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Join Ads Product Liaison Ginny Marvin as we break down the steps to delivering lead quality in an era of signal loss and AI-driven consumer behavior.
Episode overview
From tracking fragmented online-to-offline user journeys to navigating conversion windows that can stretch for months, lead gen marketers face a set of challenges that are uniquely complex.
In this episode of Ads Decoded, we’re looking past the simple form fill to discuss how practitioners can master lead quality in an era of signal loss and AI-driven consumer behavior.
Join Ads Product Liaison Ginny Marvin, Mimi Forsythe (Global Head of Lead Gen Solutions) and Lydia Azaret (Lead Gen Measurement Product Manager) as they break down the steps needed - from lead scoring to data hygiene - to enable your campaigns to deliver high quality lead volume.
In this episode:
- The offline gap: Why mapping the full lead-to-sale journey is foundational to driving performance with Google AI.
- Value-centric measurement: How to implement proxy values and lead scoring to tell the bidder what “good” looks like.
- Data Manager: Navigating the one-stop hub for connecting CRMs and first-party data.
- Tactical must-dos: Understanding the nuances of enhanced conversions for leads and Google tag gateway
Want Ginny’s key takeaways and tips from this conversation? Subscribe to the Ads Decoded newsletter.
Additional resources
Follow these steps to generate high quality leads with Google Ads.
Learn about value-based bidding for lead gen
Ginny Marvin shares how to tell if value-based bidding is right for you.
Unlock high-quality leads with AI-powered Search
Discover the newest AI-powered Search innovations, including AI Max for Search.
Lean gen customer case studies
How brands are using Google AI-powered solutions to generate leads.
Transcript
Lydia: One kind of reframe that I like to think about is better intent almost being synonymous with higher lead quality. Our AI finding better intent users means finding users that are more likely to convert for your business. There are a few ways that we’re doing that …
Ginny: I’m Ginny Marvin as Product Liaison at Google and this is Ads Decoded. Today we are diving deep into the world of lead generation. And I don’t have to tell you from tracking fragmented user journeys to navigating long conversion windows, not to mention signal loss from industry changes, lead gen marketers face unique and complex challenges.
Today, I’m speaking with Mimi Forsythe, Global Head of Lead Gen Solutions and Lydia Azaret, a Product Manager specializing in Lead Gen Measurement. So whether you are marketing software, higher education programs, fintech startup, local accounting firm, a B2B, B2C, big budgets or small, I think you’ll find this conversation informative and actionable.
Mimi and Lydia, welcome to Ads Decoded. Very excited for you to be here with us. And we are going to be talking lead gen.
I want to start off by asking, what drew you to lead gen? What gets you excited about working on lead gen solutions?
Mimi: Sure. I’m happy to get started. I think what drew me to lead gen was just the challenge inherent in the complexity of the business model, and making sure that we are really building solutions that work for advertisers in this complex set of verticals.
Why I’m really excited at this specific moment, is that we have a lot of engagement from product stakeholders across areas who are really, really super interested in understanding the challenges that you all face, and proposing ideas to help bridge the gap in what our solutions are able to do today.
Lydia: You know, I hate to give such a similar answer, but I do think lead gen advertisers face some of the most complex solutions in the measurement and advertising space, often trying to track really fragmented online to offline user journeys, and figuring out how to both meet customers where they’re at in their discovery journey - but also use all of the data at their disposal to try and drive the best outcomes with Google Ads.
And so those are some really kind of hard, complex problems to solve for. And as a Product Manager, that’s what I love to spend my time doing. So that really drew me to the lead gen space, and I’m really excited to be digging into how we can solve for lead gen advertisers better in Google Ads.
Ginny: To your point: important to note that we’re talking about a broad spectrum of advertisers with different goals, different audiences, different verticals and industries. So, a lot of individual issues and challenges that folks are facing.
I want to talk first about what we’re seeing in terms of behavior and how that’s shifting. We’ve talked a lot about how search queries are getting longer, more complex. And what are some of the implications of search behavior shifts for lead gen advertisers?
Mimi: So I think in the realm of Search, we’re talking a lot about not only how consumer behavior is changing, but how we as a company have had to adjust the core Search experience to really, like, come up to the expectation of today’s consumer.
So as we see more complex queries, we really need to meet that moment and be able to answer questions in depth. So we’re seeing the rise of AI experiences like AI Overviews and AI Mode. And this is really where lead gen verticals kind of thrive, right? We’re talking about deeply researched, deeply intentional consumer questions like, what car insurance do I need to buy?
