So many times, when I bring up running Google Ads with a potential client, I hear the same story:
“We tried Google Ads for a while, but the leads were low quality [or too expensive]”
It’s a very common experience. And, to be fair, Google Ads can be very expensive, especially when compared to Meta and other platforms.
But what’s important to understand is that because you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, Google’s algorithm is designed to send you the fewest views necessary for you to get a click.
When the click turns into a low-quality lead, or no lead at all, it’s not necessarily Google Ads that’s to blame. It can be your copy, your landing page, your conversion funnel, or an insufficient budget.
Unfortunately, despite how easy Google Ads makes it appear to be, managing profitable Google Ads campaigns is a complicated endeavour that requires daily attention. And a little experience doesn’t hurt either.
Fortunately, the number of different reasons your Google Ads campaigns might be underdelivering isn’t infinite. There are only so many ways to run Google Ads, and so many things that can go wrong.
And this article covers the top 10 most common reasons Google Search Ads campaigns deliver bad leads and what you can do about them.
The Quick Answer
Your Google Ads leads are usually bad because the campaign is targeting the wrong search intent, reaching the wrong location, optimizing for the wrong conversion action, using the wrong bidding strategy, sending traffic to mismatched landing pages, or not generating enough conversion data to target effectively.
If you’re still getting very low quality leads after more than 30 conversions, you definitely have a problem. They should at least be improving over time, so if you feel stuck, check these issues (covered in more detail below):
- Campaign Objective
- Bidding Strategy
- Search Intent
- Location
- Landing Pages
- Low Bid / Target CPA
- Conversion Tracking
- Negative Keywords
- Not Enough Conversion Data
- Switching Bidding Strategy Too Soon
In this article, I cover each of these issues in detail below and share what we do at SolidRocket to get consistently great results for our clients.
What’s A Low Quality Lead?
A low-quality Google Ads lead is a call or form fill that either doesn’t become a profitable customer or becomes a cheap / difficult / bad-fit customer. Bad leads usually come from targeting the wrong search intent or geo, optimizing for the wrong conversions, landing page design, or a lack of negative keywords, or tracking.
Lead quality gets better by targeting commercial keywords, tracking the right actions, excluding irrelevant searches, optimizing landing pages, and earning enough conversion data before trying to scale.
Better leads create better downstream profitability, so your first priority with a new Google Search campaign is always to optimize your campaigns with sufficient conversion data as quickly as possible.
What Makes Google Ads Leads Bad?
Google Ads serves many different types of businesses, and not just the ones that rely on leads to grow. Of course, many contractors and other local service businesses use Google Ads very successfully, so it works for these types of campaigns.
But the way you build your campaigns affects the outcome significantly, and if your campaigns aren’t set up correctly (which can be confusing to do), then your campaigns will be trying to deliver the wrong kind of results, and they will fail.
A conversion in Google Ads can mean something important, like filling out a lead form, or it can indicate something comparatively minor, like a user visiting a particular page, searching on your site, or submitting a contact form for non-commercial purposes.
When we say a Google Ads lead is “bad”, what we mean is that it is not someone who is going to convert into a customer successfully. The lead is unqualified, meaning that the ads attracted the wrong kind of person.
Bad leads can come from targeting the wrong keywords, underbidding, failing to filter out keywords with the wrong search intent, and a few other causes, but the thing they all have in common is that they are attracting clicks, but not buyers.
Why Do Some Google Ads Campaigns Fail While Others Win Big?
Some advertisers see great success with Google Ads. Others waste money and get no meaningful results.
What separates the campaigns that win from the ones that don’t is:
- Campaign structure
- Correct set up
- Careful management
- Negative keyword lists
- Landing page design
How To Tell When You’re Getting Bad Leads
Bad leads from Google Ads campaigns show up like unqualified opportunities: cheap prospects, inquiries from areas you don’t service, or simply people looking for services that you don’t provide.
They can be Looky-Lou’s that fill out your form, or call your team, but only want information; these folks aren’t actually ready to buy.
Or they can be difficult prospects that run you in circles, and never convert.
Or they can simply be looking for services you don’t offer in places you don’t serve.
And you’ll know because you are paying for clicks, and getting inquiries, but not converting them at a reasonable rate.
You should convert a minimum of 5% (10%+ ideally) of clicks to leads.
And more than 10% of your leads should convert to closed deals (20% for contractors) within your standard sales cycle (the average time it takes for inquiries to become customers).
