When managing a lead generation campaign on Google Ads, one of the most common questions is, "How much is our return on ad spend?". In other words, how much money are we making from the ads?

If you can answer that question, the next question is obviously, "How can we maximize our return on ad spend?".

While it is possible to track offline sales conversions on lead gen campaigns by syncing the sales CRM with Google Ads, it doesn't make sense for every business. Some don't use a CRM at all, or some use an old legacy CRM that makes it really difficult to export the data you need for offline conversion tracking. Others have a website where it's impossible to create a hidden form field to capture the GCLID.

Because of this, most Google Ad lead gen campaigns simply track when the website visitor becomes a lead. The most common conversions for lead gen campaigns being:

1. Form Submissions
2. Calls
3. Chat initiations
4. Bookings

Unfortunately, the way Google Ads conversion tracking works, you don't get the name of the actual lead that triggered the "conversion". Therefore, it can be a little challenging to (a) track the return on ad spend from your campaign and (b) maximize your return on ad spend.

So how are you supposed to track campaign profitability and maximize profitability?

The first step is determining on average how much each lead is worth to the business. Once you have that figure, you can figure out how much per lead you can spend on average to achieve say a 5-to-1 return on ad spend or better (i.e. for every dollar spent on ads you make $5).

Now you have a target cost per conversion or cost per lead to aim for to achieve profitability with the campaign. You can also assign values to your conversions now to experiment with maximize ROAS bid strategy down the road.

Money icons created by monkik - Flaticon

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