How to Improve Lead Quality in Your Ad Campaigns

Are your ads generating clicks but not conversions? The issue isn't your offer, but the quality of leads you are reaching.

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Poor lead quality has become one of the biggest challenges for PPC advertisers, and with cost per click rising across Google Ads, LinkedIn, and Meta, improving lead quality is becoming essential to driving ROI through paid advertising.

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At InterTeam, we've helped brands scale their paid advertising by focusing on better targeting, lead qualification, and conversion optimization strategies that attract high-intent audiences while filtering out low-intent leads.

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In this guide, we share our best practices for improving lead quality across ad campaigns to help you generate leads that actually convert.

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Why Most Ad Campaigns Struggle With Lead Quality

Where many advertisers go wrong is focusing their campaigns on lead volume.

While this approach can help build awareness for your campaigns, it also means you are wasting budget on a lot of unqualified traffic.

The problem is that a lot of advertisers recognize this. They just don't know how to fix it.

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After running hundreds of campaigns and auditing dozens of client accounts, we've identified some of the most common causes:

• Poor Targeting: Campaigns are often built around broad audiences or top-funnel interests. Without filters for industry, job title, or company size, ads reach people who were never a fit in the first place.
• Weak Funnel Structure: Many accounts treat every conversion the same. Without segmenting campaigns by funnel stage or intent, awareness ads compete with decision-stage offers and dilute lead quality.
• Lack of Attribution and Feedback: Few teams connect CRM data or sales feedback to their ad results. Without that visibility, it’s impossible to tell which campaigns generate real opportunities and which ones just drive form fills.

Before you can start optimizing your campaigns for lead quality, you first need to identify the issue. You can check out our Guide to Conducting A Google Ads Account Audit to get you started.

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9 Best Practices to Improve Lead Quality

Once you know what’s causing poor lead quality, you can start optimizing your campaigns. Here are a few best practices we use to consistently attract high-quality leads.

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1. Align Marketing and Sales on What Makes a "Quality Lead"

Before doing anything else, you need to be clear on what a quality lead means for your business. Collaborate with your marketing and sales teams to create a framework based on company-specific criteria that defines your ideal customer.

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A common structure we use is the BANT framework:

• Budget: Does the lead have the financial capacity to afford your offer?
• Authority: Is the lead in a decision-making role or able to approve the purchase?
• Need: Does the lead have a genuine problem or pain point that your offer can solve?

Timeline: What is the lead’s timeframe for making a purchasing decision?

Once you’ve established these details, document them in an official Ideal Client Profile (ICP) and share it with your entire team. This ensures everyone is aligned on what a qualified lead looks like and keeps both marketing and sales focused on prospects that are more likely to convert.

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2. Target High-Intent Audiences 

Once you know what a quality lead looks like, it becomes much easier to build audiences that target them. The exact process will vary depending on the advertising platform, but here are a few general tips to help you focus on high-intent audiences.

• Structure campaigns around intent levels, product tiers, or funnel stages. This helps you create messaging that speaks directly to where each audience is in the buyer’s journey.
• Use audience layering to build more specific audiences. Each layer you add filters out more unqualified traffic and improves overall lead quality.
• Add exclusion lists to remove obvious low-intent audiences. Common examples include employees, competitors, competitor employees, and current customers.

Build retargeting lists around high intent signals. These indicate a user has shown a clear purchase intent and is one of the easiest ways to increase lead quality.

For more guidance, check out our guides on Qualified B2B Targeting With Google Display Ads and the 7 Types of Audience Segments in Google Ads.

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3. Target High-Intent, Exact Match Keywords 

One of the easiest ways to filter for high-quality leads in a search campaign is by refining your keyword strategy.

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Start by identifying a list of high-intent keywords. These are search terms that show clear purchase intent and usually come from users who are actively comparing solutions. Words like “pricing,” “alternatives,” and “reviews” often signal that a user is close to making a decision.

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If you want to take it a step further, you can target competitor keywords to reach in-market audiences. Just be sure to combine them with high-intent search terms and use exclusion lists to prevent your ads from appearing to competitor employees or navigational searches.

If you’re unsure which keywords to target, you can use our Competitor Keyword Generator to help you find relevant options.

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Finally, you also want to make sure you are using exact match keyword targeting. This ensures your ad spend stays focused on high-intent, high-quality leads while eliminating the unqualified search terms that can come from broad or phrase match targeting.

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For more help, review our guides on Qualified Google Ads Keyword Research and When to Use Google Ads Keyword Match Types.

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4. Use Negative Keywords and Audience Exclusions

Another effective way to improve lead quality is to block low-quality audiences from ever seeing your ads. You can do this by adding exclusion lists to both your keyword and audience targeting.

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Some of the most common audience exclusions we use include:

• Low-intent audiences (students, job seekers, and irrelevant industries)
• In-house team members and employees
• Competitor employees
• Current customers
• Low-intent segments from audience insights

If you’re running a high-ticket offer, you can also exclude low-income brackets that may not have the budget to qualify.

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From there, you can add negative keywords to eliminate irrelevant or out-of-market searches. These often include terms like “job,” “sign in,” and “careers,” which tend to reflect the same low-intent audiences listed above.

The key to keeping your campaigns efficient is running regular audits on your search terms and audience performance. If you find segments that consistently underperform, add them to your exclusion lists to reduce wasted spend.

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Just remember not to overdo it. Going too narrow can limit your reach and prevent your ads from reaching potential customers. Finding the right balance takes testing and ongoing optimization.