10 Reasons Google Ads Campaigns Drive Low Quality Leads
Many small businesses have problems getting good results with Google Search Ads. It’s more common than you’d think because the platform is incredibly complex and not particularly user-friendly.
But the good news is that the problems you’re likely to run into have all been encountered many times. There’s a short list of problems that can explain the most common lead quality problems.
Fix these and your lead quality will improve quickly:
1. Wrong Campaign Objective
Selecting “Website Visits”, or some other option, instead of “Leads” when you’re picking a Campaign Objective is an easy mistake to make if you’re new to the platform. But this choice determines the shape of your campaign, the conversion goals, and optimization strategy that will govern how the algorithm runs your campaign..
99% of the time you want to pick “Leads” if you’re ultimately trying to drive leads.
How We Do It: We only use Leads campaigns for Google Search Ads for local service businesses, and PMax campaigns for retargeting people who’ve previously clicked on our ads.
2. Wrong Bidding Strategy
If you select the wrong bidding strategy for your Google Ads campaign, you won’t win the top positions often enough to drive profitable leads. You can easily hamstring your campaigns by selecting impression share or conversion value instead of conversions or clicks. Or even by simply selecting conversions too soon.
For leads campaigns, always start by using the “clicks” bidding strategy until you get a minimum of 30 conversions recorded in the campaign. It might take more to feel like the leads are sufficient quality, but 30 is a rule of thumb that pros use to guide their campaigns. It could be more, could be less, but the point is that Google needs conversion data before it can effectively optimize your campaign on autopilot.
How We Do It: For SolidRocket Google Ads agency clients, we only launch a couple campaigns at a time, to maximize the budget per campaign, minimizing the time it takes to get working campaigns up and running, and driving leads. Then we’ll add new budget, once the campaigns are generating profitable revenue, and put a couple of new campaigns into training, keeping this cycle going as we expand to all their services.
3. Targeting Wrong Search Intent
Search intent refers to the intent of the person searching: informational (research), commercial (business), transactional (shopping), or navigational (searching for a website).
If you target Google Ads at informational searches, you’re spending money to educate people who aren’t ready to buy. If you target navigational searches, your only options are competitors (and there are better ways). Only the commercial and transactional searches are going to generate profitable leads.
If you target the wrong people, or even the right people at the wrong time, Google Ads will just spend your money without delivering anything meaningful.
The right searches for local service businesses look like:
- brick repair near me
- bookkeepers for small businesses near me
- 24/7 IT support in DFW
Not:
- What do vertical cracks in my walls mean
- How to collect sales tax in Texas
- ACME IT Dallas
How We Do It: Our clients’ campaigns only target commercial intent searches in Google Search and we do all our “top of funnel” advertising on social media platforms.
4. Location Targeting Not Set Up Correctly
Google hides one of the most important settings for businesses that service a specific area. You would think that the default setting for your location targeting would be to show your ads to the people physically IN your targeted area.
Instead Google defaults to showing your ads to people interested in your location (meaning they have searched for it, or anything else that Google believes implies interest). And they hide the setting that filters this to only people who have been there physically.
So it’s very easy to overlook this, and then end up targeting people way out of your service area.
How We Do It: We check every client campaign before launch (and then confirm again after publishing the ads) that the Location setting is limited to people in (or regularly in) the targeted area.
5. Landing Page Not Aligned With Search
With Google Ads, you want your ad to match the search query as closely as possible, and then the landing page they land on after the click should match it precisely as well. The less the searcher has to think about your ad or landing page before deciding it’s a match, the better.
If you’re targeting searches for “24 hour plumbing near me”, your ad headline should probably be “24 Hour Plumbing Near You”, and the heading of your landing page (and the page title in the browser tab) should include “24 Hour Plumbing Near You” (at least “24 Hour Plumbing”) as well.
Anything less and Google Ads will give that ad a low Ad Rank and severely limit your visibility while charging you more for any clicks you do get.
You need custom landing pages for each ad set that match the targeted searches very closely. Which means you need ad sets for any group of keywords that is meaningfully different.
“Emergency plumbing services” and “24 hour plumbing” need to go in different ad sets (within the same campaign is fine) and have different landing pages dedicated to each search term, even though they mean exactly the same thing.
How We Do It: We build custom landing pages (or optimize existing ones) for each group of keywords for the services we’re promoting.
6. Low Bid or CPA Target
Putting too low of a bid cap, or if you’re using a conversion bid strategy, too low of a target CPA, your campaigns will stall and not deliver any impressions. This happens simply because you lose almost every auction and your ads never get seen in the first place.
