How to Get More High Quality Leads from Google Ads

If you are sick of spammy leads, tire kickers who don't buy your products and are not interested in buying your products, or if you're seeing a significant drop in the amount of leads that your Google Ads campaigns are generating, don't worry, you're not alone. Now, unfortunately, I have businesses reaching out to me every week that are facing one or three of those issues. So what I'm gonna do in this video is take you through each one of those three issues which real businesses are facing right now with their Google Ads campaigns and take you through a practical list of the optimizations or the changes that you need to make inside of your Google Ads campaigns. Now, I do wanna stress that if you are facing one of those issues of spammy leads, you know, an influx of tire kickers who aren't really ready to buy yet, or if you're just seeing a significant drop in the amount of leads coming through, I do wanna note that in most cases, it's probably gonna be a combination of more than one of these things, which I'm gonna point out. But what I am gonna do with each one of those three main issues that real businesses are facing right now, I'm gonna show you the first place to look But as I said, it could definitely be a combination of all of these. So it's important that you watch the whole video so you've got the full context of everything that you need to do in order to make sure that you and your business can see an increase in high-quality leads coming into your business. So let's get straight into it. And the first issue I wanna address is that unfortunately in 2026, many businesses, especially local businesses, are drowning in a sea of spammy or low-quality leads. Now in this case, it generally comes to one of two reasons. One, you've got the incorrect conversion settings, or two, you're using the wrong type of campaign. Now let's start with the conversion settings, and there's two important conversion settings that you do need to get right. And for clarity, I want to confirm that I'm talking to businesses who are not using a third-party CRM, something like Salesforce, HubSpot, or even CoreRail, where they're importing their leads or the actual leads which are good quality back into Google Ads. If that's not the case, you don't need to worry because there are still some structural things you need to get right with your conversion settings so that you're giving Google the right parameters on what is a good conversion and what is a bad conversion. And if you're a business like that, it's highly likely that you're gonna be tracking one of two of these types of conversions or both, which are phone calls and also form submissions. Now, when it comes to phone calls, there are two important settings that you need to get right. And let's jump in and show you them right now. Now, when it comes to your phone calls, there's two core settings that you need to make sure that you got right inside of your Google Ads account. And that's firstly, the call duration, And then secondly, the conversion count. And let me show you where you find each of those. Inside of Google Ads, you need to go to your conversions and then your summary. And then what I want you to do is actually want you to go into the phone call lead. So this one is called Calls from Ads. And what I wanna show you in through here, there's, there's two core things that you wanna make sure that you're getting right. You can see here, we've got our call settings set at 45 seconds. And then also the second one is that you need to make sure that your call count is set at one conversion. Let me explain why both of these are important. When it comes to the call duration, you need to remember that Google starts that timer from when someone starts ringing. So, you know, that first 10, 15 seconds of when someone starts ringing, it's counted as a call, but you may not have even answered yet. Now, in this account, we've set that call setting at 45 seconds 'cause they do have a really good call answering service. But for other businesses, we've set that call duration at a minute and a half or even 2 minutes. But inside of Google, this is set as a default as 30 seconds. And in most cases, we don't find this to be long enough. So what I'd recommend is that you increase that duration somewhere between 45 seconds up to 90 seconds so that you can add a little bit of extra call quality in there. And what you're looking at there is the general practice is the longer the call is going, it's more likely to be a better, higher quality call. The second one is, is the conversion count. Now for lead generation, you've got two options when it comes to your conversion setting. You can either count one, 1 or every. And it's really important that you only count 1. Now the reason for that is because with Google Ads, if you have it set to every, it means that if the same person rings 3 times or 4 times, that's going to be counted as 3 conversions, even though it's the same person calling in that 30-day or 60-day window that you've got for your call acquisition. So that's why you want to make sure that you're increasing that call duration. And secondly, you're also setting that call setting to 1. Now, when it comes to your form inquiries, you also wanna make sure that that conversion count is set to 1 for the same reasons as what we explained before. But the other thing that you do wanna do is that we really, really recommend a multi-step form. And essentially you're looking at forms that you've got more than just where you're asking for their name, email, and phone number. Now, inside of a lot of businesses, we recommend that they use a form like Typeform, or if you're a service-based business, there are different quoting type forms that you can get. And what you're wanting to do here is you're wanting to get more information than just their email and their phone number. Now, some businesses get worried that, "Well, hey, if I ask for too much information, they may not go through and fill out that form." But I like to flip that and see it as a positive because what you're wanting to do is you're wanting to use your form inquiry as part of the qualification process. And if someone is not prepared to take the extra 30 to 60 seconds in order to fill out your form, they're probably not going to go through and buy anyway. So what you want to be thinking about here is what is the information which is the most important to you, which lets you know whether this is a high-quality lead to follow up. So especially if you're a local service business, you're talking about things like the type of job that they're looking for, whether this is maintenance or whether this installation, whether they're bringing their own parts or what their actual budget is. This is the type of information that you want to put in because what you can then also do is you can also add in some automated responses. For example, if you only want to be inquiring to people who have got a budget of over $1,000, you could set up an instant reply that if someone marks