Or, what program should I enroll my child in if I need a tutor? So this deep intent and this deep research is really where we are trying to meet the consumer and bridge that gap with the lead gen advertiser being able to provide as rich of information as they can, and be there in the moment that matters when the user is asking a very specific question, that our advertisers want to be present for.
Ginny: Interesting because oftentimes lead gen advertisers, they’re creating that content to answer these questions already. They have it on hand. And so thinking about how to incorporate those moments into their breadth of assets, being able to show up in these new experiences more dynamically - and to meet people’s intent where they are - is really interesting.
Also YouTube: it might not be on every lead gen marketer’s radar. Anything you can share about behavior we’re seeing on YouTube that would be of interest to lead gen marketers?
Mimi: So we know that, for example, Shorts has 200 billion daily views. We are increasingly seeing interest in YouTube not only for awareness and consideration use cases, but for demand generation and nurturing, to make sure that by the time we get that actual lead generated, it is of high quality and has been preceded by touchpoints, where the user’s interest has been nurtured along the way.
Ginny: Interesting. We had Sarah Hathiramani talk about Demand Gen campaigns last fall on Ads Decoded, and speaking to just that how the campaign is now much more attuned to be able to focus on performance goals and help advertisers meet their performance goal, on YouTube.
And so for advertisers to think about YouTube much more as a performance channel and a full customer journey channel versus maybe thinking about it strictly as a branding opportunity.
And speaking of customer journey, Lydia, I want to ask you a couple questions about, you know, the first step we often tell lead gen advertisers is to map out their full customer journey. Can you talk about why that’s important and what that looks like?
Lydia: Yeah, absolutely. I think lead gen advertisers, more so than even other segments, understand that their users’ touchpoints are more fragmented, more cross device, more cross channel than ever before. And mapping out the most crucial touchpoints that turn maybe a casual browser, casual lead, into that final purchaser and converter is a foundational to understanding what touchpoints you actually want to bring into Google to help drive our AI.
I think you hear this from us a lot. Google AI is only as good as the data that you feed it, and so mapping out that customer journey helps you really figure out what you ultimately want to measure and optimize towards in Google Ads.
Ginny: It’s not just about online actions, right? It’s like taking it all the way through to, closed sale offline, and any other offline actions as well.
Lydia: We’re trying to ensure all advertisers harness the power of measuring the full customer journey that we know bridges the online and offline world. Bringing in those lower funnel conversion actions - these tend to be more qualified, converted lead stages - is incredibly important to giving our AI the foundational data it needs to go and bring you back more high quality leads.
Ginny: Great. Okay. All right. Let’s talk tools and how we actually go about implementing some of the things we’ve been talking about. We talked about the importance of Data Strength and sharing your first party data in our first episode this season on measurement.
And how does Data Strength drive performance and value for lead gen advertisers specifically? Why should Data Strength be top of mind?
Lydia: You can think of Data Strength as more of a foundational principle that references the most comprehensive data set up that can ensure you are giving our AI all of the necessary inputs to drive the most ROI for your business.
In a perfect world, we’d have all of the signals we need to get a full view of your customers and their conversions. But as we know, there have been many changes over the past few years leading to signal loss. That means we have gaps in what we can measure and see. And so Data Strength is what allows you to fill in those gaps as much as possible.
And the principle is shared across advertisers. But what might look different for lead gen versus another business type, is the application of Data Strength, the innate online to offline journey.
For most lead gen businesses, where Data Strength can really bring the most value to lead gen is where possible to bid towards those lowest funnel conversion actions.
Ginny: Lead quality obviously, is a top concern of customers and making sure that the traffic they’re bringing in is the traffic that is going to be of value to them.
And I want to switch to measurement a little bit, and just understand why measurement is so critical, especially for the lead gen businesses.
Mimi: What we are really trying to do is bridge this notion of what a lead quality signal is and how we translate that. It’s how Google Ads uses that data, right? Lydia alluded to some of the work that we’re doing to really drive towards getting those deeper funnel conversions, right? So understanding what leads result in sales, and really drive purchases.
In the idealized state, we are able to get that lowest funnel conversion with the dollar value attached. This is kind of like, the unicorn best practice to make sure that our bidder understands what outcomes are most valuable to you.
