Your Google Ads campaigns are learning from the wrong customer

Almost every ad account we take over is in the same state: the figures look good, but revenue isn't keeping pace. There are more leads, the cost per lead is lower and the dashboard is full of green. And yet the sales team says nothing has changed.

The cause is almost always what the campaigns are learning, and almost never the budget.

What you measure is what Google looks for

A Google Ads campaign today is a bidding algorithm that optimises for one thing: the signal you call a conversion. If you call "form submitted" a conversion, the algorithm gets better and better at finding people who submit forms. It really does learn that well. It just isn't what you need.

The people who fill in forms are not the people who buy. There is overlap, but it is smaller than you'd hope. The longer you optimise for the wrong signal, the further the algorithm drifts away from your real customer. It gets better at the wrong thing every week.

That is why an account can decline for months while every report shows progress. The report measures exactly what the algorithm optimises for, so the two confirm each other.

Turning it around

A smarter bidding algorithm or a new campaign structure will not solve this. What does help is feeding your sales data back into the ad account.

In practice, each lead gets an identifier, which you store in your CRM. If that lead becomes a customer months later, a signal goes back to Google with the real value, which is known as an offline conversion. The signal then says "conversion worth €4,200" instead of just "conversion". From that moment on, the system learns who spends money instead of who fills in forms.

In the first few weeks after that, the figures usually look worse. The number of conversions drops, the cost per conversion rises, and anyone who only looks at the dashboard gets nervous. That is part of the process: you are no longer counting what is easiest to count.

Why almost nobody does it

It is not difficult, but it is tedious.

You need access to the CRM, someone who understands how sales works and an agreement on what a customer is worth. Those are three conversations outside the marketing department. An agency that only works inside the ad account does not have those conversations. So it doesn't happen, and everyone keeps optimising for forms.

That is why we insist on one conversation a month about the decisions in your account. You know what a customer is worth, and we don't. Without that number, every bid is a guess with a nice interface around it.

What you can do on Monday

You don't need a big project to get started.

• Find out which conversion your campaigns are currently optimising for. Often there is more than one, and conversions get counted twice.
• Ask sales what share of the leads from ads become customers. If nobody knows, that is your answer.
• Check whether your CRM has a field for where a lead came from. It usually does, and it is usually empty.

With those three answers, you will know within an afternoon whether your campaigns are learning from the right customer or from the easiest one.

More budget on a campaign that is learning the wrong thing only makes the gap bigger.

We do this first in almost every account we take over. Almost nobody asks for it, because clients always ask for more leads. What you need is better leads.