Why your Google Ads leads suddenly turn to junk

I helped with two struggling Google Ads accounts. The problems had different symptoms, but the root cause was the same.

The first had been running a P Max campaign successfully for several months. The client, a commercial aircon contractor, was happy with the lead volume and quality.

But then something changed and the campaign started producing mostly spam. Leads with names like “asdf”. Phone numbers that led to people who hadn't enquired. The usual junk.

On the surface the second account was very different. It was for a life insurance company.

They ran tight search campaigns with exact match keywords. For years this setup had generated good quality leads. But recently they'd been getting more and more enquiries from people who were too old to qualify for life insurance.

In both cases the change history showed nothing that would have caused the lead quality to drop.

I've seen this pattern often. Good quality leads for ages, then a few poor quality or spam leads, then mostly poor quality or spam. And no obvious changes to the setup.

It's the junk lead death spiral. And it happens when Google's bidding algorithm optimises for the wrong signal.

Both accounts had submitting a form as the primary conversion action. Any form submission counted as a conversion, regardless of age or even whether the submission came from a human.

And that's where the problems started.

In the life insurance industry clicks from older people are cheap because most advertisers don't want them. They're uninsurable.

It's the same with clicks from bots and spammers. Nobody wants them, so they're cheap.

Google's bidding algorithm repeats what you reward

When you tell it that every form submission is good, it'll get you as many as it can for as little as possible.

That means showing more and more of your ads to the elderly and the bots.

From Google's perspective it's doing exactly what you've asked it to do: get as many form submissions as possible for your ad budget.

You can't fix this by adding negative keywords or tightening geographic targeting. Even narrowing age targeting isn't effective in the long term. Google will eventually find more cheap but poor quality clicks for you to pay for.

The only durable fix is to change the signal that the algorithm is learning from.

Instead of telling it that every single form submission is good, reward it only for legitimate qualified leads.

In time the algorithm learns from those signals and starts showing your ads to people who are actually likely to become customers.

The person managing the aircon account knew all of this. He wanted to optimise for offline conversions, but his client's CRM was a mobile phone and a paper diary.

When we talked he mentioned he was thinking of setting up a GoHighLevel account for the client so he could optimise for offline conversions through the entire pipeline.

Setting up a CRM is a common instinct for agencies that serve smaller businesses. But I've seen few cases where it lives up to what people hope for.

The technical side is easy.

But getting someone who's been managing their work with a pen and paper since 1998 to update a CRM is about as easy as pushing water uphill.

They might do it for a week or two, but after that they slip back and the data gets stale.

I think it's better to aim lower to start with. Instead of a full CRM, capture the simplest signal that improves lead quality.

Often just knowing if the lead was qualified — could you do business with this person — is enough to nudge the algorithm toward better leads.

This doesn’t need a complicated setup

For the aircon account the agency wired the contact form to a Google Sheet. Once a week the client marked each lead as qualified or not. The agency then uploaded the qualified leads as offline conversions.

For the life insurance account we did something similar, but with a slightly more structured system because they handled more leads.

Every new lead appeared in a simple lead list. When the customer service representative spoke to the person they marked the lead qualified or not.

The qualified leads were then uploaded to Google Ads as offline conversions.

We're using Litiro for this, but the tool itself isn’t the important part. The important part is capturing a signal that represents real business value, not just form submissions.

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