Learn how to run Google Ads for lead generation with this expert guide. In this training we go through an actual Google Ads audit to show you the biggest mistakes people make when attempting to run Google Search Ads for lead generation.

In this particular PPC ads audit, we review what went wrong in this setup – the keyword research, the ads, the ad groups, the conversion tracking, the bidding settings, and then discuss how it should be setup for success for lead generation in Google Ads.

This specific example covers a home service company, for a custom home builder company, however the principles apply to nearly all Google Ads lead generation strategies you would want to use to get high quality leads, reduce wasted budget, and block out bad leads from coming in.

Quick Summary of What You’ll Learn:

1. Setting Up Conversion/Goal Tracking is Critical for success. If this is setup wrong, it will appear that your ads are doing well, when they are actually wasting a lot of money
2. Don’t skip thorough keyword research strategies. Picking keywords too fast could leave you showing for terms that appeared relevant at first glance, but don’t match the exact target audience you’re going for.
3. Don’t test too many ads at once – your ads need to build data for you to pick a winner. If you are testing too many ads at once, you can’t pick a clear winning ad.
4. If you’re going for conversions (more leads) optimize for conversions, conversion rate, cost-per-conversion (CPA). Don’t waste too much time on all other metrics in Google ads.
5. Stick to phrase match and exact match keywords. Broad match can match to irrelevant terms and waste money, most of the time.
6. If you’re running ads for a client, check with them before setting keywords live – they know their business/industry better than you and can fix bad keywords before they go live.
7. Learn when to go manual CPC, when to properly use smart bidding / auto bidding to get more keywords.

Watch the video training now:

Video Transcript:

okay and this Google ads training we’re going to go through an account audit we did recently I’m going to show you how they had it set up these are some of the big mistakes we see when people do Google search ads just the the wrong setting the wrong tracking wrong keywords wrong targeting pretty much just everything was set up from the beginning uh and then optimized incorrectly so we’re going to show you some of the biggest mistakes people make with Google search campaigns especially when running uh lead generation and then we’re going to show you the right way to set it up and the how you should have tracking set up how you should switch everything over so it’s set up for Success we’ll go ahead and show you a real example here inside this Google ads audit we recently did

okay so we’re looking at the setup this is from a previous agency just right off the bat these icons that this is for search these other ones are the automated ones it’s a smart campaign uh it’s a search with display at the same time those are just honestly terrible options do not use them uh we’ll go ahead and show you the the this client they do uh Custom Homes actually it’s a home service and they do a little bit of remodeling but the main focus is custom homes so the problem with these uh automated campaigns you can see here it looks kind of weird this isn’t the normal setup you get you just put in some keywords Target your location throw in an ad uh and that’s kind of it it’s more so for beginners uh if you’re not going to actively manage it or you’ve never run a campaign before you can set this up for small local things and it um I don’t know it’s just not a good option I don’t know why it’s here it doesn’t have a lot of options

You Can’t customize that much when you when you do a real setup you get a lot more options you could probably see this if you’re an advanced user you get all the different options in here you can build out keywords you could see negative keywords you can adjust your ads you can a B test there’s a hundred other options that just aren’t in uh this campaign just don’t use it at all the other thing it’s tracking uh conversions incorrectly we’ll show you that in a minute so another rag another uh issue here red flag is just the the ad group one it looks like this agency just set it up so quickly they didn’t have time to name anything uh Target CPA that’s not necessarily a bad thing but with Target CPA immediately when you launch Google doesn’t know what your cost per acquisition is going to be so to immediately put a restriction on it it’s it’s going to be difficult if you are going to do automation you typically start with uh just maximize conversions or more commonly

we recommend doing manual CPC change that setting because you have no data at all it’s better to get a lot of clicks control the cost per click control your lead quality and let it build up a little bit before switching to automation because Google’s documentation even tells you it needs a high amount of conversions to optimize for conversions or a Target cost per conversion otherwise it’s just it doesn’t have any data to work with yet so there there’s two main issues with this at first glance it looks like it’s it’s hitting the conversion numbers it’s getting a ton of conversions but if you go into segment conversions conversion action it will tell you what they’re calling a conversion so they have if someone went to the about us page that’s it that counts as a conversion if someone calls a number on the ad that one’s actually good and if someone goes to the contact us page that’s a conversion both of these are not good options for lead generation someone’s simply going to the about us page is not a lead someone going to the contact page not filling out a form or calling just arriving to the contact page that’s not a lead so these are fake numbers a lot of agencies set it up this way it’s a lot of fluff I mean it doesn’t last if a client’s not getting phone calls that they know the phone’s not ringing I mean you could you could technically set up a conversion as whatever you want I

mean if someone went to the home page you can set that up as a conversion so that’s the biggest thing when you’re setting up conversions you have to set it up for the right thing so calls from ads this is the only real number they have I mean two people called that’s an actual lead so if you look at it they spent almost fifteen hundred dollars and received two leads so you’re you’re you’re roughly 750 dollars per lead not twenty three dollars per lead so if to a trained expert you you can see through a lot of this nonsense that it didn’t get 63 leads it got two leads because the lead tracking was set up incorrectly so that’s a major major flaw right off the bat but if if you look at also what’s in here uh it’s only broad match most of the time you’re not going to use broad match it’s just too broad it matches to everything and anything uh some experts can do it if you’re in the account multiple times per day you have a lot of negative keywords maybe you’re testing it with automation it’s it’s very experimental for most people you’ll do phrase match or exact match and the reason is when you go into Search terms you can see it it matches to a lot of random things you’ve got modular homes that’s that’s not really the type of thing container homes that’s kind of a trend floor plans for homes is not the same as Home Building or home builder uh just homes that’s a strange one maybe that’s someone uh looking to to buy a house I don’t really know what that means uh portable

