When someone tells me their cost per lead is too high, I don't start with keywords or bids. I start by asking what Google is counting as a lead. Most of the time that's where the problem is.
The number is only as good as what it counts
One account I took over showed about 3,000 conversions in a few months. It looked great. Then I opened the conversion settings. Clicks on the website's phone number were being counted, and so were page views. The real leads, people who actually called or filled in the form, were a few hundred.
Another account was counting "store visits". That one setting made it look about twice as good as it really was.
Neither of these is rare. I've seen some version of it in most of the 80-odd accounts I've worked on.
Why this matters more now
A few years ago a bad conversion setup gave you a wrong report. Today it changes how your money gets spent. Smart bidding, Performance Max and Meta's Advantage+ all go looking for more of whatever you call a conversion. If that's a click on a phone number, they will find you a lot of people who click phone numbers. Your CPA goes down and your phone stays quiet.
What I check first
- Which actions are set as primary. Only real leads should be: a call that lasted a minute or more, a form that was actually submitted, a booking. Everything else can stay as secondary so you still see it.
- Whether calls are measured properly. A click on a number is not a call. Use call forwarding numbers with a minimum length, or your call tracking tool's import.
- Duplicates. The same form counted by both the Google tag and GA4, or a thank-you page that fires twice on refresh.
- What happened after the lead. If you can send back which leads became customers, even once a month from a spreadsheet, the bidding gets much smarter.
Then the usual stuff
Once the tracking is honest, the regular fixes start to work: the search terms report, negatives, splitting services and cities that shouldn't share a budget, and landing pages that match the ad. Do them before the tracking is fixed and you're tuning an account against the wrong target.
If you want me to look at what your account is counting, send it over. It takes me about twenty minutes to tell you whether your numbers are real.