Lead gen is a complex space. Oftentimes these conversions lag really long or they’re just very low in volume and not all that useful to the bidder, just given that sparseness of data.
And so it’s really important to think about the different options to bring this notion of quality into Google Ads. So I’m going to touch briefly just about what we call value-centric measurement, which is essentially making sure that when you’re sending us conversions, you also pass a notion of value, of what those conversions are in relation to each other.
Not all leads are created equal. We know, some will be of higher value, higher propensity to convert. And there are multiple ways to share those values with us, right?
So in this sort of constrained situation where your lower funnel events are just too sparse, or lag very, very long, there are things we tend to talk about with advertisers.
So one is this concept of proxy values. So something that is akin to a lead score at the time the lead is submitted, right? So in the context of your business, you can think about the things that you know are indicative of higher value.
In the example of auto, that might be a specific make and model, and really tiering which of those is more valuable than the next. In the context of B2B software, it may be something like, what size is the company and how many employees does it have?
So we see a lot of advertisers implementing this type of lead scoring and proxy value strategy. And then - slightly more advanced, but you know, it depends on the business and what you’re able to do - we see advertisers also implementing predictive value.
So understanding the historical context of leads and what has driven the best outcomes in the past. You can then apply models to current conversions and pass us those predictive values, right?
And this is all again in lieu of having that final purchase value available. If you have that, we always recommend that that is the best thing to share for our AI to optimize best. All of this comes back to measurement foundations, right? And our understanding of the conversions that are of the highest value to you.
Ginny: Great. And I want to talk more about the how behind that. But before we go further on intent, we often talk about how Google AI is getting better at understanding intent across the entire customer journey. Can you share more about that and why it is important?
Lydia: One kind of reframe that I like to think about is better intent almost being synonymous with higher lead quality. Our AI finding better intent users means finding users that are more likely to convert for your business. There are a few ways that we’re doing that.
First, measuring that journey in and of itself can help power our bidding systems through something that we’re working on called Journey Aware Bidding.
Historically, you may be aware we typically take a limited set of click, view conversion touchpoints to feed our bidding models and tell them what are the right kind of users and clicks to go after. But Journey Aware Bidding will actually make it so all of the conversions and touchpoints you’re measuring in your account help power our bidding systems’ understanding of what are the right users to go after at every point in that journey.
And the second thing I’d love to touch on is lead quality. When we think about, how can our AI find the highest quality leads for your business, the answer is really quite simple.
It’s showing ROI what those high quality leads look like. And you can do that by bringing in those lowest funnel touchpoints. That’s typically your qualified converted lead conversion actions.
You’re showing our AI, what those conversions typically look like and how to go after similar users in the future.
Ginny: I want to dive in a little bit more and how you figure out the right conversion action to bid to. This is a question I get a lot. You said to establish, set your values to all of my different conversion actions. But how should I be setting this up to make sure that I am getting the value or the conversions that I really want?
Mimi: Yeah, absolutely. Lydia shared the lead to sale mapping exercise. And really what that helps you to do is understand the different touchpoints along the way where you are interacting with a given user.
And from a Google AI standpoint, what we want to optimize for is the sweet spot between conversion value and delay. Finding that right balance is making sure that you have a sufficient volume of a conversion at that given stage, and that it happens relatively shortly after the ad click.
Ginny: Obviously, it will depend on the type of business that you’re in. I worked with a lot of Higher Ed marketers in the past, and that was always the big challenge. You get the information request and you could never tell if they actually ended up being enrolled.
And so being able to close that gap, whatever signals you can pass to be able to understand value to you, the better.
Mimi: Right? I love contextualizing it in example because for education, we know are some of the longest conversion timelines that we see. Enrollment and actual tuition payment in those programs can take anywhere from, let’s say, six months to 18 months.
So, you know, based on your historical data that, let’s say, signing up for an information session or even submitting the application is an indicator of ultimate enrollment.
We recommend that you use those things, assuming that they happen in some shorter time frame, to optimize to that, right?
And you’re really, just striking the balance between the data that is rich and sort of immediately available versus what you want to finally optimize for, which is the enrollment, right? But in these business models, where that data tends to lag, it’s really about finding that middle ground, and making sure that you feel confident about the predictive power of that event.
Ginny: All right. Let’s talk tools and how we actually go about implementing some of the things we’ve been talking about. Data Manager, Data Manager API, designed to help make it easier for advertisers to share that first party data and build their Data Strength.
