Good and Bad Leads Can Come Through the Same Form
By Gianna Stead | SEO Manager, Maisona | 6 min read
Google Ads lead quality is the complaint that survives every fix inside the account. You fix the tracking, then the negatives, then the landing page. The enquiries still come from people who want a price on work you don’t do. Your cost per conversion looks fine while the sales team rings back buyers who were never going to buy.
Most of that waste does live in the account. We’ve written about what an ads account does after you stop watching it. Past the click there’s another layer, and very few B2B businesses build it on purpose. Three moments decide it: the ad someone reads before clicking, the form they fill in, then the hour after they hit submit.
Google Ads Lead Quality Starts in the Ad Copy
Open your best-performing ad group and read the headlines. Most B2B search ads say some version of trusted supplier, fast turnaround, free quote, servicing all areas. Every one of those invites everybody.
Google’s scoring pushes you that way for a reason, and it isn’t hostility toward specialist suppliers. Ad relevance and click-through rate both roll into Quality Score, and a better score buys a cheaper click. Broad copy tends to out-click narrow copy, so an algorithm built to reward clicks keeps nudging you toward broad copy. None of that is wrong if you’re selling a $90 product into a national market.
It stops working when your smallest viable job is $200,000. A homeowner wanting a driveway costs you the same click as a project manager pricing a subdivision. The ad is the cheapest filter you own, and in most accounts we inherit it filters nothing.
Put the disqualifier in the copy. Commercial and civil projects only. Minimum order 20 tonnes. NSW and ACT sites. Tier 1 and Tier 2 contracts. Your click-through rate will fall, and Google will show you exactly how far. The calls you stop taking never appear in that report. On screen the trade looks worse than it does in the office.
Give it a month before you judge the change. Click volume drops within a fortnight, and the shift in who’s enquiring takes longer to show up. Watch enquiry count and what your estimator says about those enquiries, not the click line on the dashboard.
It works alongside keeping the wrong searches out, which we covered in three Google Ads mistakes that quietly waste budget. One filters the search. The other filters the person reading your ad.
The One Form Field That Sorts Your Enquiries
A standard B2B contact form asks for name, email, phone and a message box. A $4,000 enquiry and a $400,000 enquiry land in the same inbox, in the same format, minutes apart.
Add one field that segments. Project value band, project stage, site location, required delivery date. Pick whichever question your estimator asks first on the phone. You already know which answer changes how you treat the enquiry, so moving it into the form just asks it earlier.
Every extra field costs you completions, and anyone who says otherwise hasn’t watched a form analytics report. The arithmetic still favours the field when one job carries six figures. I’d take twelve enquiries I can sort over twenty I can’t, and I don’t think it’s close.
A few things make the field easier to answer:
- Use bands and a dropdown, not an open box, so nobody has to commit to a number.
- Ask about stage rather than budget when your buyers are still comparing suppliers.
- Keep it optional if your volume is already thin.
- Skip anything your estimator can work out from the message box, since duplicated questions read as a form for the form’s sake.
- Label it in the buyer’s language, so tender, concept and awarded beat qualified and unqualified.
That field also gives you something to send back to Google. Once your CRM marks which jobs were worth quoting, offline conversion imports can carry that outcome into the account. The bidding then learns to chase quoted work instead of counting every form fill as equal.
Timing is Key
Harvard Business Review audited 2,241 US companies by sending each one a test web enquiry and timing the reply. Among the firms that answered, the average took 42 hours. Just under a quarter never replied. Firms making contact inside the first hour were nearly seven times more likely to qualify the lead.
That research is from 2011 and the picture hasn’t improved much, because the constraint was never technical. In civil and industrial businesses the enquiry lands in a shared inbox. Someone opens it once they’re off site and back at a desk. Enquiries arrive during the working day, which is the same window when the person best placed to answer them is out on a job. By then the buyer has emailed three suppliers and spoken to one of them.
Whoever replies first shapes the job. They hear the scope before it’s written down and suggest an approach. The RFQ that follows quietly matches what they said.
None of this needs new software:
- Give paid enquiries their own destination, separate from the general web inbox.
- Name the person who owns that inbox, not the department.
- Send an acknowledgement that states when a real person will call.
If you’re running marketing on top of three other jobs, protect this one above everything else here. It costs nothing per month and it moves lead quality further than any setting you can change.
Is Your Account Too Small for Automation
Google recommends judging Smart Bidding over a period holding at least 30 conversions, and 50 for Target ROAS. This is a measurement guideline rather than a set rule.
Plenty of civil and industrial accounts don’t get near it. Bid on a specific product term in one state and eight enquiries in a month is a good month. The algorithm works from a handful of data points. Every target you adjust restarts the learning on what little history there is.
The workaround is more discipline than automation:
- Consolidate campaigns so the signal pools instead of splitting three ways.
- Count the action that means something, such as a quote request or a call over 60 seconds.
- Change targets rarely and give each change a couple of months before judging it.
- Consider Maximise Clicks with tight keywords where a starved Target CPA keeps stalling.
Quality is the lever you have left in an account this size. Volume optimisation needs volume, and you can’t hand an algorithm signal you don’t generate.
Where to Start This Month
Pick one moment and work on it. Doing all three at once leaves you unable to tell which change did anything.
- Ask your sales team to mark last month’s paid enquiries as quoted or not quoted.
- Count both lists and work out what a quoted enquiry costs you.
- Write one disqualifier into the copy of your highest-spending ad group.
- Add one qualifying field to the form on your paid landing page.
- Set a rule that every paid enquiry gets a reply the same working day.
The ad-to-page match underneath all of this still has to hold. That’s the ground we covered in matching landing pages to search intent. A qualifying question won’t rescue a page that misses the search. It just adds friction for a visitor already leaving.
Every account differs, and the trade-off runs the other way sometimes. A distributor with a sales team of fifteen and a broad commercial term might want the volume regardless, wrong numbers included, because a small percentage of eight hundred beats a larger percentage of eighty. Know which business you’re running before you tighten anything.
Maisona works with construction, industrial and distribution businesses across Australia and New Zealand. If your campaigns are producing enquiries your team keeps disqualifying, talk to our team. We’ll walk the path with you, from the ad copy through to the hour after someone hits submit.
FAQs
What causes poor Google Ads lead quality?
Usually the account is fine and the filtering is missing. Ad copy that appeals to everyone, a contact form that treats every enquiry identically, and a reply that arrives two days later will each produce enquiries your sales team disqualifies.
Should I put minimum project size or scope limits in my ad copy?
Yes, when your smallest viable job is large. Naming commercial only, a minimum order, or a service area will lower your click-through rate and reduce the calls your team writes off. Judge it on enquiry quality after a month, not on clicks after a fortnight.
How many fields should a B2B contact form have?
Add one qualifying field to the standard name, email, phone and message. Pick the question your estimator asks first on the phone, use a dropdown with bands rather than an open box, and leave the rest of the form alone.
How fast should I reply to a Google Ads enquiry?
Within the same working day at the outside, and inside the hour where you can. Harvard Business Review’s audit of 2,241 companies found firms making contact inside the first hour were nearly seven times more likely to qualify the lead.
Can Smart Bidding work if I only get a few conversions a month?
Google recommends judging it over a period holding at least 30 conversions, and 50 for Target ROAS. Below that, consolidate campaigns to pool the signal, change targets rarely, and consider Maximise Clicks with tight keywords where Target CPA keeps stalling.