A lead generation campaign in Google Ads has one job: make the phone ring and bring in enquiry forms from people you can actually serve. Clicks, impressions and even Google’s own conversion count only matter if they lead there. I build and run Google Ads campaigns for UK service businesses that win work by phone or form, and I set them up so you can see which enquiries became paying customers.
What changes when a campaign is built around leads
How a search campaign is structured, from keywords to ad groups, is covered on my page about Google search ads management. This page is about everything around it when the goal is a call or a form: how each contact is captured, counted, checked for quality and reported back to Google, so the bidding chases the people who buy rather than the people who merely fill in a box.
- Each call and form is counted once, from the right source. No double counting, no thank-you page views passing as enquiries, no ten-second calls recorded as leads.
- Google learns from good leads, not all leads. When you tell the account which enquiries turned into quotes or sales, its bidding starts to favour searches that look like those.
- You can judge spend against what a customer is worth. A cost per qualified lead set beside your average job value is a number you can make decisions with.
Who this suits, and who it does not
It suits businesses where one customer is worth enough to pay for several enquiries, and where people search for the service when they need it: trades and home services, solicitors, accountants, private clinics, training providers, removals firms and business-to-business suppliers. It works best when someone can answer the phone during the hours the ads run and reply to forms the same day.
It suits you less if you sell through an online checkout, which needs a different campaign set-up, or if almost nobody searches for what you offer yet. In that second case, putting the offer in front of people before they search, with Facebook and Instagram lead ads, is often the better place to start.
What the work covers
Search campaigns aimed at people ready to enquire
Lead campaigns favour searches that signal a decision: a service plus a place, words like “quote”, “near me”, “emergency” or “consultation”, and specific problems such as a boiler losing pressure. Research-style searches (“how much does a loft conversion cost”) can bring leads too, but they usually need a page that answers the question before asking for contact details.
Lead form assets
A lead form asset lets someone send their details from inside the ad, without visiting your site. It is quick on a phone, which tends to make each lead cheaper and sometimes thinner on intent, because Google can pre-fill details from the person’s account. I add a qualifying question or two to slow the casual taps down, and set up a route that sends each lead to your inbox or CRM promptly rather than leaving it sitting in Google Ads. The form must link to your privacy policy, and under UK GDPR that policy needs to say how the enquiry data is used.
Calls from the ad and from the website
For many trades and local services the phone call is the lead. A call asset puts your number on the ad, and Google can count calls made from it as conversions once they last longer than a threshold you choose. Calls made after someone reaches your website are a separate problem: the number shown on the page has to be swapped for a tracked one so the call can be tied back to the ad. Both routes need call tracking, and the method is agreed with you before work starts, based on how your customers tend to call. If a third-party call tracking provider records or stores calls, your privacy policy has to name it, and callers should be told when a call is recorded.
Landing pages that match the search
Someone who searched for an electrician to fit an EV charger in Croydon should land on a page about EV charger installation, with your area, your phone number visible on a mobile screen and a short form. Send that person to a home page or a generic contact page and they have to hunt for the service they searched for, which is where paid clicks tend to leak away. Where the right page does not exist, I write a brief for one or build it through my landing page design for paid campaigns.
Lead quality and feeding outcomes back to Google
Google only knows that a form was sent or a call was made. It does not know that half of those enquiries were job seekers, sales pitches or people outside your area unless you tell it. Enhanced conversions for leads match a lead to the ad click using a hashed email address or phone number, so when a lead later becomes a quote or a sale in your CRM, that outcome can be sent back to the account. For smaller businesses without a CRM, a simple shared spreadsheet where someone marks each lead as good or not can do the same job by upload.
Bidding on leads
Until tracking has been tested and the account is recording conversions steadily, I keep bidding simple and the budget capped. Once enough qualified leads are coming through, a target CPA strategy can work towards a cost per lead you can afford. Setting that target from guesswork, or from a conversion count padded with junk, is how lead accounts end up spending freely on enquiries nobody wanted.
Consent and UK privacy rules
Ad tracking on a UK website falls under UK GDPR and PECR, so tags that set cookies should wait for consent. I check the cookie banner works with Google’s consent mode, so conversions from visitors who decline are modelled rather than simply lost, and that your privacy policy names every service that receives lead or call data.
How I run a lead generation campaign
- Agree what a lead is. We decide together what counts as a qualified enquiry, roughly what a new customer is worth to you and the most you can pay per lead.
- Fix and test the tracking. I submit test forms and make test calls, then confirm each one appears once, against the right conversion action. My guide on how to check your conversion tracking works shows the same tests if you want to run them yourself.
- Build the campaign and the landing page together. Keywords, ads, call and form assets, location settings and ad schedule are set around the hours you can answer.
- Launch on a capped budget. In the first weeks I review the searches that triggered ads closely and block the irrelevant ones.
- Review leads with you. On a cycle agreed before work starts, you or your team mark which enquiries were good, which were not and why.
- Feed back and adjust. Qualified outcomes go back into the account, bidding moves towards them, and spend shifts to the services and areas that produce work.
Problems I see most often in UK lead accounts
- Inflated conversion counts. A form counted twice, a thank-you page view counted as a lead, or clicks on the phone number counted as calls even when nobody dialled.
- Ads shown outside the service area. Google’s default location setting includes people who show interest in a place, not only people in it, so a Leeds plumber can pay for clicks from someone in Glasgow reading about Leeds.
- Ads running when nobody answers. Calls at 9pm to a business that closes at 5pm go to voicemail, and many callers do not leave a message.
- Lead forms with no follow-up route. Leads sit unseen in the Google Ads interface for days, by which time the person has booked someone else.
- Bidding trained on junk. An automated strategy told that every enquiry is equally valuable will happily find more of the cheapest, least useful ones.
What you receive
- A written tracking plan listing every conversion action, what triggers it and the test that proved it works.
- The campaign build in your own Google Ads account, which you keep if we stop working together.
- A landing page brief, or the page itself where that is part of the work.
- A lead log for marking enquiry quality, set up in your CRM or a shared spreadsheet.
- A report, on a schedule agreed before work starts, showing cost per lead and cost per qualified lead, what changed and what I plan next.
Cost and next step
Your ad spend is paid directly to Google from your own account; my fee is separate. Each quote is written after a free first call, in GBP, and agreed in writing before work starts. To see what clicks and leads typically cost in your sector before deciding on a budget, look at my UK cost-per-click and cost-per-lead benchmarks. If you want the whole account run month to month rather than a lead campaign set up and handed over, that is my PPC management service.
The quickest way to start is to book a free 30-minute call. Tell me what you sell, where you work and roughly how many enquiries you get now, and I will tell you what I would check first.