Google Ads for Lead Generation: Ups, Downs, & How to Unlock 12X ROAS

Google Ads is a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platform on the world’s most popular search engine. With it, marketers can promote businesses, sell products/services, raise awareness, and increase traffic to a website. 

However, marketers using Google Ads for lead generation need to follow different strategies than marketers focusing on other objectives like e-commerce sales or brand awareness. 

In this guide, we’ll explain:

• Why marketers need Google Ads
• How lead generation marketers can use Google Ads effectively
• How lead tracking tools support those lead gen strategies

Why Do Marketers Need Google Ads for Lead Gen?

Google Ads is the most popular platform for digital advertising. In fact, 4 out of 5 businesses around the world use Google Ads for PPC. Every day, Google processes 8.5 billion searches, which is equivalent to hundreds of millions of daily users.

But why? What makes advertising on Google so effective?

There are two major benefits of using Google Ads:

1. The Triple T of Search Marketing
2. Budget Control

Benefit #1: The Triple T of Search Marketing

Pay-per-click advertising is considered one of the best ways to generate quality leads online because of what we call the Triple T of Search Marketing:

• Targeting – Google Ads lets you target highly-defined audiences based on keywords they search for, other user behaviors (visiting similar URLs, etc.), and detailed demographic data. As a result, you can target users that are more likely to convert.
• Timing – Using Google Ads for lead gen lets you find users who aren’t just interested in your product, but are interested in your product right now (a.k.a., high buying intent). Doing so cuts down on lead nurturing and speeds up the sales cycle.
• Tracking – Google Ads offers tons of tracking potential. You can track specific actions users take, where they go, how much they cost to bring in, etc. This makes it easier to determine the success, value, and ROI of your marketing efforts.

Check out the guide below for a more detailed explanation of the Triple T of Search Marketing.

Guide: The Triple T of Search Marketing – Why Search Is So Powerful

Benefit #2: Cost Control & Lead Management

Google Ads gives you a lot of control over how and where you spend your budget.

For example, you can:

• Set daily or monthly caps to prevent overspending
• Adjust bids for individual keywords
• Schedule ads to only run during certain times/days
• Target specific locations/keywords and use negative keywords to reduce budget waste

Plus, you can actually manage your lead volume by adjusting your spending according to your capacity.

For example, say you’re running ads for an ophthalmologist with several locations. Each location can only handle so many procedures each week. With a sophisticated Google Ads setup (and lead tracking tools), you can change your ad spend to match each facility’s availability for a procedure and only send leads to locations that can handle them.

In fact, that’s exactly what a WhatConverts user Bake More Pies does (see below). And their clients love it.

Case Study: One PPC Shift, Massive Results – Agency Earns 42% YOY Growth With 3-Point Strategy

The Downsides of Google Ads for Lead Gen

It’s not all roses and sunshine with Google Ads, however. There are a few problems with generating leads via the search engine behemoth.

First, Ads only shows aggregate data.

For example, you can see how many total leads clicked a button or made a call. But you can’t zoom in to get details on each individual lead. And that means you can’t get individualized insights on their customer journey, access their contact details, or even see what they talked about on their calls.

Second, Ads does not show lead quality.

This is a big one—not all leads are created equal. Some are spam, some are people looking for a job, and some are looking for another business altogether.

If you can’t determine the quality of a lead, you can’t understand how effective your marketing truly is. These are serious data gaps. And they’re the gaps that lead tracking tools like WhatConverts aim to fill.

For more on how lead tracking tools like WhatConverts help here, check out the guide below.

Guide: The Best Way to Track Calls from Google Ads

5 Winning Lead Generation Strategies for Google Ads

So, it’s your job to bring in leads for your business or your client using Google Ads.

How do you do it?

And also importantly, which strategies should you use when your focus is on lead gen, not other objectives (online sales, brand awareness, etc.)?

Here are five strategies lead gen PPC marketers like you should use to amplify your results and achieve impressive returns (just like the agency below did).

Case Study: Agency Learns How to Train the Algorithm, Wins 12.4X ROAS

1. Focus on High-Intent Keywords

If you’re a local dentist, you’re shooting yourself in the foot by only targeting general keywords like “dentist” or “dental office”.

Instead, get specific with long-tail keywords that signal a high intent to convert:

• “family dentist Champaign, IL”
• “pediatric dentist near me”
• “emergency tooth repair Atlanta”
• “crown cost NY city”

These more defined keywords often cost less and bring in more buy-ready leads that are likelier to convert.

Lead Tracking Tip: Get Granular w/ Attribution Data

With your high-intent keywords launched, it’s now time to measure the results. Which keywords work the best? And which should you stop paying for?

 

Lead tracking tools like WhatConverts let you get granular with your attribution data, even down to the keyword level.

 

With it, you can see which keywords generate the most leads, qualified leads, or even sales value. And that makes it a snap to adjust your marketing plan accordingly.

 

You can see that data for each lead:

Or across all your leads for birds-eye insights:

So, how do you identify the keywords with the highest buyer intent? Check out the guide below.

• Guide: Identifying Buyer Intent Keywords for PPC (What You Need to Do)

2. Optimize Landing Pages

The goal of any landing page is to turn visitors into leads or sales. But there are lots of sub-goals a page needs to achieve in order to reach that goal.

An effective landing page needs to:

• Clearly articulate your product’s value
• Address the most common buyer objections
• Attract the right kind of lead, your ICP
• Weed out the wrong kind of lead to avoid wasted time
• Let visitors know exactly what to expect when they do convert

As you can see, it’s a lot to ask for from a single page.

