For businesses that rely on leads, whether through phone calls, contact form submissions, or website chat, getting quality leads is the most fundamental precursor to landing sales.
For Google Ads, this is especially important because you’re spending your precious marketing dollars and need to see the best return on your investment possible.
Defining Quality Leads
When a client of ours asks about getting the highest quality leads possible, what they really mean is getting qualified leads.
This means leads from people who:
- Are in the service area—if applicable
- Can afford the product or services offered
- Are currently in the market and looking to purchase in a reasonable amount of time
- Have found your product or service fits their needs
The above list is the most basic list of qualifying criteria.
Can Google Give You Qualified Leads?
The Google Ads platform is an amazing marketing machine. There’s a good reason why they’re so profitable as a company. Advertisers just like you spend money each month because it results in sales and often a great ROI.
But here’s the thing—you never know who’s clicking your ads and costing you money unless they reach out. If you have one out of every 10 clicks become a lead—a 10% conversion ratio, which is good—that still means that 9 other clicks—90%—are gone forever without you even knowing who they were.
Kinda interesting, right?
I mean, for walk-in retail locations, you at least see the people walk into the store even if they don’t buy anything. In a way, just seeing them feels more tangible.
You see, the world uses Google. Google is a mass-market service and it could be—and often is—somebody searching who clicks your ad and will never buy from you for a number of given reasons. For example, they couldn’t afford your product or service, duplicate keyword meanings, they changed their mind, etc.
Quality Is Derived from Quantity
That brings me to my main point for this post, which is that we need lots of leads.
We need lots of leads because in some cases 90% of them never reach out to you, and some that do reach out and become a lead are not going to buy from you.
If you can close one sale for every five leads, you’re probably doing a great job. Of course, this is overgeneralizing and will vary by industry, but for the sake of our example, it’s helpful to show you how many clicks we’ll need and how many leads we need to achieve just one closed deal.
Conclusion
Google Ads is a marketing heavyweight, but there’s always a great deal of discovery and covering of keywords, ads, and other areas of your campaigns to make sure you’re targeting the right people at the right time. Relevance is key and making other improvements like targeting demographics, creative ads, and promotions can help lock in leads that result in sales.
They won’t all be home runs. But with enough “at-bats” it’s just a matter of time before you hit one out of the park.