Map every route a Google Ads lead can take into your business

This article is part of a series on how I find high-leverage opportunities to make Google Ads more profitable..

This part of the profitability review maps all the ways in which Google Ads can generate an enquiry and how that enquiry enters the business.

For example:

Click on search ad → landing page → form.
Click on search ad → landing page → call the number on the page.
Click on call asset → call.
Click on call button on location asset → call.

Why mapping the ingress routes is important

It helps us check that we get every lead and that none slip through the cracks.
Getting the best results from Google Ads requires knowing which advertising produced each lead. Mapping the ingress routes shows what ad data is available when the lead is created, and if it's preserved in the lead management system (CRM from now on).

What I’ve found

Sometimes there are "shadow routes" that nobody thought about.

For example, a client used CallRail tracking phone numbers on the landing pages his agency set up. But, a visitor could click away from the landing page to the home page on his regular website: Click on search ad → landing page → main website → call.

The website didn't use a CallRail tracking number. It showed the plain old office number. When someone called, the call was handled, but nobody knew that the call started with Google Ads.

As a result, some sales that should have been credited to Google Ads looked like they came from SEO. What's more significant though is that they were using this dodgy data to decide where to spend their ad budget.

The questions in my audit template

Here are the exact questions I ask about every ingress route.

Name
What it means
How it happens

These make sure that there is a shared understanding of how a lead gets into the business.

The next three questions are there to see if we can confirm that every leads gets handled.

What source evidence is there that the enquiry occurred
What evidence of the enquiry is in the CRM
How do we reconcile these

The first looks for proof that the enquiry happened in the source system. For a form, this might be a submission saved in the form handling software. For a call, it might be a record in the call-tracking platform.

The second asks if there is a matching record in the CRM.

I ask the reconciliation question because there is no guarantee that every lead gets from the source system into the CRM.

I’ve seen legitimate form submissions marked as spam. I’ve written more about how this happens in The weak link that might be causing you to lose leads.
Calls get lost too. Connection issues mean that sometimes the phone doesn't ring. More on this here: The invisible Google Ads problem: zero-second calls.

The reconciliation question finds out if reconciliation is possible (a separate source record exists) and if it's actually gets done. Does someone check that if CallRail says we got 100 calls the CRM shows 100 leads? And, if not, what happens?

The last three questions look at the data that travels with the lead.

Data available at source
Data sent
Data received

The data available depends on the ingress route.

A landing page form might have name, email, phone number, and the text of the enquiry message. You might also have ad tracking information like utm_campaign, utm_source and click identifiers like gclid or gbraid.
A call might have the caller’s number, the time and duration of the call, a recording and the tracking number they called. If the call was from a website or landing page the page and ad tracking information might also be available.

We don't necessarily send everything to the CRM. We might deliberately exclude some information for privacy reasons, because it isn’t useful, or because the CRM can't store it.

Finally, we check the data received by the CRM. This confirms that the transfer actually worked. It also shows if information was lost, mangled or put into the wrong field while moving between systems.

The next part of the profitability review looks at how a lead moves through the sales journey from first contact to eventually becoming a paying customer.

Most Google Ads Problems Aren't Google Ads Problems

If my writing resonates with you, I'd like to give you a copy of my book, Profitable Google Ads. The book was written for business owners, but many PPC professionals have found it valuable too.

Before you download it, what describes you best?