Google Ads consultant for owners and marketing leaders

Why are my Google Ads leads such low quality?

Bad leads usually come from some mix of four things: the wrong searches, the wrong message, a landing page that lets anyone through, or bidding that’s chasing the wrong goal. The last one is the one I find most often in accounts I take over.

So one of the first things I check is what the campaigns are optimizing toward. Log into your account and look at two settings: the bid strategy, and the conversion actions it’s counting as success. In the worst case, the bid strategy is set to get clicks, which says nothing about quality. More often, it’s chasing form fills or phone calls, with every one counted the same. Google’s bidding is very good at finding more of whatever you reward, so if you reward any form fill, you get more form fills from anyone willing to fill one in, including students, job seekers, vendors and tire-kickers.

From inside the ad account, that looks like success. Cost per lead is down, lead volume is up. But if you’re only looking inside Google Ads, you’re seeing numbers that don’t tie back to profit. It doesn’t matter if an account sends you fifty billion leads. If they don’t make you money, it didn’t do its job.

Then I compare the search terms, the ads, the landing pages and the actual leads, to see where the mismatch starts. Sometimes it’s the bidding. Sometimes the bidding is fine and the account is buying the wrong searches.

The fix depends on which it is. When it’s the bidding, the goal is to give Google a signal closer to the leads your sales team wants. None of this is magic, and none of it is instant.

Most of this page is about search campaigns, the ads that show when someone types what they’re looking for. The same thinking about lead quality applies to the rest of Google Ads.

What the review looks at, and what you get

Junk leads cost more than the wasted spend. Salespeople end up sifting through piles of junk, or worse, spending real time on sales calls with people who were never going to buy. So the review follows a lead from the search to the sale.

• Search terms and keywords. What people actually typed before they clicked, and whether the negative keywords are keeping the wrong searches out.
• Targeting. Locations, audiences, devices and schedules, and whether they match who can buy from you.
• Ads and landing pages. Whether the ad, the keyword and the page all speak to the same intent, and whether the page does any qualifying. I wrote about this in the Google Ads alignment problem.
• Budget split. How money is divided across products and campaigns, and whether high-margin work is competing with long-cycle categories for the same dollars.
• Bidding and conversion tracking. What the bid strategy is aiming at, which conversions count, and whether any are firing twice or not at all.
• The handoff into sales. How leads land in the CRM, how they get marked as qualified or not, and whether any of that makes it back to Google.

What you get is a written plan: what I found, what I’d change and in what order, who should make each change, and what we’ll measure afterward. If there’s no account yet, the same questions get answered before launch: what counts as a good lead, what gets tracked, and whether the budget makes sense.

Search terms need watching after the review too. I use AI to mine them for negatives now.

A good lead is two things at once

Fit. Is this the right kind of company for us? Industry, size, role, location. In most B2B businesses, this is what your ideal customer profile describes.

Intent. Are they asking about something you sell, in a way that suggests they could buy it? A demo request about your core product is intent. A form fill from a job seeker is just a form fill.

A form submission on its own doesn’t establish either one.

Track every stage, then pick one to bid on

The way I set it up, you track how a lead moves through the stages: it raises its hand with a form fill or a call, someone confirms it’s a good fit, sales confirms the budget is real and it’s a problem you can solve, and finally it closes at an actual value.

You don’t have to bid on all of those. Google’s own guidance is to pick one stage for the bidding and measure the rest. Which one depends on how often it happens (bidding needs a steady flow of examples), how quickly it gets reported, and how well it predicts revenue. A qualified lead that rarely turns into an opportunity is just a nicer-sounding form fill.

For a lot of B2B accounts, that lands on the qualified lead: the point where someone has looked at a raised hand and confirmed the fit. That check is the real handoff between marketing and sales, and it’s where the value starts to show.

Once that’s working and there’s enough data, value-based bidding becomes an option: sending a value with each conversion and switching to a bid strategy that optimizes for value instead of volume.

If the values you send are estimates, the return Google reports on them is a return on estimates. It can steer the bidding. It isn’t your financial return. For that you still need revenue, margin and acquisition cost from your own books.