If your bid cap (or target CPA) is high enough to be getting leads, but those leads aren’t very good, you have a similar problem. You’re winning auctions, getting views, clicks, and leads (so your system is working) but a middle of the road bid gets you mediocre leads.
To a point, the more you’re willing to bid, the better quality auctions you’re going to win and the higher quality leads you’re going to generate.
How We Do It: There is no clear guide for what your bid / target CPA needs to be to win good leads. You have to experiment, validate the quality of the leads you’re getting, and then test the hypothesis that increasing the bid will generate higher quality leads.
But if you’re getting impressions and clicks and your Lost IS is still 20%+ (lost impression share measures the impressions you’re NOT getting), you can reasonably assume someone is outbidding you.
7. Tracking Not Implemented Correctly
Google can’t optimize for what it can’t see. If your conversion tracking isn’t set up correctly you could be tracking nothing (Google is blind) or tracking the wrong things (Google is mislead), and the results will be equally as bad in either case.
The algorithm learns as it goes, and it learns from conversion data. Without it, Google’s just guessing and the guesses will never improve.
How We Do It: We don’t launch any campaigns until we’ve verified the tracking is set up correctly. There is a tool in your Google Ads dashboard called the Google Tag Assistant that can help you test which conversion events are firing and tracked correctly.
8. Not Enough Negative Keywords
Even if you use Phrase Match or Exact Match targeting, which supposedly control the way the algorithm matches your ads to relevant searches, Google takes a great deal of liberty with that matching process and the result is generally bad leads.
To prevent Google from wasting your money on clicks you very clearly don’t want, you have to add Negative Keywords to the ad set, campaign, or account, to block certain searches from ever being considered by the algorithm again.
How We Do It: We review the Search Terms report DAILY for new campaigns, sort by clicks, and add a negative keyword for any irrelevant or non-commercial terms that have at least one click (or are just obviously problematic). We keep doing this until the terms are 99% valid for a few weeks straight, and dial it back to once every couple weeks.
9. Not Enough Conversion Data
You need a significant number of conversions for Google to understand what a good conversion is. With each new campaign, Google starts a new learning process, training the algorithm which views lead to clicks that lead to conversions.
The algorithm can’t produce reliable results until it’s been fed at least 30 conversions (or enough that the leads you’re getting are reliably good). Until then it’s still in a “learning phase” and is experimenting to understand which users are most likely to take action on your ad.
How We Do It: We focus on delivering website visits from the most relevant commercial terms, pushing as much budget as we can to the narrowest set of terms possible to make the learning process go as quickly as possible.
10. Switched To Using Conversions Bidding Strategy Too Soon
In a leads campaign, it’s typical to eventually use the conversions bidding strategy; to optimize your campaign to the best quality conversions. And it is tempting to use the conversions bidding strategy right away, because logically you want conversions for the best value.
This is a very common mistake.
Instead you need to wait for at least 30 conversions before switching from using the clicks bidding strategy to using conversions, if you feel like the lead quality is good. If not, keep optimizing for clicks until you do. If you switch too soon, you’re effectively telling Google Ads that the quality you’re getting now is what you want more of in the future.
How We Do It: We run Google Ads Search campaigns with the Lead objective and the click bid strategy until we have 30+ conversions of high quality, then switch over to a conversions bid strategy.
First Fix The Problems, Then Scale The Campaign
Bad leads don’t turn into business. Or if they do, they turn into cheap or problematic customers. And the only way to improve your leads from Google Ads is to teach the algorithm who actually converts.
After that, it’s a matter of how much you’re willing to spend to appear in front of the best searches that determines how many times your ads are seen, clicked, and converted.
And the good news is that, once you’ve optimized your campaign with good conversions, raised the bid caps / target CPA, filtered bad traffic with negative keywords, and addressed the other issues I’ve mentioned here, your campaign will gradually start to perform better and drive more business.
At this point, you can scale the campaign gradually as you generate profit to reinvest, using Google Ads as a flywheel for growth. Once you’ve figured out how to drive profitable leads, you can simply buy growth, and scale predictably.
Google Ads is an incredibly powerful channel for driving new customers to your service business, but the platform is also very confusing and it’s easy to get your campaign stalled out or waste your budget on bad leads. Getting help is never a bad idea.
If you’re struggling with Google Ads campaigns that aren’t getting impressions or generate low quality leads, reach out to us for a free Google Ads audit and 90-day plan.
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