How I reduce wrong-business leads from Google Ads

This is for you if you advertise on Google Ads and get leads who think they're contacting a different business:-

• People who ring your number but think they're calling someone else.
• People who fill in your enquiry form when they're trying to contact some other business.

This is frustrating for you and the person calling because you've both wasted your time. It's also expensive (for you) because very few of these leads will turn into customers.

These wrong-business leads from Google Ads often happen when you use phrase match keywords.

In the past phrase match keywords gave you more, but well targeted, traffic. Here's how it used to work.

Imagine for a moment that you rented Harley Davidson motorcycles.

The phrase match keyword “Harley Davidson rental” would show ads to people who’s search included the phrase “Harley Davidson rental”. Searches like:-Harley Davidson rental near me or Long term Harley Davidson Rental would trigger your ad. They'd normally be a good fit for your business.

Today, phrase match keywords don't need to include the exact words. Here's what Google says.

Ads may show on searches that include the meaning of your keyword. The meaning of the keyword can be implied...

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7478529#zippy=%2Cphrase-match

In practice this meaning-based matching shows your ads to some people who are not a good fit for your business.

Google might think that someone searching for “Dodgy Dave bike rental number” is in the market to hire a Harley Davidson. While this is possible, it's more likely that they actually want to call Dodgy himself.

A lot of people don't read anything carefully - let alone the 12px light grey domain name in your advert. They just click the first link on the page. If that happened to be your advert you're out the cost of that click.

The best, and probably only long-term, solution to this is to tell Google which leads are a good fit for your business so they can show your ads to people who are more likely to become customers. I've written about this here if you're interested:

In the short term the following should also help:-

Use exact match keywords only. This is likely to mean fewer impressions, clicks and leads, and may cost more per click. But, it should reduce the waste. You'll have to balance the savings from wrong-business leads against the loss in legitimate leads from phrase match keywords.

Add competitor names as negative keywords. You'll know some of them already and you might find some in the search terms report. It's also worth looking at the auction insights report to see who else is advertising.

I like to set up a negative keyword list with all competitor names and share it with all the campaigns. That's easier than maintaining a list per campaign.

As an aside, you might think it'd be useful to have Dodgy Dave's customers calling you so you can win them over. Competitor campaigns - sometimes called conquesting campaigns - are a valid strategy in some cases. More on this here if you're interested.

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