Closed deals are the truest signal you have, and they can still be the right goal. When a company sells enough, often enough, on a short enough cycle, bidding on real deals is the best signal there is. When it doesn’t, the qualified lead keeps the bidding learning while the slow, real conversions catch up. Google also limits how long after the click it will accept an imported conversion, so a deal that closes very late may not be usable for bidding at all, depending on how it’s tracked.

Your CRM is a marketing tool

None of this works on autopilot. The CRM is where each lead’s source, stages and outcome get recorded, which makes it as much a marketing tool as a sales one. A spreadsheet can stand in when volume is low, but a CRM is the better way to go, because the stages get updated as the work happens. If the companies you most want are already loaded in there, a lead from one of them can be recognized as a good fit the moment it arrives. If they aren’t, someone checks the fit by hand.

The other half is discipline from sales: agreed definitions of what “qualified” means, stages that get updated when they change, and outcomes recorded, including the deals you lost. Bidding can only learn from what’s actually written down.

When that’s in place, I want to be able to say a lead happened, it came from a Google Ads click as far as the tracking can tell, it moved through stages in the CRM (or even a spreadsheet, if that’s what you’ve got), and at the end of the day it made you a certain amount of money. Once you can trace that, the ad account stops being a mysterious money pit and starts being something you can manage on its numbers.

A story about an account with a few dozen possible buyers

One of the more unusual accounts I’ve worked on was an industrial equipment maker that could only sell to a few dozen companies in the entire country. They were selling million-dollar pieces of machinery, and spray-and-pray advertising made no sense. Almost every click would be someone who could never buy.

I tell that story because Google Ads isn’t one thing. For a company with a few dozen buyers and a company with fifty thousand, the right setup looks completely different, and the account should be built around who can actually buy from you.

How much budget does B2B paid search need?

It depends on what a click costs in your category. Click prices come out of an auction, and competition is a big part of it, along with how relevant your ads and landing pages are and the context of each search. In some B2B categories, $20 a day buys a handful of clicks, which may not produce enough data to judge the campaign in any reasonable time.

So I’d work backward from your own numbers. What’s a customer worth to you, in margin and not only revenue? What could you afford to spend to win one? How many clicks, at your category’s prices, does it usually take to get a qualified lead? If the answer is more than the business can support, it’s better to know that before you spend than after.

What I’d measure, where the data supports it: cost per qualified lead, opportunities created, acquisition cost, and revenue and margin from paid search deals.

What it costs to have someone manage Google Ads

There are three separate costs, and it helps to keep them apart.

• Media spend. What you pay Google for the clicks. That goes straight to Google.
• Management. The work of running the account day to day. Agencies usually price it as a flat fee or a percentage of spend.
• Consulting. The decisions above that: what the account bids toward, how the budget is split, whether the work is good.

My levels are on Work With Me. My fee covers my time and doesn’t rise with your ad spend.

Consultant or agency, and how to judge either

Often you have both. An agency or an in-house specialist runs the account. A good agency also connects the bidding and the budget to what happens in sales. When yours does, you may not need me. When it doesn’t, or when nobody on your side can tell whether it does, a consultant ties the account back to margins, sales capacity and customer quality. Some of the best paid search specialists I’ve worked alongside are very good at their tools and focused entirely on their own channel.

Before I started my own agency, I helped stand up an agency’s SEO practice and ran an agency that managed about three million dollars a month in Google Ads, where I was deep in the tactical work. The questions I’d ask any Google Ads consultant or agency, me included, come from that:

• “What are my campaigns optimizing toward right now, and why?” They should be able to answer in one sentence.
• “Can you show me a lead traced from the ad click to revenue?” If nobody can, the account is being judged on numbers that stop at the form.
• “Which CRM outcomes reach Google, and does the bidding use them?” A clear answer tells you whether the account is learning from sales or from submissions.
• “What would make you tell us to spend less?” A good partner has an answer.

When the ads are fine and the landing pages aren’t, that’s a website conversation. When you’re picking an agency to run the account, I can help with choosing one. And when paid search is one piece of a bigger plan, it belongs in the marketing conversation.

Based in Houston, working nationwide

I work from Houston and advise companies running Google Ads across the U.S. If you only sell in Houston, geography is one of the biggest levers in the account: where you show, where you don’t, and how a radius around your service area changes the cost of a lead. If you sell nationally, it’s the opposite problem, and the review starts there.