Google will tell you to use broad match with Smart Bidding. It's in the recommendations tab. It comes up in conversations with account managers. Their documentation calls it the "recommended setup" for 2026. And their own internal data backs it: campaigns running broad match with Smart Bidding show 67% more traffic and 34% lower costs in their benchmarks. I run Google Ads for service businesses and I've tested this in a range of accounts. The honest answer is: it depends on y

Most Google Ads accounts for lead-gen businesses count a form submission as a conversion. The form fires, the conversion registers, Google gets the signal: "this click turned into something good." The campaign keeps optimising toward more of the same. The problem is that a form fill and a customer are not the same thing. For most service businesses, somewhere between 10% and 40% of form fills turn into real customers. The rest are price-shoppers, wrong service, bad geography,

Two ways to track phone calls from Google Ads: Google's free forwarding numbers, and a tool like CallRail for keyword-level tracking and qualified-call scoring. The setup, step by step.

Getting spam and junk leads from Google Ads? Why it happens, how to tell junk from just-cheap, and the exact order to fix it, from traffic to forms to bidding.

Performance Max can work for lead gen, or flood you with junk. The one thing that decides which, when to use it, and how to run it without wasting budget.

Your Google Ads cost per lead is rising for a handful of fixable reasons. Find which one is hitting your account, and what to do about each.