What should advertisers know about using Data Manager other than its right in their Google Ads account? Anything that they should really be thinking about keeping in mind, when looking to bring their first party data.
Lydia: We’ve talked so much about measurement, and measuring every point of your customer journey in this conversation, and Data Manager is the enabler.
Whether that is an online or an offline conversion action, whether you’re talking conversion measurement or audience targeting. Think of Data Manager as kind of the one stop hub to enable all of that,
I’ll talk about the example of bringing in your offline conversion data, which tends to be maybe your qualified converted lead stage.
This is where you’re likely going to use our Data Manager API, or some of our native connections in Data Manager that have really easy one-click setup flows to wherever your conversion data lives. For many lead gen advertisers, this is likely a CRM.
Historically, bringing offline data into Google’s ecosystem has been an opaque process. Data Manager makes that process really clear.
There’s a UI that guides you through it, and we’re building out a lot of great functionality in Data Manager to help, for example, give you diagnostics to understand if there is anything going wrong with your data source.
If we’re getting the right data to help power all of the great conversion and audience targeting use cases that it supports.
Ginny: Great. And the other thing I like about it is that it ensures that you are just automatically getting that data upload frequently, consistently. So you’re not having that data lag where recency now becomes a challenge.
And there are a number of others: Google Analytics can get connected in Data Manager, Consent Mode can get managed in there. Anything more to add in terms of making sure that you’re getting the fullest amount of benefit from your first party data.
A little bit earlier, we alluded to signal loss and why that makes a Data Strength measurement foundation so critical to driving ROI for your business. And so the reality of solving for data loss is giving us as many signals as possible to help our systems find the most conversions, the most powerful audiences for your business.
So very tactically, what that means for offline conversion measurement, for example. Historically, we’ve largely just asked for your conversion data with click identifiers. And we have progressed that to say, please also give us user-provided data where possible and make sense for your business.
And now we’ve expanded that universe to even more identifiers, like IP address, like session attributes, like GBRAIDs where you have heavy iOS traffic. You may have a single conversion action or event where you have all of these signals.
This may vary across your data, but give us whatever you have and that will help us build the best measurement picture possible for your business.
And will give our systems the data that it needs to perform as best it can.
Ginny: So again, it’s both for your own measurement and helping feed the better with the signals and understanding of what is value to you.
Another, more tactical piece of this that I want to dig into is Enhanced Conversions for Leads. People maybe have Enhanced Conversions for Leads enabled, but what is Enhanced Conversions for Leads?
How is it different from Offline Conversion Import and any sort of nuances that people should be aware of?
Lydia: Yeah. Unfortunately, we’ve created ourselves a bit of an alphabet soup with the naming for all of these things, and that’s something that we’re trying to clean up. So stay tuned.
But to put it very simply, when you think about Enhanced Conversions and Enhanced Conversions for Leads, we’re talking about the usage of user-provided data to improve your conversion measurement.
We’ve typically used Enhanced Conversions for Leads to refer to your offline conversions, but similar to web-based enhanced conversions, it’s just giving us user-provided data to improve conversion measurement.
So as a lead gen advertiser, if we go back to mapping your lead to purchase journey, you’re likely going to have a few lower funnel, offline touchpoints, where - to measure those conversions - with Google, you’d have to be bringing in your offline conversion data, and this is where you’d want to think about enabling Enhanced Conversions for Leads.
You may already even be measuring these conversions with what we call OCI. Again, harkening back to the alphabet soup. But very simply, what we’d want you to do, for these offline conversions to be ECL-enabled is to bring in these offline conversions, with your GCLIDs, with your user-provided data, and that will give us more signals to give you much better measurement.
Mimi: Really, for any type of measurement that you are trying to do - online or offline - where we can get more signals against your conversions, that will help us increase the coverage of what we’re able to attribute to ad exposures, to other touchpoints, in the user journey.
This is really about making sure that you’re fortifying your measurement across your online and offline conversions, such that we can get you the most out of our automated tools.
Ginny: Thinking really tactically, we’ve talked about Data Manager. We talked about Enhanced Conversions. We talked about Enhanced Conversions for Leads, talked about Offline Conversion Import.
Looking across the spectrum, what are the must-dos for media and advertisers who are listening to this conversation?
