by Austin LeClear
on December 11, 2024
If you run Google Ads or Meta Ads for lead generation, you probably ask yourself one question constantly:
“How do I get more quality leads?”
Some days, the results are great, and other days, not so much. Inconsistency in lead generation is frustrating, but the good news is you can fix it.
At Grow My Ads, we spend tens of thousands of dollars monthly on our own lead generation, and we’ve fine-tuned a system that brings in only quality leads. In this post, we’re revealing our exact sales funnel setup that ensures our salespeople only talk to highly qualified prospects.
Prefer video? Check out our video on YouTube: How I ONLY Get High Quality Leads from Paid Ads [MY EXACT FUNNEL]
Still with us? Good. Let’s dive in.
What Not to Do
Let’s start with what you should avoid. Imagine you’re searching for a local landscaping company. You click on their ad, and land on their page. It looks something like this:
You click ‘Contact Us,’ and it takes you to a basic lead form asking for a name, email, and phone number, with a “Get a Free Estimate” call to action.
Sounds simple, right? But there’s a problem: this company probably receives a lot of leads that don’t fit their ideal customer profile — like one-time lawn mowing requests when they’re looking for larger, high-value projects.
Why? Well, there’s a broader issue here: Unqualified lead generation. If your landing pages look similar, you’ll struggle to scale your business. More ad spend will just mean more low-quality leads. You might think, “I need to run more ads and cast a wider net to catch more leads,” but this strategy can backfire if you don’t have a way to filter who is engaging with your business. Instead, you end up increasing your ad spend only to overwhelm your sales team with calls that don’t lead to sales.
This problem is not limited to small local businesses either. Large companies often face similar issues, particularly if they don’t segment and target their ads effectively. You could spend thousands of dollars on ad clicks and lead generation efforts, only to find your return on investment (ROI) isn’t as high as it should be because you’re talking to the wrong people.
So how do you get around this?
How to Get Quality Leads: The Grow My Ads Method
Our lead generation strategy at Grow My Ads is all about filtering. We don’t just let anyone book a call with our sales team. Instead, we ask questions upfront on our landing page to qualify leads. This is a great, low-friction way to sort out potential clients we want to work with, from those who aren’t as good a fit at the time.
Here’s a breakdown of our approach:
Landing Page: Our landing page provides value to prospects immediately, and there’s no need to hunt for the social proof. The call to action is clear, specific, and low investment — which helps us quickly generate leads (and capture lead data). So, if you’re running lead generation campaigns, make sure to optimize landing pages, as this can have an enormous impact on conversion rate.
Qualifying Questions: Before potential customers can schedule a call, we ask them to answer a few questions. We ask:
Are you currently running paid ads?
How much are you spending per day on ads?
What type of business do you have? Are you an agency, eCommerce store, or local service provider?
These questions enable us to filter out unqualified leads early on, saving our sales team time (and ensuring our lead generation efforts drive leads that are higher quality).
When your reps only spend their day talking to sales leads who are already a good fit, you’re maximizing the efficiency of your team.
Immediate Filtering: If a visitor selects “No” to the ‘currently running ads’ question, they are filtered out of our sales process. They don’t get to book a call. Why? Because our sales team only has a limited amount of time each day, and we want them to spend that time talking to qualified leads. Our target audience is currently running ads, and actively looking for someone to manage them.
If our sales team books calls with all new leads, they’ll end up wasting their time on conversations that will never lead to conversions.
Conversion Data: We don’t just filter on the front end. We also ensure that we’re not counting “No” answers as conversions in our Google Ads campaigns. That way, our smart bidding algorithms learn to find more high-quality prospects. When you properly train the algorithm to look for patterns associated with quality leads, you’re creating a lead generation strategy that continuously improves over time.
Setting Up a Sales Funnel That Works
Now, let’s walk you through how you can set up a similar sales funnel.
1. Create Landing Pages That Qualify Leads
We’ve touched on this above, but to reiterate: Your landing pages should be more than just a lead form. Instead, your lead forms should ask questions that help you determine whether a lead is high quality. For example:
Are you currently running paid ads?
How much are you spending per day on ads?
What type of business do you have?
Make sure the lead generation forms on your landing pages are simple yet strategic. Don’t ask unnecessary questions, but ask just enough to weed out unqualified leads. When you add these filtering questions, you can control who is allowed to go further in your funnel. This is especially useful if you get a lot of inquiries and your sales team only has time to handle a select number of conversations each day. This alone can make a huge difference for your lead generation efforts.
2. Train Your Smart Bidding Algorithm
In the beginning, we ran our lead generation campaign without strict filtering to gather initial data. Month one was rough, with 80% bad leads. But we got enough good leads to start feeding Google and Meta Ads’ machine learning systems. This is what takes your lead generation strategy to the next level. Had we not spent our first month collecting data, we probably would never have had enough volume to lock in our lead generation.
