Are Your Google Ads Leads Really Unqualified? 4-Question Test

I’m tired of ads taking the blame for a sales process that doesn’t exist.

Every week somebody tells me their leads aren’t qualified. Sometimes they’re right and the targeting needs work. Most of the time the leads were fine and nobody worked them.

The test

Somebody fills out your form at 9pm. When do they hear from you?

If the answer is the next morning, or whenever someone gets to it, or we called once and they didn’t pick up, you don’t have a lead quality problem. You have a speed and follow-up problem, and from the outside those look identical.

Four questions, answered honestly:

·Do you contact them in minutes, or in hours?

·Do you call more than once, or does one unanswered ring end it?

·Is there a script? Does the person answering know how to turn interest into a booked appointment?

·Is the offer they get on the phone the same one that made them click?

If any of those is a no, that lead never had a chance, and no amount of targeting fixes it.

There is one number everybody quotes here, and it’s worth knowing where it came from. In 2007 Dr. James Oldroyd studied three years of data across six companies, fifteen thousand leads and over a hundred thousand call attempts. Calling inside five minutes instead of thirty made a firm roughly 21 times more likely to qualify the lead, and about 100 times more likely to reach them at all.

Two caveats I’d want if somebody quoted that at me. It’s nearly twenty years old, and it was published by a company selling lead response software. So treat the multiplier as directional. The direction itself has never been in dispute.

The argument that settles this for me

If getting leads and getting people to show up to meetings were as easy as hiring an agency, I wouldn’t run your ads.

I’d run your business.

Follow it logically. If an agency could generate the leads, close the leads, and white-label the skill that delivers the work, there’d be no reason to hand any of it back to you. The reason agencies run ads and not your company is that ads are the systematizable part. Your offer, your sales process, your delivery, your reputation: that’s yours, and that’s the hard part.

Who owns what

I can tell you what I see converting. I can tell you the setups, the offers, the creative and the frameworks that work across accounts. What I can’t do is know your business model better than you do. You know what sells because you’ve already sold it.

When it is the ads, here’s what fixing it looks like

Sometimes the leads really are bad. Then it’s mine.

Here is the first month from an electrical account: a first-time advertiser, no prior account history, nineteen qualified leads at $157 each. That did not happen on its own. Two changes are logged against that month, fourteen negative keywords added in the first week and a bid cap tightened the day after, and the unqualified call rate came down after both.

That’s what an ads-side lead quality problem looks like when somebody actually works it: a dated change, and a number that moved because of it.

So here’s the version of this that should worry you. If you’re being told your leads are unqualified and nothing in the account has changed, nobody has looked yet.

If you don’t know what’s working, that’s the first thing to fix

No leads, no sales, no customers, and no idea why. That isn’t something you outsource. That’s the thing you go find out.

Do some research on your own. Look at what’s working in your market right now and what isn’t. Bring that to the table.

There’s no silver bullet where you hire an agency, they handle the ads and the landing pages and the sales, and your business grows while you watch. The accounts that work are the ones where the owner brings what they know, the agency brings what they know, and both sides argue about the next move until it’s right.

Before you call it a lead quality problem

Go look at three numbers: how fast you called them, how many times you called them, and what you said.

If all three are solid and the leads are still bad, then it’s an ads problem and I’ll go fix it.

Want somebody to actually look? I’ll read the account and send back what I find in writing, with the dates and the numbers. Request an account review.