10% to pure experiments. That 10% testing budget isn't optional. It's your insurance policy against the day your current winners stop winning.

Geographic and practice area diversification also helps. If you only market one practice area on one platform, you're completely exposed to that channel's decay cycle. Spreading across multiple practice areas means one declining channel doesn't tank your entire month.

Revival Stories From the Trenches

A personal injury firm in Phoenix ran the same Google Ads campaigns for 18 months with minimal changes. Month 1 through 12 produced around 45 leads per month. Month 13 through 18 averaged 22 leads. Their initial instinct was to increase budget to compensate.

Instead, we ran competitive analysis and found six new competitors had entered with aggressive bidding strategies. We rebuilt their campaigns with new keyword themes focused on specific accident types rather than broad terms. We rewrote every ad with fresh angles. Lead volume recovered to 38 per month within 60 days, and cost per lead actually dropped below their original baseline because the new structure had better quality scores.

A family law practice in Chicago watched their Facebook leads dry up completely. They'd been running the same creative for four months. We produced 12 new creative variations in one week, testing different emotional angles, different imagery, and different calls to action. Within three weeks, three of those variations outperformed their original best-performing ad by 40%.

An estate planning firm in Dallas had ranked in the top 3 for their main keywords for two years. Then a Google core update knocked them to page two. Instead of trying to manipulate rankings, we focused on creating genuinely better content with more comprehensive guides, more attorney credentials, and more client outcomes. Six months later, they were back in the top 3 with more stable rankings because Google had reason to keep them there.

The Refresh Cycle You Should Actually Follow

Monthly, review performance metrics and make incremental optimizations. Adjust bids, pause underperforming keywords, test new ad copy variations.

Quarterly, do a deeper competitive analysis. See who's entered your market, what messages they're using, and whether your positioning still differentiates.

Biannually, plan significant refreshes. New creative concepts, new landing pages, new keyword strategies. This is where you get ahead of decay rather than reacting to it.

Annually, evaluate your entire channel portfolio. Which channels delivered consistent results? Which ones decayed faster than expected? Where should you be investing your experimental budget for the coming year?

Campaign decay is inevitable. But the decline it causes is optional if you build systems that anticipate and respond to it before the phones go quiet.