Lydia: For the online touchpoints, you’ll be able to rely on our tag, the Google tag, to collect your tag-based online conversions. A really easy win is to upgrade to GTG. This gets you some very quick uplift in conversions. and we can also -
Ginny: Google Tag Gateway.
Lydia: Yes, Google Tag Gateway. And then we’d also recommend enabling Enhanced Conversions for your web, tag-based conversions.
Again this is very simply sending us user-provided data along with your conversions to improve measurement.
And when we move into the offline space, this is bringing in your offline conversion data through Data Manager, either programmatically via the API or through our native connectors in Data Manager. And Data Manager will help you bring in all the right signals.
Enhanced Conversions for Leads. This very simply is bringing in user-provided data with your offline conversions. Data Manager can help you map that appropriately along with any of the other signals we recommend like IP address, session attributes, GBRAIDS, etc.Data Manager is really the how of doing all of that.
Ginny: One of the other hows in this whole process are your conversion actions, and there are specific lead gen actions in Google Ads that enable a number of things for lead gen advertisers.
What is important to know about setting those up and should advertisers who are working with lead gen goals definitely be using those?
Mimi: Yeah, I love that you ask this a lot of what my team is spending our time thinking about is this concept of conversion hygiene, right? So making sure that when advertisers are setting up new conversion actions, that they’re set up in such a way that we can semantically understand what it means in the context of the user journey, right?
So for the sake of example, if you were to put all conversions in a category that said they’re all lead submits, we wouldn’t be able to distinguish what is shallow versus what’s deep, right?
And so I think the lead gen specific categories that apply in the offline space are really what are critical. So we have categories that refer to qualified leads, to converted leads - and then also purchase is an option - that when these tags, when these goals, are applied to your conversion actions, it allows Google AI to better understand what those conversion actions represent, right?
So we spent a lot of time talking about mapping this lead to sale journey. And really the only way that we have to understand what that journey progression looks like is by looking at the conversion goals that you’ve set up.
So what this unlocks is features like Journey Aware Bidding, higher lead quality, our ability to measure the lead quality that we’re delivering to you.
We really hope that this becomes just core to the muscle of any new conversion setup, because it really will become important to just unlocking a lot of the features that we have planned this year.
Ginny: I do want to talk about bidding more generally for lead gen advertisers and Smart Bidding specifically. What should advertisers be mindful about when choosing a Smart Bidding strategy with lead gen goals?
Mimi: Yes. This is also a very hot topic for us. I think that we have been - at Google - on a journey of trying to find which advertisers are the best fit for a value based strategy, a tROAS strategy versus a conversion based strategy, right? Like a tCPA.
And we sort of landed in this space that lead to: these signals can come via either of these strategies and either of the measurement strategies that sort of like are upstream of it, right?
I touched briefly before on value-centric measurement, and what we think about in terms of lead scoring, predictive proxy values.
And you are a great fit for value-based bidding, if you have confidence that you’re able to pass those values that predict the final conversion. Value-based strategies will work best when the advertiser has a sense of what predicts an actual conversion rate.
And of course, again, in this situation where the final value of the conversion is actually known, and something that you can pass to us, by all means use that, by all means use tROAS.
And then beyond that, when we’re talking about conversion based strategies - so tCPA - it comes back to everything Lydia just shared, right?In a world where you have a qualified converted purchase event that you can pass back to us and optimize to that. That is also a really valuable best practice for lead gen advertisers to drive lead quality, right?
We will find more of what good looks like to you. And so if you are going to pass us your qualified leads, tell us to optimize to that. We will find you more of that, right? It’s really just this balance of what data you have available, how confident you feel that it is predictive of high value for you.
Ginny: Getting value can be really challenging for a lot of advertisers. And so I think what I hear you saying is that doesn’t mean that lead gen can’t be successful on Google Ads with a conversion-based bidding strategy.
Mimi: Absolutely.
Ginny: Passing value can often be a challenge for advertisers, so what are some ways that they can still have some, give some value signal to Google if they’re unable to have that offline connection.
Mimi: One of the best practices that we always talk with advertisers about is making sure that there’s wide enough of a range of values, and - within that range - that we see enough conversions, with reasonable distribution within that range.
And what that really allows us to do is tie the value to what you are sharing with us as the incidence of a high quality lead, right?
Without that range, without enough data points of the values within that range, we’re not really able to meaningfully differentiate and find you more of the leads on the high end of that range, right?
