Your leads are bad, not few.
Bad leads at good volume usually mean the account is optimising towards the wrong event. If Google is told that every form fill is a success, it will find you the cheapest people who fill forms, and the cheapest people who fill forms are rarely buyers. The fix is to feed real outcomes back: mark which enquiries became qualified opportunities and send that back as the conversion, then let bidding optimise towards it. Alongside that, qualify on the page itself, because a form that asks nothing will be filled by anybody.
The system is doing exactly what you asked
Automated bidding optimises towards whatever you call a conversion. Tell it a form fill is the goal and it will become very good at finding form fillers, including the ones who are curious, out of budget, in the wrong country, or students doing research.
That is not a malfunction. It is the instruction being followed precisely. Which means lead quality is usually a measurement problem wearing the costume of a targeting problem.
Feed back what actually happened
The single most effective change in most accounts is to stop optimising towards the form and start optimising towards the outcome. Mark which enquiries became qualified opportunities, and send that back as the conversion the account optimises for.
It takes a little plumbing and it changes the economics quickly, because the bidding is finally being pointed at the thing you actually sell. It also depends on the tracking being trustworthy in the first place, and tracking is broken more often than anybody expects.
If you cannot connect a customer record automatically, do it by hand for a month. Even a spreadsheet of which enquiries were real, uploaded as offline conversions, beats optimising towards a form fill.
Then look at what people typed
The search terms report will often explain the whole thing in twenty minutes. Research phrases, free and cheap modifiers, do it yourself queries, job seekers and student research all convert into form fills at a perfectly healthy rate and never into customers.
Those become negative keywords. If the pattern is broad and keeps returning, the match types themselves are worth revisiting, and our keyword match type simulator shows what each one will catch before you commit budget to it.
Qualify on the page, not after the call
A form asking for a name and an email will be filled by anybody, because it costs nothing to fill. A small amount of friction, placed deliberately, filters far more than it deters.
Stating a starting price is the strongest filter there is, and the one most businesses resist hardest. It removes the people who were never going to afford you, and it costs you almost none of the people who were.
- A budget range as a required field, phrased as a range rather than an interrogation.
- One question only a real prospect can answer, such as what they are currently using or how many locations they have.
- A clear statement of who this is for, and who it is not for, above the form rather than buried in the copy.
Expect the cost per lead to rise, and welcome it
When this works, the cost per lead goes up. Fewer people fill the form and the ones who do are worth more, which looks worse in the ads report and better in the bank.
That is why this change has to be agreed before it is made. An account that quietly halves its lead count is a difficult conversation, unless everybody already agreed that the point was to count the right thing rather than the cheap thing.
What share of last month's enquiries were real
If you do not know, that is the first job, and it is a morning's work. Take last month, mark each enquiry as qualified or not, and calculate the percentage. That number is the one worth managing.
Once you have it, you can point the advertising at it. If you would like help wiring the outcome back into the account so the bidding optimises for customers rather than form fills, tell us what your sales process looks like through the enquiry form and we will tell you what it would take.
Questions we get asked.
How do I improve lead quality in Google Ads?
- Stop optimising towards form fills and start optimising towards qualified outcomes. Mark which enquiries became real opportunities, feed that back as the conversion, and let bidding aim at it. Then add negative keywords for research phrases and put a real qualifying question on the form.
Will filtering leads reduce my volume?
- Yes, and that is the point. The cost per lead will rise while the cost per customer falls. Agree the change with whoever reads the report before making it, or the drop in lead count will look like a failure.
Should I put pricing on my website?
- A starting price or a range filters harder than anything else you can add, and it rarely loses buyers who could afford you. It mostly removes people who were going to waste a call finding out they could not.
What if I cannot connect my sales system to Google Ads?
- Do it manually for a month. A spreadsheet marking which enquiries were qualified, uploaded as offline conversions, is far better than optimising towards a raw form fill, and it usually pays for the effort within a quarter.
Are bad leads ever a targeting problem rather than a measurement one?
- Sometimes, and the search terms report will tell you within twenty minutes. If the queries look right and the leads are still poor, the problem is what the account is being told to count rather than who it is reaching.