Here’s how you can do it, too:
Month 1: Build Data: Start by running your ads with a broader audience to generate leads. Even though there might be a mix of good and bad leads, this is important because you’re collecting the data that will serve as a foundation for refining your targeting around high-intent potential customers later. In month 1, we counted anyone who completed our lead form at all as a lead because we needed to get as much data as we could. Doing this early on allowed us to gain valuable insights into our target audience’s demographics.
Months 2-3: Increase Spend: Once you’ve gathered enough valuable data, start to increase your ad spend and optimize your campaigns based on early learnings. Use your initial leads to identify patterns, and adjust your targeting to optimize lead generation.
Months 4-6: Tighten Your Funnel: Begin refining your qualification process by adding pre-qualification questions on your lead generation forms. Focus on tracking only high-quality leads that fit your desired criteria as lead form conversions.
Months 6+: Optimize and Scale: Now, optimize your conversion goals so that only high-quality leads count as conversions. By this time, your campaigns should be trained to find your target audience and you can start scaling your marketing and sales efforts with more confidence.
By the time we reached month 6 or 7, our machine learning was dialed in: it knew our target audience, and had been effectively trained to find only high-quality leads. That said, our lead generation strategy is fluid: it’s an ongoing process that requires consistent testing and adjustments. We don’t just “set it and forget it” (and neither should you).
3. Feed Quality Data Back to Your Campaigns
Your ad platforms (like Google Ads and Meta) learn from the data you provide. If you feed them a mix of high-quality and low-quality leads, you’ll confuse the algorithms. It’s like Netflix recommending you kids’ shows because your account is shared with your child. Dilution is not the best strategy for long-term lead generation.
To avoid this, make sure you’re only feeding quality leads back to your campaigns. Over time, your algorithms will get better at finding the prospects you want (and generating leads), and you’ll see a noticeable improvement in lead quality. In our case, only people who answer ‘yes’ to spending over $50 a day on our lead generation forms fire as a conversion.
Why Filtering Leads is Key to Scaling
Many businesses fail because they focus on the front-end campaign tactics without refining the backend sales funnel. Without a filtration system to qualify leads, you’ll end up with a mix of low and high-quality leads that will be impossible to scale. This often leads to frustration as your marketing budget increases, but your sales revenue doesn’t.
If you find yourself in this position, take a step back and evaluate your sales funnel. Are you qualifying your leads? Are you feeding the right data to your ad platforms? A large part of the success of your marketing efforts depends on this.
Common Lead Generation Challenges (and How to Overcome Them)
Even if you follow all the best practices, you might encounter some challenges along the way. Here’s how to deal with them:
“I’m Not Getting Enough Volume”: When you start filtering leads, you may notice a drop in volume. This is normal. The key is to focus on the quality, not the quantity. If you’re worried about not having enough leads to feed back into your campaigns, you can slightly widen your filter criteria until your algorithm has enough data. For instance, allow more general categories for a limited time to get more leads from Google Ads and then refine them later.
“The Leads Still Aren’t Converting Well”: If you’re generating leads that aren’t converting into sales, consider adjusting your questions. You might need to get more specific to help the algorithm hone in on your target audience. Sometimes the solution can be as simple as adding an extra field asking about their budget or specific needs. You can also test different variations of your lead form questions to see which filters out low-quality leads more effectively.
“I Can’t Afford to Spend Much Initially”: Building a reliable lead generation system can require a bit of an initial investment. If you’re on a tight budget, start small. Focus on gathering initial lead data and slowly scale up as you start to see improvements. Think of it as an investment in your business’s growth. Over time, this approach should save you money because you’ll spend less on bad leads.
“My Sales Team is Overwhelmed”: You might find that even qualified leads aren’t converting because your sales team is overwhelmed and not able to nurture leads properly.
The solution here is to implement better CRM systems and follow-up procedures, or to add more automation to your lead handling process. Lead qualification ensures only good leads get to your team, but having a robust follow-up system is necessary to turn those good leads into sales.
Ready to Transform Your Lead Generation?
If you’re tired of inconsistent lead quality from Google Ads and other platforms, it’s time to rethink your approach. Stop letting low-quality leads steal your sales team’s valuable time. Instead, build a qualification funnel, create lead forms with purpose, train your algorithms to target potential customers, and start scaling with confidence.
Successful lead generation marketing strategies aren’t just about running ads. They require precision, filtering, and data-driven adjustments. At Grow My Ads, we learned this through months of fine-tuning, testing, and continuous improvement of our lead form. We focused on creating a robust backend system that supports our sales efforts and attracts potential customers, and the results speak for themselves.
Final Thoughts
Implementing a lead generation strategy that ensures only high-quality leads reach your sales team isn’t just about asking the right questions on a lead form; it’s about creating a system that consistently feeds you the data you need to improve your ad campaigns. This isn’t a one-and-done solution. It’s an ongoing process that will refine your campaigns over time, making your marketing budget work harder (and smarter) for you.
By investing in a robust lead qualification system, you are taking the guesswork out of lead generation. You are teaching your algorithms to identify, filter, and find the target audience that is genuinely interested in your services. This means less time wasted on bad leads, more productive sales calls, and ultimately, higher revenue. So start today, and watch how strategic filtering transforms your ad performance.
