Why agencies struggle to improve Google Ads lead quality
These days optimising Google Ads for raw leads - someone filling in a form or calling - eventually fills your inbox with the kind of leads nobody wants. Spam, wrong numbers and so on.
Most agencies know this by now. They also know the solution: upload qualified leads as offline conversions.
The real problem is getting clients to tell us which leads are qualified.
This has been raised over and over again as I've been onboarding agencies to Litiro so I wanted to share a few ideas on how to handle it.
There are really only a handful of ways to get this feedback. Some work well. Most don’t.
The ideal: feedback as a byproduct
The best way to get feedback is when the feedback is a byproduct of the normal work of turning a lead into a sale.
For instance, one of our clients installs gutters. They call every lead to schedule an appointment for an estimator to visit the site.
If the lead is unqualified - out of area, wanting something the business doesn’t do etc - they won’t send an estimator out.
Litiro integrates with their work management system (Jobber in their case). When a quote is created, Jobber tells Litiro. Because only qualified leads get quotes it's a reliable signal. We upload that as an offline conversion to Google Ads.
This works because it’s invisible. The client manages the work in the normal way and we get the feedback without any extra effort.
It also ticks all the boxes for useful conversion reporting:
- Accurate. You either create a quote or you don’t.
- Complete. Every quoted lead is marked as qualified.
- Timely. The conversion is created at the moment the work happens.
This is how it should work. Everything else in this article is a workaround.
Proxy signals as a workaround
If you can’t get feedback from real business events, one popular option is to use a proxy.
The two most common are call duration and business email addresses in B2B campaigns.
For call duration, the thinking is that short calls are poor quality leads and longer calls mean the lead was a good fit.
This is naive.
A 10 second call could be junk, but it could equally be a dropped call from a good prospect. A 60 second call could mean a good lead, or it could just mean it took a bit longer to figure out it wasn’t a fit.
I've gone into more detail on this here if you're interested.
The same applies to filtering by email address. The idea is that if someone uses a free @gmail or @outlook address, they’re not serious. And if they have a company email address they're a good fit.
At best this is a blunt instrument. There is no valid reason for equating a company email address with a lead who wants what you sell, can afford it and is in an area you serve. More here.
Both of these approaches are easy to set up, but they’re wrong often enough that you wouldn't want your Google Ads dependent on them.
AI will save us all
Some call tracking providers have been trying to solve this with AI.
An AI listens to the call and decides if the lead was qualified based on the conversation.
I can see the attraction, but I’m a little iffy about it:
- Privacy and data protection. We’ve got psychologists, therapists and lawyers using Litiro. Their conversations should be kept private.
- Accuracy. AI is getting better improving, but it still makes mistakes. I suspect that deciphering a conversation between two people on a low-fidelity phone call is pretty difficult and more prone to errors than interpretting typed text.
- Cost. Right now AI is heavily subsidised. When that inevitably changes, the cost of processing calls could become significant.
This might become a good solution in future, but I don’t think we’re there yet. I wouldn't mind being proved wrong though.
The reality: human input
That leaves asking humans to mark leads as qualified or not. Easy in theory. But often with one big hairy problem:
The person doing the work gets no real benefit from doing it.
A busy service adviser in an auto shop doesn’t care about marking a lead as qualified or not. It doesn’t help them do their job. They don't get paid more. It's just an extra task they have to repeat 20 times a day.
If you want any hope of getting people to give accurate feedback the system needs to meet a few conditions:
- Easy to use. No one wants to learn another system.
- Fast. It should take seconds, not minutes.
- Close to the moment. The longer you wait, the less likely they are to remember the lead.
If you can’t meet those conditions, you won’t get consistent data.
Here are a few approaches I’ve been exploring.
Update inside Litiro
We already have a lead screen in Litiro where leads can be updated.
This works reasonably well for office-based teams, and we could improve the mobile experience further.
But it still requires people to log into another system. Even though it's easy, it’s still friction.
Update from existing tools
Another approach is to let people mark leads as qualified from tools they already use.
For example, email.
In some other tools I've built we put a qualified / not qualified button on the lead delivery email. It works well for form leads because you have context: name, enquiry and so on.
I've been thinking of adding this to Litiro. Here's how it would work.
Litiro is compatible with most contact forms. If you capture leads using say Typeform or Fluent Forms you'd disable the lead notification from the form system. When the lead arrived in Litiro it'd send the notification to your client along with the qualified / not qualified button instead.
This doesn't work as well for phone call leads though.
SMS follow-up
We're integrated with most call tracking systems like CallRail etc. That means we could trigger an SMS at the end of the call. It could include a link to mark the lead as qualified, or even something as simple as “reply yes if the lead was qualified.”
This would work for low-volume campaigns where one person handles all the calls from a mobile phone - perhaps an independent contractor. In a busier setup with a switchboard, it’d break.
Call-based prompts
Some call tracking systems allow you to mark a lead as qualified after the call ends.
In theory this is good, but in practice it can feel awkward. You can’t end the call naturally, you have to wait for the lead to hang up.
We could do something similar to the SMS but with a call. "Press 1 if the lead was qualified..."
But, like an SMS, this is more suited to low-volume setups.
Where this leaves us
If you can get feedback from real business events like quotes, bookings or sales, that’s by far the best option.
Everything else is a workaround.
- Proxies are easy but unreliable.
- AI is promising but not there yet.
- Human input can work, but only if it’s quick, simple and fits into existing workflows.
That’s the problem I’ve been trying to solve with Litiro. I'm curious, how are you getting feedback from your clients?
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