Aaron Young ranks five focus areas for Google Ads lead-gen campaigns. Conversion tracking is #1: without it you're stuck under $20k monthly. Campaign structure and ad copy matter more than audience targeting or negative keywords.
Let's go with the lead gen edition of ranking the top 5 priorities of what you need to be focusing on for Google Ads. Let's go. So we're selecting lead gen. Negative keywords. Oh, as a reminder, 1 is the highest priority, 5 is the lowest priority. I'm going to put negative keywords at 5. Reason being, it used to be one of the core skills, but right now for me, your conversion data is a much better signal for better, better performance. Audience targeting. Oh yeah, no, I'll put that as a 4. The reason why I'd say 4 is important is because it is important to note that especially in of your search campaigns. Yes, you can do audience targeting, but the keyword is going to be the main driver for whether you're going to see success or not with your Google Ads campaigns. Conversion data. For me, this has to be number one. If you don't have the right data going into your Google Ads accounts, you're never going to be truly able to scale. You may be able to wing it and you may be able to, you know, build out some negative keywords and keyword targeting. But once you start hitting Google Ads at scale for lead generation above $10,000, $20,000 a month, Conversion data, number 1. Campaign type and account structure. For me, this is a really, really close second. It's all about getting your structure right. And many times, especially now in 2026, less is more. Get that conversion data compounded into the least amount of campaigns as possible. That's the way you get the best results with Google Ads. And that means that we've got number 3, which is ad copy. Hey, I'm happy with that. How would you rank these from 1 to 5?
