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Google Ads lead forms for home-service businesses: how leads get from the ad to whoever calls back

#googleads #marketing #smallbusiness

Drafted with AI tools by the Bidhelm team and checked line by line against Google Ads Help, which is linked at the end.

A search ad can bring a plumber, HVAC company or cleaning service a call or a website visit. Google Ads has a third way. A lead form lets people send their contact details, such as a phone number or email, from inside the ad. For a developer helping a local business, the interesting part is the plumbing: getting each lead out of Google Ads and to the person who calls back.

What it is

Google Ads Help describes lead forms as a way to let people submit their information in a form directly in your ad. You create the form in Google Ads and add it to a Search or Performance Max campaign. Only one lead form can be added per campaign.

Before you start

Google lists three requirements:

  • A good history of policy compliance.
  • An account in an eligible business category. Some sensitive categories are not eligible.
  • A privacy policy. You link to it when you create the form, and it appears at the end of the form.

Lead forms are available to eligible advertisers in supported countries.

Get every lead to the person who calls back

A lead in the account does nothing until someone phones it. Google offers five ways to receive leads:

  • Email notifications, one email per lead.
  • CSV download. You can only download leads from the last 30 days, and Google Ads stores leads for 60 days, so download often.
  • Webhook, straight into your CRM.
  • Zapier, a partner that connects Google Ads to your CRM.
  • The Google Ads API.

Set at least one before the campaign runs, so no lead waits in the account. If you only rely on CSV download, a missed month can mean lost leads, so a webhook or an email alert is the safer default.

Pick the kind of lead you want

Each form has two optimization options:

  • More volume is the default. The form has fewer steps. Google says this may bring more leads, including people less interested in your service.
  • More qualified adds steps. Google says this may bring fewer leads that generally have greater interest in your business.

For a service where every lead becomes a site visit or a quote, start by asking which one the team can follow up on. You can switch between the two at any time.

How to count it

For the form to be eligible to show, Google says the campaign should use a conversion-focused bid strategy and include the "Submit lead form (Google hosted)" conversion goal. Judge it the same way as calls: by the jobs and quotes booked from those leads.

Sources

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