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A lead is counted properly, or it does not exist.
Lead generation is the whole of what we do, not a service tier — calls, forms and quote uploads measured, policed weekly for quality, and matched end to end from the search to the page. Most enquiries in a service trade arrive by phone, and account after account we take over arrives with call conversions switched off. The account looks broken. The phone is ringing.
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Every enquiry counted, or none of the rest matters
Forms, calls and quote uploads are all leads if the job comes from a service trade — and in most trades the phone does more work than the form. Before anything is optimised, we check whether the account can actually see all three.
Call conversions switched off is the single most common fault we find on takeover. The dashboard shows a thin trickle of form fills, the owner says the phone never stops, and both are true at once — the account is only counting the smaller half of what is arriving. Google's bidding then optimises to the visible half, which quietly starves the keywords that were bringing the calls. Fixing measurement is the first job on any account, ahead of keywords, ads or budgets, and it is covered in full on the conversion tracking page.
The rebuild is the same three checks every time: calls counted only past a minimum duration, so a wrong number does not teach the account anything; forms tested from a real phone, so a broken tag does not sit silent for months; and, where the client can supply it, a note of which enquiries actually became work. Read-only access is enough to see whether an account passes.
Volume that never becomes work is just spend
Lead quality gets policed in one place every week: the search terms report. It shows exactly which typed searches your clicks came from, and it is where a lead-gen account either earns its keep or quietly rots.
A search can click like a buyer and convert like nobody. Someone researching a repair before calling their own tradesman, a student doing coursework, a jobseeker who typed the trade name looking for work, a search from three counties over where you do not travel — all of these can land on the same ad as a genuine enquiry, and the click costs the same either way. The weekly sweep reads what actually came in, cuts the searches that never turn into work, and fences them off with negative keywords so the same waste does not repeat next week.
The sweep runs every week because the junk renews itself every week — Google's matching drifts, and yesterday's clean account quietly picks up new waste. Each cut is logged rather than left for a quarterly review to discover.
The search, the ad and the page say the same thing
A click is bought once and can be lost three times: a search that does not match the ad, an ad that does not match the page, or a page trying to do two jobs at once. Message match closes all three gaps in one move.
That search wants one thing: a phone number and proof someone will actually answer it tonight. Send it to a homepage with five services, a blog link and a contact form buried in the footer, and the click is wasted whatever the ad said. Send it to a page built for that one ad group — same words, one enquiry action, phone number treated as a first-class path rather than a footer detail — and the same click has a real chance of converting.
This is why pages are built per ad group rather than one generic page carrying every campaign. One page built this way converted 13.7% of clicks into enquiries (client account data) — against LocaliQ's 2026 cross-industry average of 8.18%. Full detail on the landing pages page.
What happens after the click still decides the outcome
A well-built account and a well-matched page can still lose the lead in the last few seconds — to a call that rings out, a form that lands in a general inbox, or an enquiry nobody follows up until the next morning.
A number that gets answered
On the page, the phone number is built into the layout, not tucked in a footer or behind a menu tap. A tradesperson searching "emergency" at 9pm is choosing whoever picks up, not whoever has the nicest site.
Speed to first contact
Enquiries route to someone who can actually answer — a call, a text, a routed form — because a lead that sits for a day has usually already rung the next name on the results page.
Honest counting, always
We report enquiries: calls and forms, labelled as such. We never call them "jobs" unless the client tells us their own booked figure, and then it is labelled client-reported, not ours.
DRST, a steel fabrication client, reports £120k/mo of work booked through the account, including one £80k contract — that figure is client-reported, not something our tracking counts, because a booked-job number belongs to the client's own books, not our dashboard.
Impressions and clicks are costs, not outcomes
A traffic retainer is judged on reach — more impressions, more clicks, a bigger number to report at month end. A lead-generation account is judged on one thing only: what those clicks turned into, at what cost.
The two can look identical in week one. They diverge the moment a search term report gets read, or does not. An account run on traffic keeps whatever brings clicks cheaply, including the searches that were never going to buy. An account run on lead generation cuts those the first week they show up, even though cutting them lowers the click count, because the number that matters is cost per enquiry — and, downstream of that, what those enquiries become.
Every decision on the account — a bid, a budget shift, a new ad, a negative keyword — is judged against that one figure. If a change lowers cost per enquiry, it stays. If it does not, it gets reversed, whatever it did to impressions.
What the count looks like once it is fixed
Both takeovers below were broken on measurement before either was optimised. The counting was rebuilt first in each case — calls tracked, forms re-tested, negatives applied on the search terms that were never going to buy.
Cost per lead
£86 →£20.17
EngiClean, DPF cleaning network — 468 leads in 30 days, on rebuilt tracking.
Live account data · 30 days
Cost per lead
£32 →£14.77
ProRemapping, taken over from a previous agency, at 16.44% conversion.
Live account data · 14 days
Cost per conversion
£17.95
Book-wide average, 16–17% CVR, across all three desks in a typical month.
Live account data · anonymised
What you are looking at: the same method this page describes, run on real accounts — measurement fixed first, quality policed weekly, message matched end to end. Full write-ups, with the caveats left in, on the results page.
Know what a lead should cost before you commit to anything
The 12-Point Wasted-Spend Audit prices what a lead should cost in your market, checks whether your account is even counting them properly, and puts both in writing within 48 hours. Read-only access is enough, and it is yours either way.
Read-only access · in writing within 48 hours