Whether you’re passing a value directly in from your CRM or a predictive model that you’ve built on your side, or you’re using a feature in the tool in our Google Ads tool, like, conversion value rules, it really is about making sure that you’re landing a wide distribution and the right frequency within that distribution such that we see enough leads of that variety of values.
And that, again, will help train the bidder to make sure that we can optimize and really distinguish the attributes that contribute to those high quality leads.
Ginny: Okay. And I can’t help but think during this conversation about the, such an important role that the marketers are playing in this entire process, and making sure that they’re bringing what they know best about their business, what they know about their client’s business, into Google Ads, and that there is just a major role that the marketers are playing in this.
We touched on Journey Aware Bidding. I want to talk a little bit more about that. We teased this in the fall, we talked about this a little bit on our bidding and budget episode as well - but from a lead gen perspective in particular, what can we share aboutJourney Aware Bidding>
Mimi: We’re currently running a pilot, on this model update as we speak. So Lydia spoke a little bit about the data foundations that power Journey Aware Bidding, and what we’re looking at today is a model that applies to tCPA bidding, and really make sure that when we’re optimizing to these lower funnel events that we spent so much time talking about, that what we’re doing is informing those predictions with all of the things that happened before. Right?
So if we think again about the education example, where I’m doing some research on programs, I visit a bunch of sites, I sign up for an information session. Eventually I file an application and maybe the actual enrollment happens very, very far out.
What we can do is if the advertiser chooses to optimize towards that application event, we’ll use all of those preceding actions and those steps on the user journey to predict the likelihood of that. It’s really just using the data again to improve our prediction to improve our knowledge of what drives that high quality of ads for you.
So today, again, this is on tCPA models. And we’re really excited about the pilot. And we’ll share more as it rolls out further.
Ginny: All right. We’ve talked about measurement. We’ve talked about auditing. We’ve talked about, ensuring that you’re passing the right data. Now, I want to talk about messaging and creative assets. And it may be a new muscle for many, not in terms of text ads, but, thinking about video, image, and being more dynamic and having broader breath of creative assets for your lead gen campaigns.
And of course, also depending on the industry, there can be, maybe, legal restrictions, in certain sensitivities that make, creative again, a little more challenging for lead gen verticals than some other businesses.
So I want to talk about how we turned to capturing throughout the customer journey - so stages of intent with assets - so what are the best practices that a lead gen advertiser should be thinking about in terms of asset variety and breadth?
Mimi: So recommendations for creative and asset preparation don’t veer too far off of our friends in retail. But, I think to our earlier discussion, a lot of the focus historically for lead gen has been on search, and we are shifting to think a lot more about the other channels that Google can serve on, including YouTube, including our display partners, where their users are doing the research, and doing the browsing.
The principles of data that we’ve spent most of our time talking about today of just like, give as many signals as you can so we can do the most with our AI, also apply very squarely to asset preparation, right?
So when we’re talking about images and videos in your Demand Gen or Performance Max campaigns, it’s about, including those assets in a variety of asset ratios, making sure that you have vertical video in addition to horizontal, and that you’re enabling the features, for example, in AI Max, that allow us to generate custom text, and really get the most out of these AI-powered campaigns for you.
So when we’re thinking about preparedness, right, to meet your users in this changing landscape and in this evolving set of channels, it’s really about making sure that you have all of the assets at the ready for us to assemble the creative at the right time, with the right message for the user, in whatever context they are finding you.
Ginny: And so, yeah, because I do think specifically Demand Gen and PMax, thinking broadly about your creative, creative breadth is really important. Anything to add on video or partnership ads that should be specifically relevant to lead gen ads to keep in mind?
Mimi: Yeah. I think the main thing to note is that we typically think of, like the creator space as being really focused on sort of retail and apparel, but we are working through a lot of lead gen specific partnerships.
If we think about, like, home improvement and verticals that really fit into this space. So we’re really curating those experiences to be relevant for lead gen verticals - and you should see more coming from us there.
Ginny: The idea of generative assets can make some advertisers feel nervous about loss of control. And we’ve been introducing a number of new features to both help scale existing assets things like video enhancements, but also features like brand guidelines, text guidelines to help advertisers give us more steer in terms of what’s important to their brand to show up with more brand fidelity, have more control over the types of assets that do get generated to, again, help them scale their asset variety.
Anything you want to add in terms of how customers should be thinking about generative assets?