under $1,000, that, that you're not going to be the best option for them. Once again, you're adding in some extra qualification to really make sure you're getting high quality leads coming into Google. Now, the second thing I mentioned there in this first point of high quality or spammy leads is the right type of campaign. Now, I've been on the record before that saying for lead generation businesses, I really do like Performance Max as a campaign type. However, I do want to stress that that is not the starting point. So for me, for lead generation businesses, you do need to start with search. And I wouldn't even think about engaging Performance Max until you're reaching at least 30 to 50 conversions in a month. And then even on top of that, I wouldn't think about adding in a Performance Max campaign until you're having issues with scaling with search. So there are a lot of service-based businesses where we are, you know, hitting that threshold of over 30 conversions, in some cases over 100 conversions a month, but we're still focusing on search because Performance Max for us is a secondary type of campaign. You need to make sure you've got your conversion settings set, and you need to make sure you've got higher quality data coming in. But for most businesses, especially local service businesses, you're going to be able to scale much, much faster by focusing on search. And the other reason why that's important is because Performance Max, if you don't have that correct conversion data coming in, you do increase your chances of getting lower quality leads. That's why if you have a larger bank of conversion data, you can start making some moves like increasing that call duration or adding in a more complex form, yes, it may reduce your number of conversions, but it's a higher quality signal so that you can then eventually get to Performance Max later down the track. All right, now let's go to number 2. And the big issue that people are facing is they're getting a lot of tire kickers or people who aren't really ready to buy yet. Now, in this situation, you are getting legitimate leads. They are people who are looking for your type of service, but they may not be the exact fit. And some prime examples here are that you might be a business to business And some prime examples here is that you might be a B2B and you're getting a lot of business-to-customer leads, or you may have people who are searching for jobs rather than your service. Or another big option is that there just may be a pricing mismatch. And a perfect example of that is that you may be a higher quality or a premium price, and there are maybe some other service providers that run a lower, a lower price point service. And in all of these cases, it comes down to your messaging. So what I like to do in these situations is that I would firstly recommend you to go back through your ad copy, especially your headlines, and also your landing page, and be really, really clear about not only who your service is for, but who it's not for. Now, you don't need to say that we are not for X, Y, and Z, but you can add in some really clear qualifying messages, which also lines up with your branding. Perfect example of this is that if you run a higher price point than other providers in the same market, Let's say, for example, your prices start from $199, but you do know other providers that are offering the same service for $99. Now, you may know that you offer some real clear benefits and you can really articulate why you're $100 more expensive. But what you do wanna do is you wanna be really, really clear in your ad copy that prices start from $199. Now, the reason for why this is really, really important for a lead generation business to do is because Inside of an e-commerce business, that price gives them that signaling. What would generally happen in the e-commerce space is that if you've got a higher price product, people would go through to your website, they'd see the higher price product. Then if they're not converting, that data goes back into Google Ads and they can start to see really, really quickly who's buying and who's not buying. The problem with lead generation is that with a form inquiry and a phone call, Google can't really tell the difference which is a high quality lead and which is a low quality lead because there isn't that price. Price signaling in the conversion action. So this is why I recommend for lead generation businesses, a great way is to pre-qualify who your perfect clients are inside of your ad copy. Now, yes, it may mean less clicks. And yes, it may mean less conversions. But what you need to remember is that with Google Ads, Google gets paid when someone clicks on the ad, whereas you as the business owner only get paid not only when someone converts, but when they agree to the price and also send that money into your bank account. If you are getting leads, which yes, they are looking for your service, but they're not pre-qualified enough, look at going back and adding in some extra qualifying remarks in your headlines and also in your landing page. All right, now let's get to the third one. And this is probably the biggest one. We're seeing a lot of businesses who are reaching out and saying they're just seeing a drop in leads. And this one is confusing for them because they haven't actually made any changes inside of their Google Ads account, like significant changes to their keyword targeting. And we hear this a lot where they'll say that, you know, over the last 6 months, we've just seen a month-to-month decline. In the number of conversions that they are getting. Now, a lot of this does draw back to the changing nature which is happening inside of Google Search at the moment. And I don't want to spend too much time on this because we've got other videos about that. But what I do want to give a reminder is, is that you do need to remember that Google has made some significant changes into the way that it actually triggers your ads. It used to be about targeting the syntax, so the actual keywords in your keyword phrase. And now it's targeting the meaning or the intent of that keyword phrase. And that actually even holds true for exact match keywords. So if that is the case, and if you are in that situation where you haven't really made any significant changes to the structure of your Google Ads account recently, but you're seeing a month-to-month decline, we would recommend that you go through and do a full audit of your keywords and what search terms are actually being triggered by your ads. Now we're gonna jump over to a screen share because the great news is, is that inside of Define Digital Academy, we've actually released a free tool that which you can use, which will go through and do a full keyword SWOT analysis on your keywords and search terms in a matter of minutes. And you can get free access to this keyword and search term tool just by following the link in the description below. But to help you even further, let's jump into a screen share so I can show you how you can complete this and how this works