When managing a lead generation campaign on Google Ads, one of the most common questions is, "How can we maximize our return on ad spend (ROAS)?". In other words, how can you make more money from your ads? How can you get more quality leads that then convert into sales/customers?

To answer this question, you must first know what your campaign's existing ROAS is. Most lead gen campaigns only have conversion tracking set up for form submissions and calls. 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.

Some businesses will just drive their Google Ad traffic to dedicated landing pages so they know anyone that submits a web form from this landing page came from Google Ads. This allows them to calculate how many new customers have come from Google Ads.

There are 2 problems with this method:

1. You don't get this sales conversion data in your Google Ads Campaign, which makes it very difficult to then optimize the campaign to increase these offline sales.

2. Not every Google Ad visitor will convert on your landing page, some will go to your main website and submit a form.

So what's the best way to calculate the ROAS for your Google Ad Campaign? By setting up ​Google Ads Offline Conversion Tracking​. This will allow you to see how many offline sales conversions are coming from Google Ads, and more importantly, you will have this offline sales conversion data in your Google Ad Campaign, allowing you to optimize the campaign to maximize your return on ad spend.

Setting up offline conversion tracking can be difficult for some businesses if they don't use a CRM or have 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 or the form doesn't allow you to set up Enhanced Conversions for Leads.

If you can, you should ​hire an expert​ to help you resolve these issues or find ways to get around them. If you can't do this, or ​learn how to do it yourself​, then your next best options is to just calculate your ROAS holistically.

The first step is determining on average how much each lead is worth to the business. How many leads does it take, on average, before you convert one into a customer? And how much is the average customer worth to your business? Not just from Google Ads, but from all marketing channels.

Once you have these numbers for your business, 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.