Quick answer
Cost per lead is a better Google Ads KPI than cost per click because cheap clicks often come from irrelevant searches that never convert. Track calls and form fills as conversions, bid toward them, remove wasted search terms weekly, and send traffic to a focused landing page. Then judge campaigns on what each lead costs.
Two accounts. One pays $1.20 per click, the other $4.80. The first looks four times better on a dashboard. But if the cheap clicks come from people searching for jobs, free advice or a different city, and the expensive ones come from people ready to book, the “bad” account is the one making money.
That's why we stopped reporting clicks as a success metric years ago. Here's how we set campaigns up around leads instead.
Step 1: Track the right conversions
Without proper conversion tracking, smart bidding optimizes toward whatever you tell it is a conversion. If that's a page view, you'll get lots of page views.
- Track form submissions on the thank-you page or with a GTM event.
- Track calls from ads (call extensions) and calls from the website (with a forwarding number or a click-to-call event).
- Turn on enhanced conversions so Google can match more of them.
- Mark only real leads as primary conversions. Newsletter sign-ups and scroll depth stay secondary.
Step 2: Clean the search terms every week
Broad match and Performance Max can find good traffic, but they also wander. Open the search terms report every week and add negatives for anything that will never buy: “jobs”, “salary”, “free”, “course”, competitors you don't want to pay for, and areas you don't serve.
Step 3: Structure campaigns by intent
Keep high-intent searches (“emergency plumber near me”) away from research searches (“how to fix a leaking pipe”). They convert at very different rates and need different budgets, bids and ads. Brand searches get their own campaign too, so they don't flatter the numbers of everything else.
Step 4: Send clicks to a page built for the ad
Sending ad traffic to your homepage makes people hunt for what they searched. A landing page with the same promise as the ad, a short form, a click-to-call button and a few trust signals almost always lowers cost per lead. Page speed matters here too; we cover that in why a slow website costs you leads.
Step 5: Judge on cost per lead, then lead quality
Once tracking is solid, the weekly question becomes simple: what did each lead cost, by campaign and keyword? Monthly, go one step further and ask the sales team which leads actually turned into jobs. Feed that back into Google with offline conversion imports if you can.
Our PPC management service starts with exactly this audit: tracking, structure and wasted spend. In most audits, the search terms report is where wasted spend shows up first.