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5. Use Ad Messaging to Pre-Qualify Prospects

One of the most common reasons advertisers get low-quality leads is that their ads attract unqualified prospects.

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You can fix this by optimizing your ad copy to pre-qualify prospects before they ever enter your sales cycle.

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Start by adding qualifiers directly to your ads. Phrases like “Built for Enterprise Teams” or “For Senior Living Communities” tell users exactly who your offer is for. This makes people who match your target audience more likely to click while signalling to unqualified users to keep scrolling.

You can also use ad extensions that align with the stage of the buyer journey you’re targeting. These help add context and key information that resonates with your audience, further encouraging qualified leads to engage with your ads.

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For more help crafting ad copy that attracts the right audience, check out our guides on How to Write the Best B2B Ad Copy and How to Write Google Ads Copy for B2B SaaS and Services.

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6. Optimize Landing Pages for Lead Quality

Once your ad copy is dialled in, the next step is to make sure your landing pages are optimized for lead quality.

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Here are a few tips to help you get started:

• Align your messaging with your ad copy. Include the same qualifying language and always match your offer to the CTA of the ad.
• Include a clear, action-oriented CTA. Let the lead know the exact next steps by using calls to action like “Get Pricing” or “Watch the Demo.”
• Add qualifying fields or form questions that match the funnel stage. This helps maintain the user experience, filters out leads not at that stage of the funnel, and provides valuable information for the next stage of the sales cycle.
• Use tools like ReCAPTCHA or double opt-in to validate submissions. This helps eliminate bot traffic and low-intent audiences.

Track conversion rate, CPL, and CLV. This helps later on when you are trying to identify your most profitable lead sources.

When your ad copy and landing pages are both aligned around your ICP, you make it clear who your offer is for and filter out users who were never a fit to begin with.

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7. Retarget Around High-Intent Signals

Retargeting campaigns are consistently among the top-performing ad campaigns in terms of conversions. But even these can suffer from low lead quality if you aren't retargeting based on the right signals.

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At InterTeam, we remove this obstacle by creating our retargeting lists based on high-intent website behaviors.

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Some of the signals we look for include:

• Users who have visited a high-intent page, like a pricing page, free trial sign-up, or demo page.
• Users who spent more than 30 seconds on the website, eliminating bounced traffic.
• Users who scrolled more than 50% of the page, showing clear interest in the offer.

With custom events for these signals set up in GA4, we automate our lead qualification process to streamline our retargeting lists while focusing only on high-quality leads that have shown clear purchase intent.

For more on how we conduct our retargeting campaigns, check out our guides on Retargeting with LinkedIn Ads, Retargeting with Google Ads, and B2B Retargeting Best Practices.

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8. Implement Lead Scoring to Measure Quality and Down-Funnel Conversion Tracking 

Once your campaigns are optimized for lead quality and live, you need to make sure you can see exactly how those leads progress through the funnel. That means setting up not only conversion tracking, but also CRM integrations that let you connect ad data to real sales outcomes.

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Here are a few best practices we focus on for a complete tracking and lead scoring setup:

• Set up conversion tracking in GA4, GTM, and your ad platforms to trace leads from first click to closed deal.
• Integrate your CRM to sync lifecycle stage data, allowing you to track when leads become MQLs, SQLs, or Opportunities.
• Use lead scoring to prioritize high-value prospects and route lower scores through retargeting or automation workflows.
• Create down-funnel conversions that trigger when a lead reaches key stages like SQL or Opportunity, giving you clear visibility into which campaigns are generating real pipeline.
• Monitor CPL, conversion rate, and CLV to identify which ads generate profitable leads, not just cheap ones.

With proper tracking and CRM integration, you’ll know not just which campaigns are converting, but which ones are bringing in qualified pipeline and contributing directly to revenue.

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9. A/B Test for Down-Funnel Conversions

A/B testing is one of the most reliable ways to optimize your campaigns for high-quality leads. It allows you to use data to refine your targeting and strategy based on what’s actually driving results.

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The key to successful A/B testing is optimizing for down-funnel conversions.

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Clicks and impressions don’t tell you much about lead quality, but conversions to MQL, SQL, or pipeline value do. Down-funnel metrics should always be your benchmark for measuring which campaigns are truly high-performing.

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Here are a few best practices for running A/B tests that improve lead quality:

• Run tests that measure conversion-to-SQL or pipeline value, not just CTR or impressions
• Test one creative element at a time (headline, offer, image) to isolate what’s working
• Use statistically valid sample sizes before making optimization decisions
• Reinvest in ad variations that consistently deliver high-quality conversions

For more on how to structure and analyze your tests, check out our guide on A/B Testing LinkedIn Ads.

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What Better Lead Quality Looks Like

As PPC advertising experts, we’ve helped dozens of clients scale their sales and reduce cost per lead (CPL) by improving lead quality through better targeting, qualification, and conversion optimization.

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Here are a few of the results we’ve achieved in recent campaigns:

• B2B SaaS Growth Marketing Case Study - 166% increase in conversion rate and back-to-back record quarters
• Multi-Channel Performance Marketing Case Study - 7x increase in monthly leads and 87% lower CPL
• SaaS PPC Case Study - 23x more sign-ups with a $676 reduction in cost per lead

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Need Help Driving Higher Quality Leads Through PPC?

If you’re getting clicks but not conversions, it’s time to focus on improving your lead quality.

At InterTeam, we’ve built a proven system that generated over $80,000 in qualified pipeline within three months for one of our clients.

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Schedule a free strategy call to see how we can do the same for you.

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FAQs