How do I launch my first lead generation campaign on Google Ads?

1. Setting Up Conversion Tracking (First Step)

Never launch a campaign without conversion tracking active. Without it, Google's algorithms have no feedback loops to optimize your bids.

• Create a conversion action in Google Ads named "Form Submission".
• Use Google Tag Manager (GTM) to trigger this tag when users land on your /thank-you redirect page or submit a form successfully.
• Send a test submission to verify that the status in Google Ads switches to "Active" before launching ads.

2. Campaign Settings: Reclaiming Control

When creating the campaign in the dashboard:

• Campaign Objective: Select "Leads" to guide Google's recommendations.
• Campaign Type: Select "Search". Avoid PMax or Display networks for your first validation test.
• Networks: Deselect "Search Partners" and "Display Network". Keep ads strictly on primary Google search pages.
• Bidding: Start with **Manual CPC** or **Maximize Conversions with a Target CPA cap**. This keeps your bids predictable.

3. Keywords & Ad Creatives

Build your ad groups around unified keyword themes:

• Select 5 to 10 Exact and Phrase Match keywords. Avoid Broad match initially.
• Write a Responsive Search Ad (RSA). Place your primary keyword in Headline 1 (pin to Position 1).
• State a clear offer CTA in Headline 2 (e.g. Book Free CRM Audit).
• Add Sitelink, Callout, and Promotion Assets to maximize ad size.

4. What to Do in the First Thirty Days

The most expensive mistake in a new lead campaign is intervening too early. Bidding algorithms need a learning period, and changing budget, bid strategy or conversion goal restarts it. For roughly the first two weeks your job is to watch search terms and fix targeting errors, not to optimise performance.

• Week one: review the search terms report daily and add negatives. Verify that conversions are actually recording, and that each one corresponds to a real enquiry in your inbox or CRM.
• Week two: keep adding negatives, check that location and device splits look sane, and leave bids alone.
• Weeks three and four: once you have twenty to thirty conversions, start reading cost per lead by ad group and make your first structural decisions.

5. Setting a Budget That Can Actually Produce Data

There is a minimum viable budget below which a lead campaign cannot function, and it is set by your cost per click rather than by what you would like to spend. Work backwards: if clicks in your category cost about a hundred rupees and a realistic landing page converts at five percent, a lead costs roughly two thousand rupees. Thirty conversions a month — the volume smart bidding needs to work — therefore requires around sixty thousand rupees a month, and no amount of optimisation compresses that arithmetic.

If the real budget is a third of that number, do not spread it thinly across five ad groups and every location you serve. Narrow the campaign until the money is dense enough to generate a signal: one service, one city, your highest-intent keywords only, manual or maximise-clicks bidding rather than a conversion-based strategy that will never accumulate enough data to leave the learning phase. Expanding from a narrow campaign that works is straightforward; rescuing a broad campaign that never gathered enough data is not.