Best practices for generating high-quality leads

Map the full lead to sale journey

Understand your customer journey and choose a relevant conversion goal

 Chart the lead to sale path and identify key conversion actions: Map out the steps your leads take, from their first interaction with your brand to becoming a qualified or closed lead. As you do this, pay close attention to final sale values, conversion rates, and the average time it takes for leads to progress between stages. This will help you pinpoint the actions that signal a strong likelihood of conversion and align to your business goals accordingly.

 Choose a conversion goal to use in your bidding: Select a conversion goal that directly aligns with your business goals and avoid selecting goals from multiple stages of your lead to sale journey for optimization. Consider these factors:

• Use conversion goals specific to lead generation: Tailor your campaigns to optimize towards lead generation goals, such as "qualified lead," "converted lead," "book appointment," or "request quote." These automatically trigger invalid traffic protections, built specifically for lead generation campaigns.
• Conversion volume: Make sure the action generated at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days at the account level.
• Data freshness: If using enhanced conversions for leads or offline conversion imports, upload conversion data regularly—ideally daily.
• Conversion delay: Ideally, choose a conversion action that happens within 7 days of the ad interaction for timely optimization.

Build a strong measurement foundation

Use robust measurement to collect, connect, and consolidate your data

 Collect and connect your first-party data: Implement the Google tag to measure valuable actions customers take on your website. Use enhanced conversions to improve the accuracy of your online and offline conversion measurement and drive better campaign performance.

• If you’re using offline conversion imports, consider upgrading to enhanced conversions for leads for more accurate and durable measurement grounded in your first-party data rather than the Google Click ID. It also enables easier data imports, and the ability to track engaged-view and cross-device conversions.
   Advertisers who use Enhanced Conversions for Leads achieve on average 10% more conversions than measured with standard offline conversion import.¹

 Consolidate and simplify your data management with Google Ads Data Manager: Data Manager makes tag implementation more efficient, enables CRM connections with third-party partners like Hubspot and Salesforce, and makes it easier to use Customer Match and Enhanced Conversions for Leads.

Activate AI-powered campaigns

Put Google AI to work for your lead generation goals

 Embrace value-based bidding: If you can assign different values to your leads, use value-based bidding strategies like Maximize conversion value or Maximize conversion value with target ROAS to optimize bids and prioritize your budget to reach your most valuable customers. To learn more about value-based-bidding, watch our miniseries here.

Is value-based bidding for lead gen right for me

• If lead quality is important to you, but you aren’t able to assign distinct values per conversion, we recommend using target cost-per-acquisition bidding for qualified or converted leads.

 Keep pace with evolving consumer search behavior: Use broad match with Smart Bidding in Search campaigns to appear on a wider range of relevant and valuable queries.

 Drive more leads across all of Google’s channels: Capture the highest-ROI opportunities in real time and multiply leads across Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, and Maps from a single campaign with Performance Max.

 Create and convert new demand: Use immersive, visual storytelling on YouTube, Discover, and Gmail with Demand Gen campaigns to drive leads when customers aren’t actively searching. Set social-like CPA or ROAS targets for the best results, and customize your Google AI strategy by channel, audience, and creative to tailor messages.

 Increase your base of loyal customers: If you have a mobile app that drives strong engagement with your customers, win new app users across Google's extensive channels—including Google Play, Search, and YouTube—and drive them to download your app with App campaigns for installs.

Optimize and expand

Safeguard campaign quality and stay agile to capture opportunity

 Leverage content suitability settings: Control where your ads appear with content and placement exclusions. Refine further with brand exclusions to keep your campaigns from serving for branded queries you want to avoid. 

 Implement additional lead verification methods: Consider tools like ReCAPTCHA, double opt-in, or server-side validation to ensure lead authenticity.

 Align your targets and budget with your performance goals: Set bid targets based on patterns in your past campaign performance, considering factors like seasonality or previous promotional activities. Make sure these targets are aligned to your actual ROAS and CPA goals. Budget strategically—your CPA or ROAS targets act as your spend levers. If campaigns are constrained by budget, you'll be leaving conversions on the table.