That’s why lead gen companies need to spend extra time and effort on A/B testing their landing pages. Headlines, CTA copy, design format, value propositions—marketers should always be testing these elements and looking for various ways to improve their landing pages.

One thing to watch out for is making sure you’re optimizing based on the right KPIs. Avoid vanity metrics like clicks or impressions and instead shoot for actions like calls/form fills or even completed sales.

Lead Tracking Tip: Optimize for ROI with Sales/Quote Value

Clicks are a good indicator of landing page success, but they’re just that—an indicator. If you really want to evaluate how successful your landing pages are, start measuring success based on quotable leads, sales/quote value, and ROI. These metrics don’t hint at success. They are success.

 

With WhatConverts, you can report on…

 

Landing Page Variations by Lead Type

Landing Page Variations by Quotable Leads

Landing Page Variations by Sales Value Generated

With this information, you can start using value based bidding strategies and further maximize your ROI.

 

• Guide: Value Based Bidding for Lead Gen – 5 High ROI Strategies

3. Be Diligent With Conversion Tracking

Conversion tracking is the backbone of any successful Google Ads lead generation strategy.

While other business models may have very clear indicators of success (e.g., a purchase with an e-commerce business), lead gen businesses rely on tracking actions to show the potential for success.

What’s critical here is understanding which conversion actions show the highest potential for becoming a customer.

Simply tracking form fills or call clicks isn’t enough. You need to dig deeper into which conversions are turning into actual sales or high-quality leads, so you can fine-tune your campaigns for maximum ROI.

Google Tag Manager, GA4, and Google Ads itself can help here. But many lead gen marketers need lead tracking tools to get at the data gaps those platforms leave behind.

Lead Tracking Tip: Focus on Lead Quality

Sales/quote value are the ultimate indicators of lead quality—this is where the money comes in after all. However, many lead generation agencies don’t have direct access to the value their leads create for their clients.

 

So, how do you determine lead quality without looking at revenue?

 

With lead tracking data.

 

Lead gen agencies can evaluate the quality of their leads based on:

 

• Customer journey (which pages leads have visited)
• Where they came from (Google Ads, social media, organic)
• Conversion action data (what they said on calls, info they shared through forms)
• Other behaviors (chats with support, email inquiries sent, etc.)

This data gives marketers a more complete picture of a lead, letting them see whether they’re likely to result in becoming a customer.

 

And with the right lead tracking tool (like WhatConverts), you can see all that and more.

Check out the guide below for more on the importance of lead quality.

 

• Guide: Qualified Leads – The Key to More Effective Marketing

4. Train the Algorithm

As Google continues to push Ads users towards automation and AI, smart bidding strategies are becoming more popular. These strategies remove the ability to manually bid on keywords and instead use Google’s algorithm to make goals-based bidding decisions on your behalf.

This can be great—it allows for faster bidding adjustments, continuous optimization, and improved cost efficiency (if set up correctly).

But like any AI model, you need to train it on the right data.

For example, let’s say you get one spam lead for every nine quality leads. And even though 10% of your leads are garbage, you still send every conversion back to the algorithm as a successful lead because they called your number (this is your primary conversion).

Since Google only judges success based on the conversion action, it continues to bring in more and more spam leads.

In order to train the algorithm to weed out spam and attract higher quality leads, you should only send the best lead data back to Google.

Lead Tracking Tip: Send Back Only Best Leads to Google

Okay, so how do you pick and choose which leads to send back?

 

Lead tracking tools like WhatConverts let you be selective with the data you train the algorithm on.

 

For example, our Google Ads integration lets you choose what types of conversions to send:

 

1. All new leads
2. Only leads where the sales value is received or added
3. Only leads that are quotable
4. Leads that are selected based on Lead Intelligence rules

As a result, you can effectively train the algorithm to only target your best leads.

 

• Guide: How to Optimize Google Ads Automated Bidding for Better Results

5. Use Various Ad Types

By diversifying your marketing, you can mitigate risk while testing which channels and techniques work best for your audience.

Luckily, marketers using Google Ads for lead generation have plenty of options here.

Local service ads (LSAs), for example, are great for industries like home services and other businesses where location matters most. And when handled effectively, LSAs can result in massive ROI gains for you or your clients.

Google My Business (GMB) listings are also valuable for local businesses and can be filled out for free.

Call-only ads skip the redirect and instead guide leads to call directly from the ad—a strong CTA.

Lead gen marketers should also consider using ad extensions like call extensions, callouts, site links as well as lead form extensions.

Lead Tracking Tip: Cover All Your Bases w/ Dynamic + Static Numbers

While dynamic number insertion is great for tracking calls made from numbers on your site, you still need to be able to track calls from off-site numbers (think PPC call extensions, call-only ads, GMB pages, local service ads, etc.).

 

Luckily, WhatConverts lets you do both. And you can view, filter, and organize all your leads in the same place (no matter where they came from).

Check out the case study below to see how an agency used various ad types to grow their client's business.

 

• Case Study: Florida Agency Scales Client LSA Budget by 2X with ROI Reporting

Wrapping Up

Google Ads is the best platform for digital advertising and PPC.

That said, Google Ads does make it hard for lead generation businesses to get the data they need to thrive.

WhatConverts provides that extra layer of data lead gen marketers need to make better decisions. And when combined with Google Ads, it's everything a marketer needs to analyze, organize, optimize, and thrive.

Ready to make smarter marketing decisions with better lead data? Start your WhatConverts 14-day free trial now!