Mimi: Yeah, I’m so glad you brought that up, because I think oftentimes we’re talking to advertisers who sit in verticals with high sensitivity around the need for transparency and approvals like finance or health care. And a lot of these features, right, have been built with those verticals in mind. Certainly continue providing the feedback on where we can provide more guardrails or more transparency on these asset generative features.
Ginny: All right. And the last piece on assets I want to talk about are lead form assets. They’ve been around for a while. Any tips for using lead form assets, ensuring quality and that the traffic that’s coming through is going to be of value.
Mimi: Yes. I love this question because this is an area that we’re reinvesting in, and really, really excited about.
Lead form ads, particularly in Search, are truly purpose-built for the lead gen segment. Right?
These are lead form ads that will be embedded in your Search ads, and really can help you not only scale the volume, but also the quality.
So to your question, Ginny, we just launched a feature called Qualifying Questions in this format and what that allows the advertiser to do is really to define the questions that they would otherwise use to qualify a lead. Right?
So, asking things again, going back to my previous examples of like, what’s the make and model of the car you’re interested in? How soon are you interested in purchasing? In the education example, you know, what is the degree that you’re in search of? How soon do you plan to enroll?
All these sorts of things that are specific to a business, that allow them to better understand whether the lead will ultimately be qualified, can now be built in directly to this Search format experience with lead form ads.
And it’s just one of the many examples of ways we’re investing in making the format useful for both quality lead generation and volume of lead generation. And you should hear a lot more soon. But we encourage you to try out this feature and also provide feedback on what’s working and what’s not right.
Ginny: And because I know that these are not necessarily new, but it’s nice to know that there’s investment happening in there. All right. Last question to wrap up. Lydia, I’ll start with you. What is the must do that you would tell lead gen advertisers today?
Lydia: Well, I know I’ve repeated myself a lot, but I’ll say it one last time. I think the most important place to start is mapping out your purchase journeys and making sure the most critical touchpoints in your purchase journey are measured within the Google Ads ecosystem. And the how is with Data Manager.
I think most advertisers have done the work for their online touchpoints, so likely need to focus on bringing in their data for the offline touchpoints through Data Manager, and with the right signals - and that is as many signals as possible: GCLIDs, user-provided data, IP session attributes, so on and so forth. And this will really set you up to get the most on the activation front.
Ginny: Great. And Mimi, how about you and the must do for lead gen advertisers today?
Mimi: Okay. Well I do love this baton pass because we talk a lot about this framework of map, measure and activity. And so Lydia has covered the first two beautifully for me.
And so I think once the data foundation is in place, right, once you feel good about your Data Strength, we want to make sure you’re putting that data to work to find those high quality, right?
So when we’re thinking about automation, and really building on top of that strong data foundation, we’re talking about enabling AI Max in your Search campaigns, using Demand Gen to get reach beyond Search on services like YouTube and Display, and then where useful applying also to get further reach for those quality leads.
These data foundations are what’s going to drive performance for you across all of our campaign types. The activation piece powered by your Smart Bidding is what’s going to allow you to find more of those high quality leads across all of Google’s services.
So it’s not just one thing, but a comprehensive list of things to make sure that you are generating high quality leads.
Ginny: Thank you both so much for your time. This has been a great conversation.
Lydia: Thank you so much.
Ginny: Big thank you to Mimi and Lydia for sharing their expertise and guidance to help lead gen advertisers dial in their campaigns to action items that I took away from this conversation.
One: map your lead to sale journey. This will help you identify, or verify, your conversion sweet spot - that point you want to bid to - is where you have sufficient volume and a short enough delay from the ad click to fuel the AI.
Two: do a Data Strength to audit. Are you sharing as much as you can back to your account? Use Data Manager to ensure you’re capturing online actions and to connect your offline data, like your CRM, call-tracking, chat engagements, or even lead-scoring spreadsheets – there are lots of options. This is the best way to tell Google what a good customer looks like and improve your lead quality.
Alright, just like a lead gen journey, this conversation was longer than most of our other episodes. We tackled the big questions I’ve been hearing, so no Community Q&A segment this time.
But if you’ve got lead gen questions, I want to hear them. Look for the companion Ads Decoded newsletter on the Google Ads LinkedIn account in the next day or so after this episode first airs, and leave questions in the comments. Or send an email to adsdecoded@google.com. That’s adsdecoded@google.com and you can always find me Ginny Marvin on LinkedIn or @adsliasion on X.
All right, that’ll do it. And until next time.