cabins for sale it you can see broad match uh Barn House’s price it broad matches matches for a lot of random things that have nothing to do with your actual word I mean some of them will match most of them broad match just just isn’t a good idea um so you’ve got broad match with automated bidding with incorrect tracking so this was already set up to fail it’s not going to work at all um the other thing you you’ve got to mix this client remember they they’re a custom home builder that’s their main thing and you’ve got you’ve got house contractors remodeling uh if you want to do two services at the same time they should be in different campaigns at the very least two different ad groups you’ve got remodel modeling and uh home renovation and a custom home these are completely different things there’s there’s remodeling there there’s renovation and changing up certain parts or there’s building a custom home from scratch from for several million dollars probably so these are completely different things even if the client was running all these at the same time different campaigns different ad groups this is just a mess and the settings this is showing in the Display Network too which I mean if you see that icon that’s a red flag it’s it’s a beginner mistake you never show on display and search at the same time banner ads and search ads are completely different I will jump over to the ads real quick you’ll see kind of the same thing going on with we have different training on responsive ads I mean we don’t recommend filling it here

um this this is just too many headlines to rotate through it’ll it’ll never get through all of them really just do three and use the pen feature at least in position one so your first headline makes sense because otherwise it’s going to rotate these through and it it could say North Georgia’s experts custom floor plans contact for free free estimate so it’s making it seem like they’re selling custom floor plans which they’re not they’re a custom home builder they don’t really sell the plans by themselves so our home contractors that again separate ad group if they even want those types of leads at all this is just a huge mess same things with with these it just they really didn’t do their research for the client that didn’t put in the right things I mean you could do two descriptions and pin them or if you’re going to do all four of them at least make sure that they make sense independently because Google’s going to rotate through all these so I mean AD strength isn’t the number one thing you’re going for you’re going for conversions and leads it has to be profitable or it’s just wasting money uh jumping back to here the the video campaign not a huge fan of that for lead generation I mean search people just searching custom home builders

near me it’s just a perfect lead stick to search they’re typing in exactly what they want YouTube’s kind of all over the place I mean it it can work but it’s it’s not easy to get in front of somebody that’s researching people to build them a custom home whereas on google.com they’re going to type they need a custom home builder right now and they’re going to hire one so search most of the time for lead Generations is going to be a lot better than YouTube that’s a it’s something much further down the road maybe remarketing or just not do it at all so when we switched it using using our methods for for our Google search campaigns for lead generation for Home Services or software or whatever you’re doing when we switched it over we focus this is a smaller budget so we focused on exactly what they are custom home builders and luxury uh home builders so by focusing on the right keywords and switching to phrase match you can see we’ve just got custom home builders near me Gainesville best custom home builders you get a lot cheaper cost per lead and these leads were much better when they first launched after one month they had much higher quality leads and one of those leads turned into a 1.5 million dollar custom home for their company which is huge because Custom Homes are their

biggest client that’s what they want they they don’t want all the renovations and small remodeling jobs they want these big these big leads in these much bigger clients so in one month I mean they’ve paid for their PPC ads for a very long time this is just focusing we’re not using broad match we’re not using random things these are very specific keywords on exactly what they are with the the Geo targeting in there with uh it’s actually started as manual bidding because we didn’t have a lot of conversion data to start with so we just started with a low CPC and we want to just build up the volume there so we got a lot cheaper cost per click higher click-through rate CPC was still low just much much better numbers by setting it up right from the beginning also just expand this here we need to do the set segment conversion conversion actions you can see these are for form submit we also also have call tracking setup in case somebody clicks on the ad and then goes to the website we have that third-party call tracking in there as well so whether it’s a form they call the number on the Google ad or they call number on the website we’re tracking actual leads we’re not tracking the about us page we’re not tracking the contact us page actual lead submitted or phone calls to make sure that the lead generation

campaign on Google is set up correctly for Roi so even with a smaller budget and a small amount of time if you set it up correctly and you you have the right keywords the right ads and you follow our program to set it up for Roi not just getting a bunch of clicks and Blasting it out everywhere on Broad match and all these automation features that don’t work you can get a much better Roi because you have it set up targeting the right demographic and in this case it’s lead generation but it’d be the same for any industry whether in home services or software or e-commerce when when the targeting is correct and you have the right keywords and the right ads everything lines up and it’s much better for Roi because you’re not focusing on clicks and things like that so just I wanted to show you a real example on one of the accounts we audited recently and the massive difference it can make even with the small budget switching over to to doing it the correct way how how big of a difference that can make for a campaign so we have a lot more training down in the link below our training programs you can click on that and get a discount now learn we just

did a small snapshot of a lot of different things we teach but that’s in the description below if you want to learn a lot more amazing strategies like this alright everyone thanks so much for watching our PPC ads training video uh if you want more videos go ahead and hit the Subscribe button like this video if you found it useful and any questions post them in the comments down below we also have additional training in the description so thanks so much for watching and we’ll see you in the next video