for your business. Now, inside of Define Digital Academy, we actually have 5 tools which you can use. And this does everything from letting you know which campaigns are ready to scale, We've also got ones that help you with the ad copywriting and your landing page, CRO audits. Those ones also go out and do Reddit forum searches and Facebook group searches to really find out those pain points and make sure they match with your messaging. And then we've also got our Smart Bidding Coach. But the one that you can get free access to is, as I mentioned before, is this Keyword and Search Term Audit Tool. Now, let's jump in and show you an example of how you can use this. And as I said, if you wanna get access to this free tool, just follow that link in the description below. But I want to show you some real-life examples of how it's gone through and helped different accounts that we've been going through and helping with businesses inside of Define Digital Academy. This was a business that reached out to us. They needed to be hitting 25 conversions a month, and last month was the first month that they've done that in a long time. And you can see it was an increase of 13 conversions from March. And the way that we went through and did this is that we went through firstly and used this tool, um, to go through and do an audit to really find out where there was potential for wasted spend inside of their account. Now what we've done on top of this is if we've built this around a SWOT analysis framework. If you don't know what a SWOT analysis is, that's obviously looking at the strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats. And this comes off the core functionality for success with Google Ads is that one of the easiest way to see success with Google Ads is find out what search terms or what keywords are giving you profitable results and then find out which ones where you're wasting spend. So you're getting you know, repeated spend with no conversions, and you really just want to turn the tap on, get more, spend more money where you're getting good results and spend less money where you are wasting spend. So what you need to do in order to run this process is you want to be getting two reports. Now we generally— so what we did at this time, we went back through January and February, and as you can see, at— in this period, they only got 21 conversions in the two months from January to February. Now they're getting over 25 conversions a month. You need to go through and download two reports. So the two reports you want is you want the search terms report, and the way that you do that is you go through, click this download, and I generally download it as a CSV file. And then you also want to get the same for your keywords. So the same process, go to keywords and then click that same, same download option. Then when you've got that option, you open up through here and and just open it up inside of your own Claude account. And you do need to have those two bits of information ready. Now, while this is loading, I will let you know as well is that what you can also do as well is you can add in any extra information. So it'll— you can see it's going to prompt you as to what you're uploading. You can also add other data. We've also gone through and added in our call data with the client or their brand guidelines or some extra longer data. Just anything that will help give you some better responses. And so the way that we've gone through and do this, I recommend that you add both keywords and search terms. Obviously you can use this for e-com as well, but this is not e-com. And then when it comes to your n-gram focus— now if you don't know what an n-gram analysis is, it's either going to group one-word phrases, two-word phrases, or three-word phrases together. And for this one, we're going to do three-word phrases. Now that will go through and give us that response. It does take a couple of minutes, but what I want to show you here is this is the report that we have gone through. So you can see here we've gone through and added in our, our search terms, and then it's come through and done our audit. So there's a lot of different information here, but what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take you through to the SWOT analysis at the end. And what it really starts to go through and does is it firstly breaks it into your strengths. Now, what I do want to let you know as well is that please see this report as a diagnostic tool. Do not go through and blindly just make all of the changes in your account. You do need to go through and really make sure that this makes sense for your business. But what we've designed it to do is to really give you some pointers on where you're spending the money and where you're wasting your money. So you can see from here as well, is it does also give you some long tail broad match opportunities. It also goes down to where you are wasting some spend. So, but what you can see from here is that when it comes into the recommendations, it's giving us two clear theme winners. Now, I have had to go through and blur out some of these search terms just for privacy. And then it's also gone through and given us some different weaknesses. And they can see with this one is that there was a high amount of competitive brand spend. So straight away in that February mark before they started to see those better results through March and April, we added in some extra negative keywords. The other thing that we— what we did do as well is that we did see the broad match was working because it was getting a 5% conversion rate. And we're also happy with our current target, target CPA settings. But there was an opportunity to add in some extra negative keywords, which it did give us. And if you go up through here, or you can actually ask it, it can give you the full list of negative keywords. So you can see from here it gave us a full list of about 10 different negative keywords that we could go through and add, which we did actually add to the account. Sorry, I think about 8 of the 10 we added to the account. Then it also lets us know of, you know, it said to add in some extra broad match long tails, long tail keywords, especially around the different equivalents of those different themes that are already working. So the main thing that I would point out in through here as well is that really see this as an audit and a diagnostic tool. You don't blindly follow everything, but it is gonna give you a real quick analysis of where you're spending your money and what are some opportunities to limit waste and what are some other opportunities to increase the spend on your profitable keywords. So thank you so much for joining me. My name is from Aaron Young from Define Digital Academy. Remember, if you want to get full access to this keyword and search term audit tool, just follow that link in the description below. And if you would like to know more about what has changed with Google's keyword match types, once you go through and watch this video right here. See you next time. Bye.