The short version
- If Google Ads is producing enquiries but no revenue, the campaign is usually working exactly as instructed. The instructions are the problem.
- Google optimises towards whatever you tell it counts as a conversion. If a form fill counts, you will get form fills, not customers.
- Fixing lead quality is mostly a tracking job, not a bidding job. Feed the platform real outcomes and the targeting corrects itself.
- Before touching bids, check five things: what you count as a conversion, search terms, match types, the landing page promise, and your speed of response.
This is one of the most common conversations we have with a new client. The account looks healthy. Impressions are up, the cost per conversion is down, the monthly report is full of green arrows. And yet the sales team says the leads are rubbish, or the phone rings and it is somebody who was never going to buy.
Nothing has gone wrong technically. Google Ads is a machine that gets very good at producing whatever you told it to produce. If you told it that a submitted contact form is success, it will find the people most likely to submit a contact form. Those people are not necessarily the people most likely to spend money with you.
Your conversion action is the brief
Every automated bidding strategy is built on one instruction: get more of this thing, at around this cost. That thing is your conversion action. Most accounts we inherit are optimising towards one of the following:
- A form submission on the contact page
- A click on a telephone number
- A visit to the thank-you page
- Occasionally, something as loose as a three-page session
All four are proxies. None of them is a sale. The gap between the proxy and the sale is where your money goes. If one in ten of your form fills becomes a customer, and the platform is bidding hard on form fills, then nine tenths of your optimisation effort is aimed at people you do not want.
Ask whoever runs the account: what happens inside Google Ads when a lead becomes a customer? If the answer is nothing, the platform has never been told what a good outcome looks like. It is guessing, and it is guessing based on the only signal you gave it.
Send real outcomes back to the platform
The fix is to close the loop. When a lead becomes a qualified opportunity, and later becomes a sale, that fact needs to travel back into Google Ads and be attached to the click that started it. Google calls this offline conversion import. Everyone else calls it closing the loop.
Mechanically it works like this. When someone clicks an ad, Google attaches a click identifier to the landing page URL. You capture that identifier and store it against the enquiry in your CRM. When the deal progresses, you send the identifier back with a value and a stage name. Google now knows which clicks produced money.
The effect is not subtle. Once the platform can see that leads from one set of search terms close at three times the rate of another, it starts spending your budget accordingly, without anyone adjusting a bid. You have replaced a proxy with the real thing.
Getting the identifier from the ad click into the CRM and back again is the part that stops most businesses. It usually needs a hidden field on the form, a bit of work in the CRM, and a scheduled job to push the data back. We do this as a matter of course, and it is the single highest-return change we make to most accounts. There is more detail on our marketing attribution page.
Read your search terms, not your keywords
Keywords are what you bid on. Search terms are what people actually typed. With broad match and automated bidding, the distance between the two can be enormous.
Open the search terms report and read a month of it properly. Not the top twenty by spend, the whole thing. You are looking for three patterns:
- Research intent. Anything with “how to”, “DIY”, “template”, “free”, “salary”, “jobs” or “course” in it. These people are not buying, they are learning.
- Wrong-fit intent. Searches that describe your service but at a scale or price point you do not serve. A commercial roofing contractor bidding on “roof repair” will meet a lot of homeowners with a slipped tile.
- Adjacent intent. Searches for the thing next to your thing. If you sell software, “software engineer jobs” will find you eventually.
Every one of those becomes a negative keyword. This is unglamorous, repetitive work, and it is why accounts that are left alone for six months quietly rot.
Check what the landing page actually promises
Lead quality is often set before anyone clicks. If the ad and the page talk about price, speed or a free consultation, you will attract people shopping on price, in a hurry, or looking for free advice. If they talk about a specific problem and a specific type of client, you get fewer enquiries and better ones.
Two changes usually help more than any bid adjustment:
- Qualify on the page. Say plainly who you work with. “We work with housebuilders on developments of twenty units and up” costs you a lot of bad enquiries and almost no good ones.
- Qualify on the form. Add one or two fields that a serious buyer will answer and a tyre kicker will not. Budget range, timescale, project size. Yes, this reduces submissions. That is the point.
If you add qualifying fields, your cost per conversion will go up and your cost per customer will go down. Make sure whoever reads the report understands that before you do it, or you will be asked to undo good work.
Getting enquiries that go nowhere? We will look at your account, your tracking and your landing pages, and tell you which of the five causes above is actually costing you money. No obligation, and you get the findings either way.
Speed of response is a conversion setting
This is not a Google Ads problem, but it is very often the reason ads look like they are failing. Somebody searching for a supplier at eleven in the morning is comparing three or four options. If your competitor calls back in ten minutes and you call back the next afternoon, the campaign did its job and you lost the deal at the last step.
It is worth measuring. Take last month’s enquiries, record how long each one waited for a first reply, and split the conversion rate by response time. Most businesses that do this exercise find a cliff edge somewhere in the first hour. It is usually cheaper to fix that than to increase the budget.
What good looks like
An account that is set up properly for lead quality looks like this:
- Conversion actions reflect commercial stages, not page views. Qualified enquiry and closed sale both feed back into the platform, with values attached.
- Calls are tracked to the campaign and keyword that produced them, and call recordings or outcomes are used to grade them.
- Search terms are reviewed on a regular schedule, and the negative keyword list grows every month.
- Landing pages qualify openly rather than casting the widest possible net.
- The report shown to the business leads with cost per qualified lead and cost per customer, with clicks and impressions somewhere further down.
If your reporting cannot yet show cost per customer by campaign, that is the first thing to build. Everything else is guesswork until it exists.
Common questions
Will offline conversion tracking work if my CRM is a spreadsheet?
Yes, though it is more manual. The requirement is that you can store the click identifier against each enquiry and get it back out again. A spreadsheet can do that. It is worth automating once volume justifies it, and that is usually a small piece of integration work rather than a new system.
How long before the campaign improves after I change the conversion action?
Automated bidding needs a meaningful volume of the new conversion before it changes behaviour. Expect a settling period, and expect performance to look worse before it looks better, because you have just told the platform that most of what it was proud of does not count.
Should I just pause Google Ads until the tracking is fixed?
Usually not, if the account is at least breaking even. Fix the tracking while it runs, then let the improved signal do its work. Pausing loses you the historic data the new setup will learn from.
Is this a Google Ads problem or a Microsoft Advertising problem too?
Both, and paid social as well. Any platform with automated bidding optimises towards the signal you give it. The principle does not change, only the plumbing.
