Why Your Google Ads Leads Are Rubbish

"We tried Google Ads. Phone rang constantly, none of it was any good."

I hear this often and it is almost never bad luck. An account attracting the wrong work is doing exactly what it was set up to do. These are the five reasons, in the order I find them.

1. The match is too loose

You chose a keyword. Google decided which searches are close enough, and its definition of close is broader than yours.

Broad match on a small budget is the single most common cause of poor leads in a trade account. Your money goes to searches that share a vague theme with what you sell, and the people behind them wanted something else.

Start tighter than feels comfortable. Phrase and exact match on the jobs you actually want, then widen deliberately once you can see what is converting rather than hoping.

This is related to but separate from blocking waste. Match types control what you are in the running for; negatives remove specific things you do not want. You need both, and the negative keyword list is its own job.

2. The ad does not filter anybody

An ad that says "Quality plumbing, fast response, free quotes" is true of every plumber and therefore filters nobody. Everyone clicks it, including everybody you did not want.

The ad is your first qualification step and almost nobody uses it that way. Say the work: "Bathroom renovations and hot water systems". Say the area. Say something that signals your end of the market, whether that is same-day call-outs or fixed-price installs.

Fewer clicks for the same money, and more of them are the job you wanted. The counterintuitive part is that a lower click-through rate can be a better account.

The strongest version of this is naming a price or a floor. "Bathroom renovations from NZ$12,000" loses you everybody with NZ$3,000 to spend, which is the entire purpose. You are paying for each of those clicks and none of them was ever going to book.

3. The page does not match the ad

Somebody searches for a blocked drain, your ad mentions blocked drains, and they land on a home page listing eleven services with the drains one third of the way down.

That person now has to work out whether you actually do their job. Some will. The ones who do not go back, and you paid for them to leave.

The fix is unglamorous: send each ad group somewhere that talks about that specific job, with the number at the top. This is also why ads and the website are not separate problems. Paying for clicks to a page that was never built for them is the most expensive mistake in any account.

4. You are not actually measuring calls

Most trade enquiries arrive by phone. Plenty of accounts only count form submissions.

That account will tell you the campaign is failing while the phone rings, and somebody will switch off the thing that was working. Or the reverse: calls are counted but every call counts the same, including the thirty-second wrong numbers, so an account producing rubbish looks healthy.

Set a minimum duration before a call counts as a conversion. Sixty seconds is a reasonable starting point for most trades: long enough to exclude the wrong numbers and the hangups, short enough to keep the real ones. Until that is in place you are not judging lead quality, you are guessing at it.

5. You are running when you cannot serve

Ads run at three in the morning. Somebody calls. Nobody answers, or you answer and it is a job you do not do overnight.

Ad scheduling is a setting most accounts never touch. If you do not turn out after hours, do not advertise after hours. If Sunday enquiries always go nowhere, stop paying for Sundays.

The sixth one, which is really a budget problem

Sometimes the account is set up correctly and the leads are still poor, because there is not enough money going through it for anybody to learn anything.

An account spending NZ$15 a day across four services in a competitive city is not running four campaigns, it is running a lottery. Google cannot gather enough data to optimise, you cannot see a pattern in thirty clicks a month, and every decision anybody makes is noise.

The fix is narrowing rather than spending more: one service, one area, enough budget to produce a few hundred clicks before you judge it. A small budget aimed at one thing beats the same money spread across everything you do.

How to work out which one is yours

The search terms report settles it in ten minutes.

• The searches arriving are wrong. Causes one and two. Tighten match types, add negatives, rewrite the ad.
• The searches look right but the calls are poor. Causes three and four. Look at where the clicks land, and at whether you are counting the right thing.
• The searches look right and the calls are right but nothing books. That is not an ads problem any more, and more spend will not fix it.

That last one is worth sitting with, because it is the one nobody wants to hear and the one no amount of account management solves. If people are reaching you and not booking, the problem is the quote, the response time or the price, and all three are outside the account.